Spared from Palestinian rockets, Oleg Korotkyi credits God

Just seconds before a huge Palestinian rocket exploded and destroyed his apartment, Oleg Korotkyi walked out — unaccountably — and stood behind a protective bomb-shelter-type wall in the latest round of hostilities in Israel.

“Maybe two seconds before the explosion happened, I left my room, says Oleg in a One For Israel podcast video posted on May 13.

Because he figures the odds of his apartment getting hit are low and because he is always working on research, Oleg says he doesn’t generally run to the shelter area when the Palestinians launch a barrage. Most of the rockets are destroyed in the air by Israel’s Iron Dome missile interception system. But Oleg’s apartment in Ashkelon is close to the Gaza Strip, where the Palestinians launch their destructive weapons.

Oleg’s wife, who was in the bedroom, simultaneously left that room and found refuge behind the wall, so both their lives were spared. In the attack, one apartment dweller was killed and Oleg’s apartment was completely destroyed.

“Usually I don’t go to a shelter,” Oleg says. “I continue to work every time on the computer to write, to do something else, to read books and so on. That day when it happened, I was in the same situation. I was working with my computer and I wrote a research paper there in my room. But before it happened, maybe two seconds before the explosion happened, I left my room and went out. All three bedrooms were destroyed as well as the whole kitchen. There are no windows.”

Oleg is a Christian and a professor at the One For Israel Bible School in Netanya, though he lives far from there.

He sees God’s hand of protection to save their lives. “It is interesting how God works,” he relates. “We don’t know why we should go out. We just go out. We have no injuries, no problems. We are absolutely healthy, physically okay. We feel that God stays here and he gives comfort and desire to serve him to preach the gospel.” Read the rest Oleg Korotkyi spared from Palestinian rockets.

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.

How an Iranian Muslim went from Israel-hater to born-again Christian who loves Jews

Every morning in school, Darwish shouted the customary class-wide chant repeated like the pledge of allegiance in America: “Death to Israel!”

As a Muslim in anti-Semitic Iran, Darwish hated the Jews but never knew why.

He graduated military school and became a commander in the Iranian army. He was moving up the ranks, but he acquired a nasty drug habit. “I became addicted,” he says on a One For Israel video on YouTube.

When he was discharged from the army, he got a fabulous job with great compensation.

But he wanted even more success, so he decided to go abroad where opportunities were greater. He made the dangerous journey from Istanbul to Bosnia and finally to England, where he applied for asylum.

On his application, he justified his need for asylum by stating he was a persecuted Christian.

This was a lie, only a ploy to increase his chances of being granted legal status in the West, where he enjoyed freedom and prosperity.

He realized that eventually he would be called to account for his version, so he decided to arm himself with knowledge of Christianity. Dutifully, he went to church. He filled his mind with the basic doctrines of Christianity.

Still, he felt no compulsion to accept Jesus as his Savior.

“My brain was full of information,” Darwish says. “But my heart was still dark.”

On the day of his interview, he asked his pastor to go with him, but his pastor refused.

“You are not a Christian,” the pastor told him. “It is all a lie (on your application). Yeshua asked you to stand on truth, and the truth will set you free.”

Darwish was outraged by the pastor’s refusal to support him. Why wouldn’t his pastor help him? He was now in very real jeopardy of being deported to Iran.

That night alone at home, he cried out to God. “If there is any God,” he prayed desperately, “show yourself to me because I can’t continue anymore.

Then something remarkable happened. God revealed Himself to Darwish. “In that moment, He healed me completely of drugs. He touched my heart.”

Darwish was born again, filled with resurrection power by the Holy Spirit. “That was a power just working in my heart,” he remembers. “I tried several times before to give up the drugs, but I couldn’t. But that time I asked Yeshua to start a new life, and He did.”

The next day, he confessed his lies on the application to the immigration official. His status change request was, naturally, denied.

But Darwish wasn’t completely without resources or hope. Most importantly, he had finally started a legitimate relationship with Christ. Embarking on a new life, he also was given a new legal strategy, one based on truth.

He appealed the summary denial of his visa application and was granted a court hearing.

By the ironic sovereignty of God, he wound up in a Messianic congregation. Darwish, the man who grew up hating Jews without knowing why, suddenly found himself in a body of completed Jews.

He even became part of the worship team.

When his court date came, the judge asked him what he had done the day before.

He had led worship. He had been reading Psalm 96, and he recited it to the judge and the court. Read the rest of Iranians hate Israel.