Kabbalist found Jesus

To combat depression, anxiety and suicidal thoughts, Eden Frenkel delved into personal development, self actualization, Buddhism, meditation, Hinduism and the mystical interpretation within Judaism known as Kabbalah.

“To be honest, I enjoyed the process of studying those cultures, but they were very temporary fulfillments,” the Jewish born singer says on her YouTube channel, Graves into Gardens. “I constantly needed to go back and search for more. They didn’t fill the emptiness. I was looking for peace and happiness.”

As a 12-year-old in the synagogue, she stayed before the ark and prayed longingly to God after everyone had left and gone to eat.

“God, I know there is something,” she uttered. “I don’t understand. I feel like there is something between us.”

Eden had a proclivity for music but joined the Canadian Army as a career. In addition to seeking peace from religion, she sought peace from psychedelics. She had suffered some abuse as a child, she says, and sought in vain to resolve the trauma.

When she got stationed in Toronto, she met some Christian women who were extremely friendly and they invited her to study the Bible. Why not? she thought, since she had studied so many other religions.

What she found out about Jesus startled her.

“All I knew growing up was he was a man who did miracles. In the beginning, I didn’t really take it seriously,” she says. “But after getting to know who Jesus was and what He did and what he claimed to be and what he wanted for his people, it was incredible.

“I had no idea that Jesus was… Read the rest: Jewish Kabbalist found Jesus.

Bible study in the Pentagon? Yes, and Navy Seals are getting saved.

The first time Bud Greenberg showed up at a Bible study, he introduced himself as a Jew, and the leader asked him to teach the next week’s study.

“You’re Jewish,” the leader told him. “Wow, you’re an expert on the scriptures. We’re just finishing up the study and we’re going to start the book of Esther. Since you know it a lot better than us, you being Jewish, will you teach us?”

There was only one problem: Bud had never read the Bible.

Notwithstanding, he assumed the invitation to teach was standard operating procedure. He went home and, starting from Genesis, thumbed through the Bible until he got to Esther.

“I didn’t want to disappoint,” he says on a Delafe Testimonies video. “It gave me a desire to read more, so I thought to myself, ‘Well, maybe I’ll read the New Testament.’ So I started in the book of Matthew.”

Today, Bud leads Bible studies in the Pentagon with Navy Seals and Special Operators, leading America’s elite fighters to Jesus. God has spoken through him in a way that unnerves the highest military professionals famed for having nerves of steel.

“I’m scared of you,” a Delta Force operator told him one day, arriving at the Bible study.

“You’re scared of me?” Bud responded. “I’m just a pencil-neck geek bureaucrat; you’re the killer.”

“No, no,” the operator said. “They tell me what goes on in these bible studies. I have no idea. I came early just to see for myself.”

Bud Greenberg was born Jewish but married a Christian girl. He loved baseball but wasn’t good enough in umpire school to make it in the Big Leagues. So, he joined the military and carted his wife with him to Germany.

She wasn’t too happy with the sudden move, and their marriage began to suffer. He asked a social worker what he could do to improve his marriage. Do something with your wife that she likes to do, was the answer.

So Bud… Read the rest: Bible study in the Pentagon.

He rebuffed Christians because he was Jewish. Secretly he suffered depression.

Trevor Rubenstein got mad when some Christians approached him at a mall and talked about Jesus.

“I’m Jewish!” he barked. “This Jesus who you’re following is a false prophet! Why are you sharing this with me?”

Later, he admitted that his anger was unjustified. But it seemed reasonable at the time: Judaism was important to his well-off family.

Trevor – his Hebrew name is Tuvia – grew up in an affluent family. His parents did well; his grandparents did very well, he says on a Chosen People Ministries video.

Despite living in the lap of luxury, Trevor experienced significant depression to the point of being suicidal.

“I would often contemplate killing myself,” he said. “There was this overlying feeling that I’m not loved like I want to be loved.”

The inner emptiness prompted him to look for acceptance, which he found among the druggies. He began to drink and abuse drugs.

“That really affected my grades and my education,” he says.

With plummeting grades and behavioral issues, he got kicked out of school.

“You’re not coming back to this school,” the principal told him in his office. “I’m going to do everything in my power to make sure you don’t come back to this school.”

At college, a friend invited Trevor to a Bible study. Without really listening to what the activity was, Trevor acceded. Only too late did he realize he was in a Bible study.

But the friend had answers to Trevor’s doubts and Read the rest: Story of the Prodigal the heart of a suicidal Jewish man.

She feared even hearing Arabic until she heard it sung in a chapel

Anastasia Ohkrimenko grew up knowing the terror of Palestinian attacks in a small Jewish settlement on the West Bank.

“The thing that scared me the most was the Arab language when I heard it,” she says on a One For Israel video. “It reminded me of shootings and rocks flying and people I knew who got killed.”

But then she was led by Isaiah 53 to enroll in the One For Israel Bible College. On her first day in Chapel, they played a worship song to Yeshua — in Arabic.

“Every note that they played took off layers and layers of fear, hate, pain, war, everything that was just choking me,” she says. “Every word that they said in that same language — that terrified me to death a few years before — sounded like the most beautiful thing in the world to me.

“And that is the power of the Gospel. It has the power to clean and heal and make us new again.”

Anastasia Ohkrimenko (also spelled Ohrimenco) was born into a Jewish immigrant family from Moscow in the milieu of conflict on the West Bank, the area of longstanding dispute between Palestinians and Jews, which contains many Israeli settlements.

As a kindergartner, Anastasia had no idea about the enduring conflicts between Israelis and Palestinians, who still claim the Holy Land is theirs from before the foundation of modern Israel in 1948.

All she knew was that at any moment, an angry Arab might kill her, her family or her friends. The Jews would repeat often: “The Arabs are the enemy.”

Unlike some of her friends, she wasn’t attacked. As she became a teenager, she noted a dissonance between the loving God of the Bible and the description by the rabbis of a vengeful sovereign who would inflict punishment if you violated Sabbath. Read the rest: Anastasia Ohkrimenko One For Israel

Palestinian son of imam comes to Christ via One For Israel outreach

A Palestinian son of an imam did not sleep for three days after receiving salvation in Jesus.

“He was crying all the time, calling and crying, and said that he was betrayed, that he had been living in a lie,” due to his upbringing in Islam. “And then he just knew what is the truth. His life was so changed that he wanted to tell everyone about Jesus.”

Despite the risk to his life, this joy-filled young convert began sharing Jesus on the streets of Gaza, a Palestinian city off the southwestern border of Israel, according to a One For Israel video that documents his conversion.

To question Islam is a great sin for Muslims. Jews are often derided as “dogs” who deserve death, and Christians are said to follow “corrupt” teachings of the Bible. Since Palestinians frequently engage in terrorism, to abandon Islam, embrace his enemies and then preach Jesus on the streets of Gaza is tempting death. The fact that his father is an imam, a preacher of Islam, made things worse.

The young man came to Christ after watching an Arabic video about Jesus produced by the One For Israel Bible College in Netanya, Israel. It is a Messianic Jewish institution of higher learning and all the course work is taught in Hebrew.

One For Israel also spearheads an online effort to win Israelis to Jesus. What not many people realize is that there are Palestinians who from the foundation of Israel in 1948 decided to become Israelis and not move to Gaza and the West Bank along with their countrymen.

One For Israel has a department that reaches out to Arab/Palestinian Israelis. And their evangelism and discipleship, via the internet, ranges throughout the Middle East and northern Africa. They employ a simple Arabic that everyone can understand (there are variations through all the Arab world of the original Arabic spoken by Mohammad).

When Muslims call in with questions, they answer them at length and engage any objections. Many of these Muslims wind up becoming born-again. A lot of their short videos are oriented towards young Muslims.

Where missionaries cannot cross borders, the internet is providing an open door for evangelism and discipleship.

When anyone gets saved, they continue to disciple them online, since born-again churches may not be easily accessible.

In some cases, when a convert is threatened, they counsel his next moves to spirit him away from danger and relocate to a safe haven.

The Palestinian young man started as a seeker, asking questions. When doubts filled his mind, he sought answers from the imams in Palestine, who either counseled him to not talk to Christians or promised answers at a later time but never followed up. Carlos Damianos, an Arab Israeli convert to Christianity, leads the online evangelism and discipleship.

“Carlos was giving them all the answers he needed from the scriptures,” said Hadil (no last name was provided), who also works on Arab outreach.

The video outreach started in January of 2020 with a series of eight videos which focused on the Muslim’s main rejection of the Bible: that it supposedly was corrupted and altered through the years.

Entitled “The invention of the myth of Biblical corruption,” the series of twice-weekly videos showed the integrity and reliability of the scriptures. They cite the Dead Sea scrolls, which were hand-copied from before Jesus’s day and validate the accurate preservation of holy words from ancient times. Read the rest: One For Israel outreach to Arabs.

Ok, Biden.

Politicians in America sound off sanctimoniously about needing to “stick with science” in dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic, but Israeli scientists prove how difficult it is to find consensus in the best ways to limit the deadly pestilence.

After initial success handling the pandemic, in July Israel saw a resurgence of Covid-19. On September 13th, Israel’s government approved a severe, three-week lockdown that will limit people’s travel, shut down malls, restaurants, hotels, fitness clubs, and swimming pools. It will also limit indoor gatherings to 10 people.

Epidemiologist Dr. Hagai Levine of the Israeli Association of Public Health has stated that complete lockdowns are an extreme measure that should be reserved as “a last resort for very unusual situations of very contagious and deadly diseases. This is not the situation with Covid,” he told The Jewish Voice.

He labeled the shutdown of work and social activities as “medieval” in its approach and not necessary for controlling Covid-19.

“At the beginning, we didn’t know enough about how the virus spread and even then, public-health professionals thought the response should be more proportional to the specific risk,” Levine said. “Now we know much more about the virus. The risk of transmission in open air is very low. It therefore does not make any sense, from efficiency or a public-health point of view, to force people to stay at home. What we need to do is proportional measures to reduce transmission so we will get slowly to a reduction of the disease.”

Simple mask-wearing, hand washing and social distancing should be enough to keep the pandemic in check. Everyone has a role in limiting transmission, he says.

“You explain that gathering in closed spaces is risky and in open spaces much less risky,” he said. “You give solutions for people to be educated in how they socialize, work and consume entertainment. We need to get people to understand how important it is to avoid any unnecessary contact. If we don’t have this internal motivation, nothing will work.”

Dr. Levine’s views fell on deaf ears, however, considering the government’s current course of action.

By contrast, Yaneer Bar-Yam of the New England Complex Systems Institute fully endorses lockdowns, in line with the current directives.

Baruch Barzel,

“If you fought a fire in your house and got it down to a small fire and then walked away, the fire will grow again,” he told The Jewish Voice. For the past 15 years, Bar-Yam has used mathematical tools to help governments and organizations deal with epidemics like Ebola. He cites air travel for the rise of worldwide contagion.

His End Coronavirus coalition aims to aid community-based solutions for policymakers, businesses and individuals.

Israel imposed rigorous limitations near the outbreak of Covid and saw a dramatic decrease in spread, Bar-Yam observed. But when things got better and Israel loosened restrictions, the disease flared up again.

“This is not a natural disease that circulates in the population,” he said. “It is driven by a simple dynamic. It grows exponentially in a normally behaving population until the population takes clear actions such as social distancing from people who might be sick and isolating people who are sick as determined by symptoms or testing.”

He says authorities face three scenarios: “Either you relax restrictions and infections will continue to grow; keep the current situation [of limiting gatherings and mandating mask-wearing], where you’ll have a constant but high number of nearly 2,000 new cases per day; or choose stronger actions and the number of cases per day will decline.”

“The shortest amount of time requires the strongest action. Within four to six weeks, anyplace in the world can be at zero transmission. It will take longer the more lax you are,” he says. “The way to do all the things everyone wants to do, and the way to save lives, prevent disease and make the economy recover, all result from getting transmission to zero.”

For his part, Dov Shvarts, a professor at Ben-Gurion University, advocates partial lockdowns: nighttime curfews, weekend lockdowns and voluntary quarantine for people over 67 and people with underlying medical conditions that make them high-risk. People can still work and study, but on weekends they should stay home, he told The Jewish Voice. Read the rest: Scientists disagree on how to contain covid.

Taught that Bible is ‘fairy tales,’ Jewish college student was bombarded by Jesus’ love

From a very young age, Bob Siegel identified with being a Jew.

His dad, however, saw Judaism as a legacy, not a religion and ingrained in him the message “that there was no God, that the Bible was a bunch of fairy tales, even the Old Testament,” he recalls in a 2007 CBN video. “So I learned a lot about the nation of Israel, I learned about the Holocaust, I learned about anti-Semitism, but I learned nothing about God.”

Outfitted with a researcher’s affection for learning, Siegel hit college running. In addition to examining books, he began to examine himself.

“I began to notice a selfishness in me that I couldn’t control or do something about. Even if I donated money to a charity, I realized I was trying to make myself feel better than to have an altruistic emotion that I really cared about the people,” he remembers.

Those self-centered characteristics came to head one day when Jews for Jesus visited the campus and set up a sign.

“That absolutely infuriated me,” he says. “I thought that people were making this bug-a-boo about a man who had been dead. I thought that Jesus could never be proven, that anyone who read the Bible was a moron. So I thought these people were cowardly and dishonest. It was just plain stupid.”

He began to argue with the Jews for Jesus, but when he went home that night, he was perplexed.

So he said a simple prayer.

“God, all my life I’ve been told Jesus is forbidden knowledge. A second grader in Sunday school knows more about Jesus than I do, and I’m almost 20 years old. But if I’m missing out on something, if I can have a relationship with you and it is through Jesus, then help me to learn about him because I know nothing about him.”

He went to sleep.

The next day, two young women told him about having a relationship with Jesus.

After hearing them out, his mind was unconvinced, but then something happened that melted his heart – for the first time in his life he felt the presence of God!

“They didn’t necessarily say anything that was particularly persuasive, but after they left me, I was bombarded by a very difficult-to-describe mystical, supernatural, loving presence. Read the rest: Jew becomes Christian

Erez Soref thought he was the only Jew who came to know Jesus

Erez Soref discovered spiritual reality on a trip to India as he conversed with Buddhists and Hindus.

Then he stumbled on a Christian group in Amsterdam that challenged him to read Messianic prophecies and compare them to their fulfillment in the New Testament.

“The best kept secret among the Jewish people,” says the president of One For Israel videos.

Erez Soref’s dad was a Sephardic Jew and his mom was of Babylonian Jewish descent. Going to synagogue seemed boring to him as a kid. The history of the Jewish people from thousands of years ago seemed to have little current relevance.

“God was very, very far away,” he says.

All through K-12, he studied the Old Testament for its historical and literary value only.

“It was something one needs to know being Jewish but not the Word of God,” he says.

Like many young Israelis, he traveled the world and landed on the “Mysticism Trail” — which is simultaneously the “Drug Trail” — in India, where he was exposed to Hindu and Buddhist scriptures.

“I got to understand there is a spiritual reality,” he says. “That spiritual reality was very scary, very negative, very dark, but it was very real.”

In Amsterdam, Erez fell in with some young vibrant Christians.

“I’m Jewish,” he told them right from the start. “We don’t believe in Jesus.”

“Why?” they responded. “Jesus is Jewish.”

“I’m not sure why, but I’m SURE we don’t believe in Jesus,” he answered.

Nevertheless a seed of inquiry began to germinate in his heart.

He was struck by their enthusiastic faith. The way they called it a “personal relationship with God” seemed totally foreign to him.

“What was even more shocking than that was that some of them were familiar with passages in the Hebrew Scriptures that I wasn’t ever well familiar with,” he says.

His new friends called them “prophetic” or “Messianic” passages.

“I was amazed. How do you guys know these passages? This is ours!” he says.

He referenced his own Bible in Hebrew and verified that the Messianic passages were legit.

Then he cajoled himself into peeking into the New Testament. He had already read Buddhist and Hindu literature, so what could be wrong with reading the Christian writings?

“I was very surprised. First of all it took place in Israel and places I’ve been to many many times,” he says. “Growing up in Israel, I never ever heard anything about Jesus of Nazareth.”

“Jesus is the best-kept secret among the Jews,” he says. It seemed incomprehensible that he hadn’t learned a thing about Jesus when his family lived near the Sea of Galilee.

“I was very drawn to Yeshua,” he recounts. “He did not do things to try to win men’s favor.” Read more about the best kept secret of the Jews.

Best-selling author Andrew Klavan came to Christ

Andrew Klavan, international best-selling author, grew up in a Jewish household devoid of God.

He felt like a hypocrite at his bar mitzvah when he recited Hebrew statements of faith neither he nor his parents believed. “Judaism is a beautiful religion, but when you empty it of God, it has no meaning,” he told CBN.

He threw himself into reading. He didn’t get along with his dad, so he searched for male role models in books. He struck on the noir, Hemingwayesque hero, the tough guy womanizer who held to his own moral code.

The Long Island native liked reading so much that he started writing, first for a newspaper in Putnam County, NY, and then riveting detective novels. He wrote prolifically and read widely.

“The more I read, the more I found that Christianity was at the center of almost every great story that I loved,” Klavan said. “I started to read the Gospel according to Luke as a piece of literature just to find out what everybody was talking about, and I found that the figure of Jesus Christ was at the center of Western Culture.”

At first, he examined the issues only as a sociologist, trying to understand the origins and evolution of Western Civilization’s values and development. But the quest for truth that his protagonists portrayed resonated in his heart and eventually Klavan realized nothing made sense without the existence of God.

“I began to believe in my mind that there actually was a God, but I didn’t know Him yet,” he explained to CBN.

One day he read in a book that a character prayed before going to sleep and Klavan decided he could try the same. Tentatively, he muttered a very terse prayer.

“Thank, You, Lord,” he uttered.

Undramatically, he fell asleep.

“I woke up the next morning and truly everything had changed,” he says. ”There was a new clarity to everything. My heart was filled with gratitude. I was experiencing a joy that had been locked away. Suddenly, knowing God opened me up to my own experience of life.”

That tiny prayer turned into titanic growth in the Lord. Read the rest of the article Andrew Klavan Christian

Used to outwitting the KGB in Ukraine, immigrant outwits rabbis in the Yeshiva

By the time the KGB showed up, the Torahs were gone, stowed safely with their Ukrainian neighbors.

This the game of cat and mouse of being a Christian or a Jew under Communist Soviet domination in the 1980s. Foer her part, Andrew Scokovsky’s mom was born ethnic Jew but had decided to convert to Christianity after a lifelong search for truth.

My mom always searched for the meaning of life,” says Andrew*. “So she turned to socialism and communsim to see if it had the truth. She read Marx and Lenin and she couldn’t find it there. She was looking all theese places. Finally her friend said, Hey why don’t you read the Bible? It changed her life. Then she told it to my father and then he accepted Jesus too.”

Little Andrew grew up in the underground church of Odessa, always dodging the KGB and the communist authority.

“Whether Jewish or Christian, persecution was the same,” Andrew says. “According to socialistic creed, you’re supposed to believe in Lenin, so there is no higher authority than the communist party, there is a higher authority. They couldn’t allow that.”

So when Andrew’s neighbors got wind that the KGB was planning to raid their house on a certain day, they spirited away the Torahs to Andrew’s house just in the nick of time. When the KGB — the feared security apparatus that propped up the communist dictatorship — arrived, agents found nothing.

Andrew says there were officially sanctioned churches but that you couldn’t hear the full gospel in them.

“We were part of the underground church,” he recalls. “You could not go to the regular church because if you went to a regular church, the KGB made a list of what you could preach. If you want to preach the whole Bible, you have to go to the underground church.”

As a young child, he was brought to church and dedicated to God. Accordingly, he grew up always wanting to pray, read his Bible and pursue a relationship with Jesus, he says.

At age 14, his parents were granted asylum to the United States under the religious persecution clause, and they settled in Brooklyn, NY, 1989.

“At the time we left, revival was going on,” Andrew says. “Just before communism fell, they opened up the region to foreigners, and Americans would come and preach. It was like a voice of angels in the late 80s. A lot of people converted during that time.”

In New York, his parents enrolled him in a public high school. But the fights — even with knives — frightened them, so they switched him to a conservative Jewish school, called a Yeshiva. They were not Jewish but resorted there because it was a “safe place,” he says.

Andrew knew he couldn’t talk about Christianity.

“Teachers taught us you only worship God and that Christians worship a man who claimed to be God, which is idolatry, the worst sin,” he said. Read the rest: Ukrainian persecuted Christian.

Babylonian conquest of Israel confirmed by archaeology

Nebuchadnezzar’s siege of Jerusalem represented a watershed in Jewish history, ushering in the era of the captivity. The carnage in Jerusalem was catastrophic and was lamented by generations of Jews.

But the conquest, narrated assiduously in the Bible, was never discovered in archaeological digs and documented by field researchers.

Until now.

Archaeologists, led by a professor with North Carolina University at Charlotte, have uncovered ruins that correspond to the Babylonian attack. The team unearthed layers of ash, carbonized wood, broken pottery and a mansion.

“What we’re finding is the result of that destruction. It’s the kind of jumble that you would expect to find in a ruined household following a raid or battle,” says Shimon Gibson, professor of history at the university. “Household objects, lamps, broken bits from pottery which had been overturned and shattered and arrowheads and a piece of jewelry which might have been lost and buried in the destruction.”

Every turn of the archaeologist’s spade confirms another page of the Bible.

Jerusalem became a vassal state of Babylon during the Iron Age but rebelled twice — first under King Jehoiakim and then again under King Zedekiah. In 586 BC, Nabuchadnezzar — the “Destroyer of Nations” — set out to make an example of their repeated resistance and, after a two year siege, breached the gate and tore down all “great houses” and burned them with fire.

King Solomon’s temple was stripped of its treasures and razed. The wall around Jerusalem was leveled.

Gibson and his team found that Jerusalem was a sprawling and rich cosmopolitan city, larger than previously thought, at the time of Nebuchadnezzar’s conquest.

“The combination of an ashy layer full of artifacts, mixed with arrowheads, and a very special ornament indicates some kind of devastation and destruction,” Gibson says in a Haaretz news article. “Nobody abandons golden jewelry, and nobody has arrowheads in their domestic refuse.”

The arrowheads have been identified as Scythian, used during the 7th and 6th centuries BC by Nebuchadnezzar’s troops.

“They were fairly commonplace in this period and are known to be used by the Babylonian warriors,” Professor Gibson says. “Together, this evidence points to the historical conquest of the city by Babylon because the only major destruction we have in Jerusalem for this period is the conquest of 587/586 BCE.”

The jewelry piece is half gold and half silver. It consists of a cluster of grapes suspended from a cup-like top that might have been an earring or a tassel and seems to be a bauble for a Jerusalem elite, not a temple decoration, Gibson says.

“Frankly, jewelry is a rare find at conflict sites, because this is exactly the sort of thing that attackers will loot and later melt down,” Gibson says. “(It) is a unique find and it is a clear indication of the wealth of the inhabitants of the city at the time of the siege.”

The finely worked fragment may have been torn from a more significant artifact but not enough of it survives to identify its original nature definitively, researchers think. Read the rest of Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem confirmed by archaeology.

‘You killed Christ’ taunt filled him horror of ‘Christians’

His Jewish mother was smuggled out of Nazi German by nuns, but tragically, she later died in a mental hospital.

“We could get mom out of Nazi Germany, but couldn’t quite get Germany out of mom,” says Dr. Jeffrey Seif.

Living in a Jewish community in Texas as a young person, Jeffrey got smacked with anti-semitism.

“One time around 12 or 13 years old, I’m walking down the street and these two girls yelled ‘Hey you dirty Jew, you killed Christ!” Jeffrey recounts. “I remember that vividly.”

So his first brush with what he thought were Christians provoked unmitigated horror in his heart.

As a young boy, Seif was sent to a Yeshiva– a very strict, religious Jewish school. It changed his mindset about following Judaism because, by nature, he was rebellious.

“I’m 16 now and as I’m laying on my bed my mother comes in and tells me to clean up my room and I gave her a hard time. She says ‘Well if you don’t like it you can leave!’ And so I left!” Jeffrey says.

He ran away from home, hitchhiked to California and ended up in San Francisco.

This is where he got his first positive exposure to Christians.

They were very nice, they were gracious, they’d give me a ride, they would want to give me a meal,” Jeffrey says. “I realized there were Christian people that were kind of cool.”

At school, Seif got high on drugs and received D’s and F’s in his classes.

“I wasn’t on anyone’s ‘most likely to succeed list,’” he recalls. “I was almost like road kill on the highway of life.”

Later in Pennsylvania as Jeffrey walked down the street, a man with hair down to his waist gave him a pamphlet and told him he wanted to talk to him about Jesus.

“Look man, I’m Jewish; I don’t believe in Jesus,” Seif responded curtly.

“Why not?” the man replied. Read the rest of Overcoming anti-semitism to come to Christ.

Rebel Jewish rocker went forward to receive Jesus as a joke, got surprised by joy

Growing up in a Jewish household, Dr. Michael L. Brown believed Jesus was the God of Christians and had nothing to do with the Jews.

During his high school years he became a pothead and eventually earned the nicknames “Drug-Bear” and “Iron Man” due to his prodigious intake of drugs. He abused pot, hash, LSD, mescaline, amphetamines, cocaine and heroin.

“I would take massive quantities just to see how far I could go,” Brown says on a One For Israel video. ”I once did enough mescaline (a hallucinogenic drug) for 30 people — the equivalent of one ounce. I couldn’t distinguish between reality and hallucination.”

Between 1996 and 2000, Brown led the Brownsville Revival, a Christian Pentecostal Movement at the Brownsville Assembly of God church in Pensacola, Florida. He is currently a radio talk show host and also president and professor of practical theology at FIRE School of Ministry in Concord, NC.

Born in New York City in a respectable family, his father served as the senior lawyer in the New York Supreme Court.

“My upbringing was typical of many New York, Conservative Jewish children. We moved to Long Island, I did well in school, I played lots of sports, and, like all my friends, I basically stayed out of trouble. But something changed. It all began innocently enough,” he said.

“When I was eight years old I started to play drums. There was no question that I had ability. In fact by the time I was fifteen I had played on a studio album. But my favorite music was rock, and after my Bar Mitzvah in 1968, I got interested in playing in a band. I wanted to be a rock drummer, and all my role models were known for their heavy drug use, rebellion, and flagrant immorality. I wanted to be like them!”

In 1969, at age 14, he was offered pot.

“I was only too happy to oblige,” he says. “Soon I tried smoking hash too. But neither one had any effect on me. So I tried harder drugs until I started using uppers, downers and LSD. I thought I wouldn’t do anything worse than that, but I was deceived.”

By age 15, he tried speed and heroin.

“I loved it,” he says.

His grades crashed. Drugs, rock and “filthy living” were his daily portion. He and his friends broke into homes and a doctor’s office just for fun. Snatching up drugs wherever they entered, they nearly killed themselves.

He was binging drugs, constantly pushing the outer edge of the envelope toward overdose.

At times, it was difficult to distinguish between hallucination and reality. “I would walk with my hand in front of my face at night because I didn’t know if the tree that was growing up in front of me was really there, or if the tree that grew up into fireworks, that they were really taking place,” he noted.

”I’d see a car coming at me, and suddenly it became a person: the lights became eyes and a mouth. I’d see someone walking their dog and they’d morph until they each became a little bit of each other.”

Brown wasn’t the type of person to fight, but he would bring people down with verbal volleys. He ripped into people until they were in tears.

He had been raised a conservative Jew, but wandered far from the faith of his family. He rarely thought of God, but when he did, he rationalized that he was a good person.

“If there really is a God, He knows I have a good heart,” he thought at the time.

Ultimately, it was the Book of Revelation that brought him to account. Some friends began attending church and telling him about the Beast with seven heads and 10 horns that emerged from the Bottomless Pit to rule the world. It sounded like an LSD trip.

“That’s in the Bible?” Brown asked his buddies. “That’s what they talk about in this church? That’s a cool church.” Read the rest: Dr. Michael Brown started as a Jewish rocker on drugs and came to Jesus.

The ‘success’ of touring with Bob Dylan left her disillusioned

Touring with iconic superstar Bob Dylan may have been a life changing experience for Jennifer Goetz, but that wasn’t the only transformational aspect of the journey.

After going on two 6-week tours with Dylan in 1975 in the U.S., rather than feeling elated, she felt empty, completely lost.

“It was like I had climbed a mountain and looked over and there was nothing on the other side,” Jennifer said. “I was so frustrated with life that I determined I would give myself 35 days to find a new way of approaching life. I was so sick of this brain inhabiting this body and just the way I thought about things.”

During those 35 days, Jennifer contracted Bell’s Palsy, which is partial face paralysis.

“As I was going to bed one night, I was brushing my teeth and water came squirting out of the side of my mouth, and I lived alone in an apartment at that point, and I thought to myself, ‘I’m going to go to bed and I’m going to wake up paralyzed,’ and sure enough when I woke up the next morning, half my face was paralyzed.”

The next day, Dylan’s girlfriend, an African American Baptist Woman, grabbed Jennifer by the hands and started praying for her in the name of Jesus.

With her husband, Marty Goetz

“I remember that when she was finished I walked out of that trailer and I was stunned, and I looked around and I thought, ‘What was that?’’ she remembers. “And the next day I actually started seeing an improvement and feeling an improvement in my face.”

After the first tour, Jennifer got to join Dylan’s six-week European Tour.

Her quest for truth was not over.

With a friend at a hotel in the desert, Jennifer opened a little drawer and found a red Gideon Bible. She “stole” it, brought it home and began to read.

Read the rest of Jennifer Goetz disillusioned with success in music industry finds Yeshua.

Kuwaiti Muslim was taught to hate Jews

“Allahu Akbar”, the crowd chanted, “Allahu Akbar”

The Muslim girl was confused and didn’t know what was going on in the large crowd until they were pushed to the front and saw a woman tied up, sitting on a box, and a man next to her uttering a traditional prayer.

The next thing she knew the man pulled out a golden sword from his side and beheaded the woman. The little girl, her hand in her dad’s, began to tremble.

“If you don’t listen to the teachings we’re instilling in your life, this will happen to you one day,” her father told her sternly, as recounted in a One For Israel video.

In the dramatic video, the woman is dressed in traditional Muslim garb, including a hijab, and her voice is altered to thwart identification.

She was raised in Kuwait, a small oil-rich nation on the Persian Gulf whose population is 98% Muslim. Two of her uncles are imams, and one is president of a mosque. Five times a day, she prayed.

“The word ‘Yehudi,’ which means Jew, was instilled in me as a bad word, as a cuss word,” she says. “Yehudis should not exist. They should be killed. I never thought to question why would I hate them. I never met Jewish people in my life. They never did anything to harm my family.

“I just hated them. Just the word brought hatred in my heart.”

She had to learn the Quran and the Hadith, memorizing vast portions in Arabic.

During her younger days she even entered a competition of reciting a long chapter in front of Islamic leaders and teachers. She was proud to win second place.

But her dad criticized her for not doing better.

“Most of my life, I was alone, by myself, alone,” she says. “I was a broken person in need for love from my family but I never received it from them.

“I tried to experience this love from Creator God, from Allah,” she adds. “In my prayer times, I prayed with my hands lifted up: ‘Please help my father to stop beating my mother. Please help my father to stop beating me.’ But no help came.

“God (Allah) is not a personable god to Muslims,” she says. “Allah does not say, ‘I love you,’ to Muslims.”

Then, Saddam Hussein and his Iraqi army overran Kuwait to take possession of its oil and start the unification process all Muslims idealize in the Quran. His soldiers raided homes, stole possessions, killed men and raped women.

Because of the carnage and suffering, her family applied for and was granted visas to the U.S. There her grandmother suffered a heart attack and two days later died at the hospital.

“I was devastated because I lost my best friend,” she remembers.

Her friend, Paula, seeing her saddened one day, asked her if she was OK. She burst into tears afresh.

“At that moment, only crying helped,” she says. Read the rest of Kuwaiti Muslim taught to hate Jews.

Star-Lord worships the Lord of the stars

Before he played Star-Lord of Avengers Endgame, actor Chris Pratt told his high school wrestling coach he would become famous one day and make a lot of money, but the path he chose in his teens did not look very promising at first.

He dropped out of community college part way through his first year, then found work as a discount ticket salesman and daytime stripper.

At 19, he ended up homeless and weed-smoking in Maui, sleeping in a van or a tent on the beach.

One day he went to the supermarket with some friends to buy booze. Outside a Jews for Jesus worker confronted him: “What are you doing tonight? Will you fornicate tonight? And drugs and drinking?”

“Most likely, yeah,” Pratt replied. “Probably all three of those things. I mean, at least two of them, possibly all three.”

“I stopped because Jesus told me to stop and talk to you,” the man told Pratt. “He said to tell you you’re destined for great things.”

By the time his friends emerged with the liquor, Pratt had already decided to say goodbye to his sinful lifestyle. He accompanied the guy to the Jews for Jesus meeting.

Moved by the power of the Word and the Spirit, Pratt was born again. He surrendered his life to Jesus as his Lord and Savior.

Within two days, he was busy stuffing envelopes, helping Jews for Jesus spread the gospel. He witnessed to a pastor’s prodigal daughter who was strung out on meth and helped her return to the Lord.

Four weeks later at his job as a waiter for the Bubba Gump Shrimp Co., Pratt was “discovered” by a movie director and cast for a role. He became famous on NBC’s Parks and Recreation but really catapulted with The Lego Movie and Guardians of the Galaxy.

In 2007, Pratt played opposite his movie love interest Anna Faris in Take Me Home Tonight. The fictional romance on the screen blossomed into a factual romance in real life, and they eloped on a whim, marrying in Bali, Indonesia in 2009.

Pratt got the chance to let his faith grow when their baby was born prematurely and remained hospitalized for months. The couple “prayed a lot,” he said. “It restored my faith in God, not that it needed to be restored, but it really redefined it. The baby was so beautiful to us, and I look back at the photos of him and it must have been jarring for other people to come in and see him, but to us he was so beautiful and perfect.”

Pratt constantly raves about parenting.

“I’ve done all kind of cool things as an actor…but none of it means anything compared to being somebody’s daddy,” he says. “I made promises in that moment about what kind of dad I wanted to be and I just PRAYED that he’d live long enough that I’d keep him.” Read the rest of Star-Lord worships the Lord of the stars.

President of synagogue accepts Yeshua

As president of a Jewish synagogue, Steven decided to divorce his wife when she started attending a Christian church. But later he did some soul-searching to find the truth and made a surprising discovery.

Steven’s first encounter with Christianity as a Jewish boy growing up on the East Coast was when his grade school friend leveled a malicious accusation: “You killed Jesus!”

“What are you talking about?” Steven responded, on a One for Israel video. (His last name was not provided.)

For centuries, American and nominal European “Christians” have perpetuated anti-Semitism by calling Jews “Christ killers” when in fact Jesus willingly laid down his life to pay the penalty for everyone’s sins.

In college, a musician friend introduced Steven to drugs. The sensation induced was like nothing he’d ever experienced before.

“What is this stuff?” he said at the time. “It was the most incredible feeling I’ve ever felt.”

He decided to become a musician and left his Jewish faith behind.

While performing at a club one night, he noticed a really cute girl in the attached cafe, and he asked her out. It didn’t take long for him to decide he wanted to marry Monica.

Steven got into the scrap metal business with a couple named Sam and Louise.

Louise “started talking about the Jewish Messiah, Yeshua,” he remembers. “She was like, ‘You’ve gotta hear about this, it’s changed my life. You’ve never heard of Yeshua?’ I said no, and she said, ‘I bet you’ve heard of him as Jesus.’”

“Stop right there,” he cut her off. “I’m Jewish. I don’t believe in Jesus.”

Nevertheless, she had piqued his curiosity.

“I was intrigued about this Yeshua guy, but this Jesus is a no, no, it’s not for me.”

During the next decade, Steven continued to use drugs. After his father passed away at the age of 52 from cancer, Steven felt intense pain and began to abuse drugs even more.

While driving home one day after taking himself to the emergency room, he decided to commit suicide. He knew that the stretch of highway was frequented at that time by heavy trucks, so he decided to spontaneously swerve in front of one and die.

“I can’t take it anymore,” he said. “I’m history. I just wanted to kill the pain.” Read the rest: President of synagogue accepts Yeshua.

Isn’t Jesus Italian? A Jew thought so.

As a Jew who grew up in New Jersey and attended public school with Italian Catholics, Mottel Baleston assumed Jesus was Italian.

“My expectation was that the New Testament was a book on how to persecute the Jews,” he recalls.

Since many Jews incorrectly identified Hitler as Christian, generations have warned their children about the dangers of Christianity (there is also a long history in the Middle Ages of Christians persecuting Jews).

But the Jewish rules didn’t appeal to young Mottel either.

“You’ve got to first shave your head, dress in black, you’ve got to wear a white robe, eat only kosher foods, you’ve got to become a vegetarian. You have to face Jerusalem and you’ve got to face Israel when you pray, you pray in Hebrew, and grow a nice big beard,” he remembers. “And if you do all of those outward cultural things, you’ll know the God of the universe.”

He was unconvinced.

“I’m thinking this is crazy that someone thinks that they can force their culture on God or that God is going to be impressed by what you wear, what direction you face, what you eat and all other sorts of things.”

It seemed to him that if there was a God out there who could be known, he should be able to be recognized no matter where he faced, no matter how he’s dressed, because he’s God.

Eventually, his curiosity got the better of him because of his doubts about Judaism. He went to the library and got a New Testament. To be sure, there was a dose of fear with reading a book that his elders had warned him was basically a manual of war on the Jews.

“My expectation was a book on how to persecute the Jews and it was something you should stay away from.”

But as he read the words of Jesus, Mottel was shocked. He discovered the Jesus was Jewish and that the New Testament was written almost entirely by Jews.

He couldn’t believe it.

“I was expecting to find a handbook on how to persecute the Jews,” he says.

But the first sentence (in Matthew) described Jesus as the son of David, and the son of Abraham — all who were Jewish. Read the rest: Jew thought New Testament was a manual of how to wage war on the Jews.

‘That’s MY Messiah’ Jewish politician declares upon reading Sermon on the Mount

John Desser has a rich Jewish heritage that includes a maternal grandfather who participated in the First Zionist Congress, which led to the formation of modern Israel.

His father studied at an orthodox Jewish seminary in New York City. When he was in medical school, he donated blood on Shabbat to a Gentile, an infraction under the Jewish code.

“While he knew this wasn’t right under the law, it felt right in his heart, so he went ahead and did it,” Desser says on a One For Israel video. When he consulted rabbis later about his decision, he received a tongue-lashing. It was disillusioning.

“He walked out of the yeshiva, bought a ham sandwich (also prohibited for the Jew) and was never going to look back,” Desser says. “Because if the laws aren’t true, then God’s not true. My father’s heart was broken.”

As a result, Desser was raised in a secular Jewish home and never attended synagogue. “We had a Christmas tree growing up because my father wanted us to be Americans,” he recalls.

When Desser finished college, he decided to get involved in politics, so he moved to Washington D.C. where he was hired on the staff of a little-known freshman senator, John McCain.

“While I was working with the staff of McCain, I was invited by another staff member to a breakfast, and another man pulled out a book, and began reading it and as he was reading it, the thought crossed my mind, ‘Is that the Bible?’” he remembers. “‘Is he reading the Bible in front of all these people? Is this a Bible study?’”

When a friend asked Desser what church he attended, he responded curtly: “I DON’T!”

Next, he was invited to a National Day of Prayer breakfast. Because he admired one of the speakers, Secretary of State James Baker, he went.

“He got up in front of 3,000 people and said, ‘It’s pretty neat being Secretary of State to the wealthiest nation in the world, and it’s pretty neat being chief of staff to the most powerful man in the world, and it’s pretty neat being Secretary of State to the most influential country in the world,’” he remembers. “‘But the thing that’s really getting me up in the morning these days and I’m excited about is Jesus.”

Desser was flabbergasted.

“Did he just say, ‘Jesus?” he thought at the time. “Why would James Baker talk about Jesus as something that’s interesting to him?” Read the rest of Jew who found Jesus in politics.

A Jewish millionaire lost it all, got Christ and thus found more than he ever had

Steve Olin, a Jewish boy from Brooklyn, made and lost millions, fell into drugs and was close to becoming homeless when he found the ultimate answer to set his life on course.

As a high school pitcher, he threw baseballs in the high 90 mph range. The New York Yankees wanted to sign him in 1962. His lifelong dream was within reach.

But his family, of modest means, insisted he go to college.

“The Yankees were impressed with me,” Olin says on an Israel Media Ministries video. “But my father and my family had never gone to college. My dad wouldn’t co-sign the contract because I was a minor. He said, ‘Son, I want you to get a college education, and then after college you can go into baseball.’

“I was heartbroken,” he says.

Still he honored his parents. He received a full scholarship at St. John’s University, where he is listed as Steve Olshansky on their ’65-66 roster. (Steve Olin who played for the Cleveland Indians is a different person.)

“I wanted to stay in New York,” he says. “God has a sense of humor that a Jewish boy went to a Catholic university.”

On the college baseball team, Olin injured his pitching arm.

“My team went on to the college world series without me. My arm was lame. I couldn’t pitch anymore. My fast balls had gone down to mediocre speed.”

Needless to say, he was crushed.

“God has different roads for us to go down,” he says, now looking back over his life. “He just didn’t have baseball as the road for me.”

Instead, Olin went into the business world.

“I rose very, very quickly to the very, very top of the business world,” he remembers. “God opened every door for me. Every position I went into as I climbed up in the business world got better and better and better.”

At 31, he started his own electronics business. “I was fortunate to get the Atari video game line. Every door I went through, it was like God opened up for me. It was like magic. It was like going to Las Vegas and throwing sevens, one after another. I had millions of dollars in the bank, a penthouse in New York, a penthouse in Miami, a 15-acre weekend estate in Connecticut.”

In eight years, he did $2 billion in sales, and his public company was valued at $6 billion, he says. His wife and child lived the good life with him.

Out of the blue, panic attacks hit him. Read the rest of Jewish millionaire comes to Christ.

650 scientific articles, 120 patents, 7 companies, several academic degrees, 1 Jewish Messiah

James Tour obtained his PhD in organic chemistry, did post doctorate work at Stanford, was voted one of the 50 most influential minds in world, is a visiting scholar at Harvard University, has 650 published scholarly articles, has 120 patents and seven companies with products from everything from medicine to material science, electronics and computer memory.

“But more than that, what means the most to me is that I am a Jew who believes that Jesus is the Messiah,” Dr. Tour says on a One For Israel video.

He grew up outside New York City in a neighborhood so Jewish that he didn’t know there was anything else.

He wasn’t interested in religion. “Once I tried to talk to a rabbi. He just brushed me off. There was very little explanation for me.”

In college he began to meet people who called themselves born-again Christians.

“That was a kind of an odd term,” he remembers thinking. “What’s ‘born-again?’ What do you mean ‘born-again?'”

It began to make sense when, in a laundromat, a man asked to show him an illustration, something of a chasm separating man from God. He labeled the chasm “sin.”

Dr. Tour recoiled somewhat. “I looked at him and said, ‘I’m not a sinner. I’ve never killed anyone. I’ve never robbed a bank. How could I be a sinner?'”

The man encouraged him to read Romans 3:23: For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.

Modern Judaism never talks about sin, Dr. Tour says. “I don’t remember ever talking about sin in my home.”

Then the man led Dr. Tour to the passage where Jesus warns that whoever lusts after a woman has already committed adultery in his heart.

“Pow!” Dr. Tour says. “I felt as if I’d been punched right in the chest.”

Secretly, he’d been looking at pornography in magazines — enough to call himself an “addict.”

“All of a sudden, something that’s written in the Bible, somebody who lived 2,000 years ago was calling me out of it, and suddenly I felt convicted and I realized I was a sinner,” he remembers. “When I read the Scriptures, I knew I was a sinner. How would I get to God?”

As he poured over the Bible, he realized that there is no forgiveness of sin without shedding blood. In the Old Testament, animal sacrifice was stipulated. In the New Testament, Jesus was humanity’s Passover Lamb. Isaiah 53 described graphically how the Messiah would be punished for the sin of the world. He would bear it on the cross.

“The Perfect God comes and gives Himself for us. He is the one that gives Himself for us. I started to realize how Jewish the New Testament is.”

On Nov. 7 1977, alone is his room, he realized Yeshua was the Messiah.

“I said, ‘Lord, I am a sinner. Forgive me. Come into my life,'” he recalls. “Then all of a sudden, someone was in my room. I was on my knees. I opened my eyes. Who was in my room? That man, Jesus Christ, stood in my room. This amazing sense of God, Jesus was in my room. I wasn’t scared. I was just weeping. The presence was so glorious because He was there in my room. I didn’t want to get up. This amazing sense of forgiveness just started to come upon me. That was Him.”

Eventually he stood up. He didn’t know what to do, who to tell.

When he told his cousins, they were shocked. “’How could you do that? You’re Jewish,’” they said. “Telling my mother how I had invited Jesus into my life, she didn’t say much. She was weeping. She told my father. They weren’t happy at all.” So what happened to his family? Read the rest: Jewish scientist James Tour accepts Jesus as Messiah.

Famous cardiologist convinced of God upon reading dietary law in Leviticus

Those same stipulations in Leviticus that make most Christians’ eyes glaze over are the very ones that convinced Dr. Lawrence Czer that God was real — specifically the dietary restrictions that must have seemed arbitrary and pointless in the unscientific ancient world.

“As I began to read the Bible, especially the books of Moses and specifically in Leviticus, I was noticing that God was telling the people of Israel to basically trim the fat off the meat that they were offering Him and to offer the fat to Him,” Dr. Czer said. “And I thought, ‘Wow, God’s a cardiologist.’ They’re eating really healthy meat because they trim off all the fat, and God really knows what He’s doing here.”

Dr. Czer is an internationally recognized cardiologist. He is the medical director of the Heart Transplant Program at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. He was a pioneering researcher in the use of stem cell treatment as an alternative to invasive surgery.

For him, another convincing dietary restriction was the prohibition of eating blood, a “very, very safe practice because a lot of bacteria and viruses can be in the blood and you certainly don’t want to eat uncooked meat or poorly cooked meat,” Czer continues. “He was saying to drain all the blood out of the animal and to cook it well.

“So I thought, ‘Well, He’s very health conscious too! He knows what He’s talking about. He’ll prevent transmission of infectious diseases. It’ll keep the priest healthy; he won’t eat too much fat. And you know, they’ll have a long life.”

So while atheists who revere science examine Leviticus for laws that appear nonsensical, Dr. Czer discovered that God knew about science before even science did and His dietary requiements made perfect sense.

“I thought, ‘This is really neat. It’s not just a whimsical or arbitrary set of rules. He’s asking the priest to do this in faith not knowing the reason.’ But obviously He knew the reasons. We kind of know the reasons now. Looking in retrospect, God was just looking out for his people. I thought, ‘These are rules for good reason, not just arbitrary rules, and He knows what He’s doing.’” Read the rest of Famed cardiologist convinced of God upon reading dietary law of Leviticus.