Standing in support of Israel, Jews, and believers in all the nations, in the name of Jesus (Yeshua). Sharing biblical truth, encouragement, news and prophecy.
Israel Today has reported numerous times regarding Christian Palestinians who claim to be the true Israel. In their case, the Palestinian Jesus is just an adaptation of the Arian-looking Jesus of the classic Christian iconography.
Likewise, reclaiming the Hebrew Bible for the Muslim/Palestinian cause is nothing new. From its get go, Islam had its followers believe that Jews corrupted the Old Testament to the point of rendering it unholy. Hence, whatever's written in the Hebrew Bible can be retold in a way that fits Islam's creeds.
It is well known that in the eyes of Muslims, all the prophets of the Bible were Muslims. That Islam came into being some 3,000 years after Abraham makes no difference since, unlike the Jews, Abraham is forever a true believer – a Muslim.
But even this Islamic version of "Replacement Theology" has its limits. For even Muslims will acknowledge that a real entity called the people of Israel not only exists, but to them the Land of Israel was given: "O my people [Israel]," reads the Quran, "enter the Holy Land which Allah has assigned to you and do not turn back and become losers" (Sura 5:21).
So the Palestinian reimagining of the Bible is going a step further. It wasn't Jews who came out of Egypt as the "people of Israel," but rather Muslims. Back in 2012, Dr. Omar Ja'ara of Nablus' An-Najah University told Palestinian TV:
"We must make clear to the world that David in the Hebrew Bible is not connected to David in the Quran, Solomon in the Hebrew Bible is not connected to Solomon in the Quran, and neither is Saul or Joshua son of Nun [of the Bible].
"We have a great leader, Saul, [in the Quran] who defeated the nation of giants and killed Goliath. This is a great Muslim victory. The Muslims of the Children of Israel went out of Egypt under the leadership of Moses, and unfortunately, many researchers deny the Exodus of those oppressed people who were liberated by a great leader, like Moses the Muslim, the believing leader, the great Muslim, who was succeeded by Saul, the leader of these Muslims in liberating Palestine.
"This was the first Palestinian liberation through armed struggle to liberate Palestine from the nation of giants led by Goliath. This is our logic and this is our culture."
“And thy seed shall be as the dust of the earth, and thou shalt spread abroad to the west, and to the east, and to the north, and to the south. And in thee and in thy seed shall all the families of the earth be blessed. And, behold, I am with thee, and will keep thee whithersoever thou goest, and will bring thee back into this land; for I will not leave thee, until I have done that which I have spoken to thee of.’” Genesis 28:14-15 (The Israel Bible™)
In a new book, a member of an obscure Christian sect has set out to document a chapter in the Holocaust that brought Jews and Christians together, not in belief or even friendship, but as one family living under the same roof.
Following Kristallnacht in November 1938, Britain, the only willing host country, began the Kindertransport, taking in over 10,000 Jewish children from Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Germany. Conscientious objectors and shunners of politics, the Christadelphians, an obscure Christian sect, were unlikely hosts, but in the face of the growing evil that threatened the Jews, they decided to take action. Their participation in the Kindertransport saved 250 Jewish children from almost certain death.
The Christadelphians were, and remain, an obscure branch of Christianity. There are about 50,000 Christadelphians today who follow the 19th century teachings of John Thomas. With no central authority, different groups vary, but all Christadelphians are Biblical Unitarians, emphasizing the Bible as divinely inspired. Daily Bible reading is a central part of their religious devotion.
Jason Hensley (Photo: Courtesy)
According to Christadelphian belief, the Hebrew Bible is truly about the Jewish people, bringing a recognition that God made eternal promises to Abraham, and fostering a desire to work on the Jews’ behalf.
Jason Hensley, a Christadelphian school principal from California who recently authored a book about his co-religionists’ part in the Kindertransport, claims that it is this Bible study that brought them to a greater affinity towards the Jews. So great was their love for God’s Chosen People that they saw Jewish children as their own.
He named the book “Part of the Family”, because that was the phrase he heard almost every time he interviewed a survivor who was saved by the Christadelphians.
The book project came as a result of Hensley’s visit last year to the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC for a national conference of educators. Hensley was so affected by what he learned that he created a Holocaust course in his school. The message from the conference that impressed him most deeply was the reminder that the Holocaust is not about statistics, but about individuals.
“Every person has a story,” Hensley told Breaking Israel News. He sought out the Kindertransport survivors for interviews, eventually connecting with 35, and was amazed at what he heard.
Hensley’s book tells the unknown story of the Christadelphian families who took in Jewish children and cared for them as their own while allowing them to maintain their faith. Hensley interviewed ten of the survivors saved by the Christadelphians.
One of those survivors was Ursula Meyer, nee Eichmann, who left her family at the age of 14 in Westfalia, Germany in August 1939, one month before war broke out. Her parents watched the Kindertransport train leave. It was the last time they would ever see her. She was received by the Sawyer family, Christadelphians who lived in Birmingham, England.
Usula Meyer (Photo: Part of the Family/YouTube screenshot)
Ursula told a moving tale of her relationship with the Sawyers. At the height of the Blitz, Birmingham was heavily targeted by German bombers. Windows had to be covered so no light could show. A passing warden saw the reflection of car headlights on the Sawyer’s windows and thought someone inside was signalling the Nazi bombers, directing them to their target. He broke down the front door, saw a German teenage girl, and assumed she was a spy endangering the entire city. He drew his pistol and pointed it at Ursula. Her adoptive father Norman Sawyer stepped in front of her, saying, “You shoot me first.”
At the end of the war, Ursula, like almost all of the Kindertransport children, was left without parents. Out of 35 people interviewed, only two ever saw their birth parents after the war.
“Kindertransport was meant to be a temporary measure. The families had volunteered to take the children in until the danger passed,” Hensley explained to Breaking Israel News. “After the war, when the children realized they had no family, they had to go to the family and ask, ‘Can I call you mom and dad?’” In every case, the families agreed.
In a number of cases the children of the survivors thanked Hensley. “They wanted their parents to talk about it but they didn’t. It was too painful. One of the survivors was going through the pictures from the war and her grown daughter said that she had never seen the pictures before.”
One of the most remarkable aspects of the story was the fact that though the children were placed with devout Christadelphians, almost all of the survivors retained their Jewish identities – with the help of their Christian families.
Ursula Meyer cherishes the photos she has of her family members who perished in the Holocaust. (Photo: Part of the Family/YouTube screenshot)
“Almost unanimously they said there was no religious pressure,” said Hensley. “Often the families helped them keep a connection with Judaism, and in most cases the kids went back to Judaism after the war.”
While the story of the Kindertransport is not a new one, Hensley’s book uncovers a previously unknown, Biblically-motivated aspect of that story: a community of Christians whose firm belief in the Hebrew Bible was the direct catalyst for the saving of hundreds of Jewish lives. By welcoming these Jewish children as a “branch” on their Biblical family tree, the Christadelphians represented the roots of today’s growing movement towards mutual respect and a sense of brotherhood between the two faiths.
“I will gather you from the peoples and assemble you out of the countries where you have been scattered, and I will give you the land of Israel.” (Ezekiel 11:17)
By: Deborah Fineblum Schabb
With the publication of a new edition of the Hebrew Bible under his belt, Rabbi Naphtali (Tuly) Weisz is set to manifest his vision for honoring and nurturing evangelical Christian support for Jews and the Jewish homeland.
It wasn’t so long ago that Christians weren’t always viewed as a Jew’s best friend. But that’s not how things are playing out today, says Weisz, the former pulpit rabbi of Beth Jacob Congregation in Columbus, Ohio. Ordained by the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary at Yeshiva University, and also holding a law degree, Weisz made aliyah four years ago to a Jerusalem suburb where he now lives with his wife and their five children.
Before he ever dreamed of producing a Bible spotlighting the central role of Israel, Weisz founded Israel365: Your Daily Connection to the Land of Israel, a website that is jam-packed with information on Israel and deploys an email list distributing Israel-centric biblical quotes. These days, the Israel365 emails that land daily in the inboxes of some 200,000 Christians and Jews—70 percent and 30 percent, respectively—“serve as a constant reminder of the biblical commandment for Jews to make their home in the land of Israel,” Weisz, 35, says.
In recent years, the rabbi has added BreakingIsraelNews.com, a news website covering the latest happenings in Israel through a biblical lens. But fresh off its launch, Weisz sees “The Israel Bible” as the hub around which his other programming spokes revolve.
“It’s crucial to be able to see on every page of the Bible how central the land of Israel is to the holy book that both we and the Christians see as the word of God,” he tells JNS.org. Beginning with the classic 1917 Jewish Publication Society translation, the team of biblical experts added insights into each one of the multitude of biblical references to the land. The five-volume paperback set of the Bible (what the Christians call the Old Testament and the Jews call the Torah) costs $39.99 on the Israel365 website. The longer and complete Tanakh version—20 paperback volumes, including the Torah, the Prophets, Judges, Proverbs, Psalms, etc.—was recently completed and is now available on the site for $120.
“You can find all kinds of translations of the Bible out there—88 percent of Americans own at least one,” says Weisz. “But this is the first to draw our attention to the absolute centrality of the land of Israel and its eternal connection to the Jewish people.”
Staying faithful to the original wording of the text, he adds, packs a special message for those who, like religious people of both faiths, read the Bible literally as the word of God.
“The Israel Bible” is a publication whose time has come, says Rabbi Shlomo Riskin, the founding chief rabbi of the Israeli community of Efrat, who penned the foreword to the new Bible.
“In these very critical and tempestuous times it is especially important to understand the inexplicable connection between the nation of Israel and the land of Israel,” Riskin says. “And this is precisely what Rabbi Tuly Weisz has succeeded in doing in this timely translation of the Bible.”
Though it is designed for all, by far the greatest number of readers of “The Israel Bible” are expected to be evangelicals Christians.
“The Bible, the land, and the people of Israel are one, and this new Bible reminds us of this bond,” says Pastor Keith Johnson, founder of Biblical Foundations Academy International, upon visiting Israel from his Charlotte, N.C., home. “You can’t read the Bible, the word of God, without understanding the significance of Israel—past, present, and future. In 1948, the prophecy came to pass in our own time and no one can disconnect the people from their land ever again. Now that the God and people and land of Israel are back together, history is happening here.”
Jews and Christians share a biblical heritage, and the new Bible “shows even more clearly that this is the land God chose for the Jewish people,” adds Johnson.
Copies of the newly released Israel Bible at the Siyum event. (Photo: D2 Photography / Breaking Israel News)
Sondra Baras sees the value of the new edition from both the Jewish and Christian perspectives. An observant Jew, Baras heads the Israel office of Christian Friends of Israeli Communities, an initiative that helps Christians find travel and programming experiences in Israel.
“Many in the evangelical community are trying to understand what Israel is all about and how it connects with what they’re reading in their Bibles, so coming into contact with Jews in Israel brings the Bible to life for them,” she says. “They get what we’re doing here because their Bible is clear about why Jews belong in Israel.”
Weisz writes in the new Bible’s introduction, “Efforts to vilify the Jewish state seem to expand daily across the globe, as does the number of evangelicals who stand strong with the nation and the people of Israel as an expression of their commitment to God’s word.”
The rabbi has a prayer of his own to add: “May ‘The Israel Bible’ be a small contribution in bringing about the final redemption of Israel and the world.”
There are many reasons for the discrepancy between what people say they believe and what they do with their beliefs. But the Messianic Jews in Israel are working to bridge that gap with a new project aimed at getting people in the Land of the Bible to read their own book.
For the first time, the ancient Masoretic text of the entire Hebrew Bible has been translated into modern Hebrew. The Messianic publishing company Hagefen (The Vine) finally completed the project, a painstaking effort that took over 20 years.
The full article appears in the February issue of Israel Today Magazine. SUBSCRIBE NOW to read it all!
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JERUSALEM, Israel -- A unique exhibition of Bible history opened this week at Jerusalem's Bible Lands Museum.
They call it the Book of Books. The museum's latest exhibition traces the history of the Bible and the Jewish roots of Christianity, tracking the story of God's written word from the Dead Sea Scrolls to the Gutenberg Bible and beyond.
Bible Lands Museum Director Amanda Weiss says there's no more important city than Jerusalem to host such an exhibit.
"It's the first presentation of this collection of rare and important Bibles and manuscripts and biblical texts looking at the Old Testament and the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, together in one exhibition here in Jerusalem," Weiss told CBN News.
"The significance is that we are trying to show the Jewish roots of Christianity," Cary Summers, chief executive of the Green Collection, said.
"We've put in added effort to make it an equally balanced and important exhibition for both a Jewish audience and the Christian world," Weiss said.
"The exhibition begins in the Judean Desert," exhibit curator Heather Reichstadt explained. "We have a representation here of facsimiles of those Dead Sea Scrolls that belong to Amman, Jordan."
Reichstadt says the dispersion of the Jewish people in 70 A.D. sets the stage for the exhibit.
"We move into North Africa where we then start to see introduction of Greek, where you have the Septuagint, it's the Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament to Christians in the Greek language," Reichstadt continued. "After that we have the introduction of earliest New Testament text."
The artwork on the walls related directly to the exhibits, and a floor map traces the spread of God's Word throughout the world.
Interactive iPads allow visitors to zoom in on texts like a genealogy from Adam to Christ.
There's even an exact working replica of the 15th century Gutenberg Press, which printed the famous Guttenberg Bible.
"And you have a printed page. You could make several thousand in a day," Reichstadt explained.
"We do end the exhibition with one of the oldest biblical texts known to date…which is a blessing from Numbers 6:24-26, 'May the Lord bless you and keep you….'"
Most of the exhibit comes from the Green family collection, which will one day have a permanent home in Washington, D.C.
Cary Summers, the Green collection's chief executive, says they want to change the notion many people have that the Bible is not readable.
"We take on that challenge to provide a means for people to get comfortable reading it," Summers said. "It's literally one of the great, great writes of the world. It's fantastic. It's entertaining. It's mystery. It's everything that good movies are made of -- are found in the Bible."
