A Match Made in Heaven

by Zev Chafets

  None of this kept the evangelicals from hoping. In 1923, the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago set up the first chair in Jewish Studies and hired a converted Jewish professor to teach the art and science of capturing Jews for Christ. The New Testament was translated into Yiddish (don’t ask how that sounded). But for the most part it was wasted effort. The Jews who did convert were most often second- and third-generation, upper-class Germans with social aspirations. The Sulzbergers, Pulitzers, Warburgs, and Strausses who crossed the line wound up in Episcopal cathedrals or Unitarian meeting halls, not Baptist revival tents.

  In 1964, the American Board of Missions to the Jews (ABMJ)—a Brooklyn Christian outreach founded by a converted Hungarian rabbi, Leopold Cohn, at the end of the nineteenth century—set up a booth at the New York World’s Fair that was widely ignored. Seven years later, the same group ran a full-page ad in the New York Times. This caused a ripple because it coincided with the emergence of a new movement, Jews for Jesus.

  Jews for Jesus was the creation of an ABMJ missionary, Moishe Rosen. Born in 1931 and raised a secular Jew, he found Jesus in Denver (the same place Hyman Appleman was converted a generation earlier). Rosen had a good eye for the sort of words and music that would appeal to young Americans in the Age of Aquarius. He also understood the Jewish taboo against conversion. So he took a novel approach: he taught that becoming a Christian didn’t make you a goy. “Please don’t call me a converted Jew!” Rosen wrote. “I was born a Jew and I’ll die a Jew…. I am pleased to be a Jew and part of a noble people who have brought so much to the rest of the world.” You could do your own thing, be a Jew and a Christian—just like Jesus, whom Rosen called Y’shua.

  Jews for Jesus became the best known of a number of messianic Jewish movements and congregations (Rosen himself spun off from the ABMJ board in 1973 and set up an independent group). They formed their own congregations and created their own rituals and lingo. Perhaps the high point of the Jews for Jesus movement was Bob Dylan’s “Christian period” in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when he recorded three religious albums, and Norman Greenbaum’s hit song “Spirit in the Sky” (“Gotta have a friend in Jesus”), which became a born-again anthem. Still, Greenbaum never converted and Dylan eventually came wandering home.

  Today, evangelical outreach to the Jews is most likely to come via bad TV. Televangelists like Reverend Sid Roth have all the charisma of certified public accountants, while messianic infomercials intersperse the hawking of Jewish ritual merchandise with scenes of unattractive people dancing the hora. All this enforces a message to American Jews: evangelical Christianity is a major step down the social ladder.

  Of course, there are Jews who have become born-again Christians, and a few have leadership roles in the evangelical world. Marvin Olasky, a professor at the University of Texas, coined the term “compassionate conservative” and has been a spiritual and intellectual influence on George W Bush. Jay Sekulow runs Pat Robertson’s American Center for Law and Justice, the born-again equivalent of the ACLU; he was named one of the country’s twenty-five most influential evangelicals by Time magazine. Joel Rosenberg, a best-selling writer of End of Days fiction, describes himself as “a nice Jewish-Christian boy from Syracuse.” But, with apologies to these luminaries, they represent a pretty thin harvest for a hundred-year missionary effort.

  ONE OF THE great differences between evangelical Christianity and Judaism is that Jews don’t proselytize. Orthodox rabbis are enjoined to discourage potential converts three times, and some of them are very good at it. If they do take you on, there are no cell phone conversions. You get a makeover—new diet, clothes, neighborhood (walking distance to a synagogue), even a new name. And in Israel, where the Orthodox rabbis have a monopoly on conversion, sometimes even becoming a Jew isn’t enough to make you Jewish, as my friend Viktor found out when they put him in jail.

  Viktor is a tall, blue-eyed, blond-haired, soft-spoken young fellow who grew up in a Romanian farm village near the Serbian border. One day, while visiting Bucharest, he met a tourist from Tel Aviv. She and Viktor fell in love, he got an Israeli visa, and they returned together to Israel.

  The young woman was not in any way religious. Neither were her parents. But they wanted a wedding in Israel, where there are no mixed marriages. Viktor would need to convert to Judaism. So Viktor set out in search of a rabbi.

  But everywhere he went he got the runaround. As far as the rabbis of Israel were concerned there were already too many tall, blue-eyed Russian immigrant gentiles running around, and if a Romanian wasn’t exactly a Russian, what was the difference?

  For months Viktor searched, until he finally found a small, off-brand ultra-Orthodox yeshiva in Jerusalem that was ready to take him on. It belonged to a minor opposition political party—religious institutions in Israel support political parties and are financed by the government—but Viktor wasn’t alive to, or interested in, such partisan nuances.

  If the rabbis suspected that Viktor was merely a convert of convenience, they were mistaken. He quickly decided that he was a devout Jew trapped in a gentile’s body. He began dressing like a Forty-seventh Street diamond dealer, complete with black suit and hat, ritual prayer fringes peeking out from under his white shirt. He started speaking Hebrew laced with Yiddish expressions and Talmudic aphorisms. It didn’t take him long to decide that it was wrong for him to be shacked up out of wedlock, so he and his girlfriend broke up.

  In Romania, Viktor had been a massage therapist and he maintained a small practice in Jerusalem. Giving rubdowns wasn’t exactly an approved activity for yeshiva boys, but Viktor wasn’t a standard student, and besides, he kicked back a portion of his income to the yeshiva.

  This lucrative arrangement may have accounted for Viktor’s relatively slow progress. After a number of years, though, it was no longer feasible to keep turning him down. His final test was living for an entire year under the supervision of an ultra-Orthodox family. At the end of this trial period he was circumcised, dipped in the ritual bath, and pronounced Jewish.

  Certificate of conversion in hand, Viktor headed for the Ministry of the Interior. He thought he was covered by the Law of Return, which grants automatic Israeli citizenship to any Jew, converted or otherwise, who applied for it. As soon as he got his papers, he intended to hire a matchmaker, find a kosher bride, and settle in Jerusalem, a Jew in good standing.

  The Ministry of Interior turned down Viktor’s conversion, ostensibly because it had been granted by ultra-Orthodox rabbis instead of state-employed rabbinical officials. Viktor, who had grown savvy over the years, suspected that the real reason was that the new minister of the interior was a member of the anticlerical party Shinui and wanted to give black-hat rabbis a hard time. Either way, Viktor was screwed. The ministry not only turned down his application for citizenship; it handed him over to the police for overstaying his tourist visa by about six years. Viktor called me from prison to tell me he was about to be deported.

  There was nothing I, or anyone else, could do. They put Viktor, dressed in his black suit and hat with prayer fringes dangling down, on a plane and sent him back where he came from.

  This story has a happy ending. In Bucharest, Viktor was befriended by an influential Romanian rabbi with a bad back. Viktor gave him massage therapy and received a letter of recommendation in return. This rabbi was from the right party, and the letter did the trick. Eventually Viktor was allowed to return to Israel and, after undergoing a second, “official” conversion by a politically connected rabbinical court, he was permitted to stay. It took him almost eight years, but he was kosher.

  In the United States, where religion is a personal matter not regulated by the government, conversions are much easier. In Miami, twenty years ago, I knew a rabbi named Emmet Frank who offered a one-day conversion course complete with ritual immersion on the beach. But even Rabbi Frank made his candidates spend eight hours in the classroom (time off for lunch). He also provided them with a warranty. “If you forget something, call m
e at home,” he told the newly minted Jews.

  Most of Rabbi Frank’s customers—like many mainstream Reform and Conservative converts—have very little interest in Judaism as a religion. They are appeasers of Jewish in-laws (or, in some cases, rebels against their own Christian families). Orthodox converts are expected to take on “the burden of the Torah.” Conservatives are required to serve kosher food at the conversion party. Reform converts are encouraged not to practice other religions. But no one gets into the tribe, let alone heaven, with a cell phone call to the secretary.

  CHRISTIAN ZIONISTS TEND to downplay the degree to which converting Jews is important to them. This is especially true when they are dealing with the Israeli government, which, because of the pivotal importance of its clerical political parties, is sensitive to the Orthodox horror of missionaries. This, in turn, sometimes leads to misunderstandings. That’s what happened to Pastor John Hagee in early 2006 in San Antonio, Texas.

  No Christian Zionist in the United States is more red hot than Hagee. The Pentecostal pastor of the Cornerstone Church has traveled to Israel often, supported a succession of Israeli prime ministers, raised millions of dollars for Russian Jewish immigrants, and written best-selling books of Israel advocacy. Zionism is at the very heart of his ministry. Hagee’s website boasts of an honorary doctorate from an institution called the Netanya Academic College and brags that he is the first gentile ever to receive the San Antonio B’nai B’rith Humanitarian of the Year Award.

  On February 7, 2006—which Hagee calls “a historic day in the history of Christianity in America”—he made a bid to put himself into the front rank of Christian Zionism by inviting three hundred clergymen and lay leaders from around the country to gather in San Antonio for the purpose of founding Christians United for Israel. CUFI’s declared purpose is to be “a national organization through which every pro-Israel organization and ministry in America can speak and act in one voice in support of Israel in matters related to Biblical issues.”

  Among the clergymen in attendance that day was Aryeh Scheinberg, an Orthodox rabbi in San Antonio and a longtime friend and collaborator of Hagee’s. Attempting to explain what the group was all about to a reporter from the Jerusalem Post, Scheinberg said that Hagee does not believe in proselytizing Jews because Jews have a separate covenant with God. Scheinberg also told the reporter that it was safe to infer that Jerry Falwell felt the same way.

  Neither the rabbi nor the Israeli reporter understood the implications of this claim. If Scheinberg was right, two of the nation’s leading fundamentalist preachers were accepting the doctrine of “dual covenant”—common among some liberal Protestant denominations, but heretical to evangelicals—which holds that Jews can go to heaven without Christian salvation.

  The Post story set off a firestorm in the evangelical world.

  Falwell immediately issued a denial. “I have been on record all 54 years of my ministry as being opposed to ‘dual covenant’ theology,” he wrote. “I simply can’t alter my deeply held belief in the exclusivity of salvation through the Gospel of Christ for the sake of political or theological expediency. Like the Apostle Paul I pray daily for the salvation of everyone, including the Jewish people.”

  Hagee, for his part, sent a letter to the editor of the Jerusalem Post affirming that if Jews inquire about Christianity, “we give them a full scriptural presentation of redemption as presented in scripture. Regardless of the response from the Jewish person, we remain friends in support of the State of Israel as required by scripture.”

  Rabbi Scheinberg had inadvertently let an evangelical cat out of the bag. Falwell, Hagee, and other advocates of Judeo-Christian partnership had, over the years, adopted what amounts to a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy in dealing with Jews. For evangelical Zionists, it is the price of admission with Israeli politicians, and it is based on the tacit assumption that, in the matter of the conversion of the Jews, God will work things out for himself.

  PASTOR ANN STRATTON doesn’t practice “don’t ask, don’t tell.” She tells. An Italian Catholic girl from New Jersey turned Manhattan Pentecostal faith healer, she looks and sounds like Adrianna in The Sopranos, and her approach to salvation is along the lines of an offer you can’t refuse.

  I met Pastor Ann and her husband, Pastor Dan Stratton, on a brilliant September Sunday morning in 2005 just a week after they had moved into the new premises of the Faith Exchange Church of Tribeca. The “Exchange” refers to Wall Street, where Dan—Yale, Skull and Bones, all-Ivy tight-end class of ’81—once scored a $453,000 commission as a commodities broker in a single day, took it as a sign from God, and began to preach the Bible to his fellow traders.

  Around that time Dan met Ann in a nightclub. She was there, she says, looking for a soul to save and a man to marry. “I used to pray to God to give me a husband. Let’s just say that before I met Dan, God sent me a lot of guys to minister to.”

  Dan and Ann got married, received Pentecostal ordination from Oral Roberts, and started a church on Wall Street that was obliterated on 9/11. For a long time their congregation met in the Marriott Hotel in the Financial Center. Now they had found what they hoped would be a permanent downtown home, the former headquarters of the Tribeca Film Festival no less, and they were in a celebratory mood.

  One of the best things about a Pentecostal church in Manhattan is the quality of the music. The Faith Exchange band featured Billy “Spaceman” Patterson, a New York guitar legend who has played with Miles Davis and James Brown. The choir was mostly off-Broadway talent. The chow is another bonus: after ser vices the Strattons took me to the Tribeca Café for brunch.

  Pastor Dan was mostly interested in talking real estate.

  He had been through a harrowing few years trying to find a New York landlord willing to rent a ground-floor property to a Pentecostal church in the general environs of Wall Street. He attributed this resistance to Satan. Pastor Ann, whose specialties include biblical nutrition (no shrimp!), let Dan do most of the talking. It is an article of faith among evangelicals that, as the Bible says, “God put man at the head.”

  But Ann has strongly felt opinions, especially on the subject of conversion. At the start of his ministry, Dan had tried to reach out to the Jewish brokers he worked with. “Their books were not my books,” he said philosophically. This lack of response has given him a decidedly laissez-faire approach. “If the truth convinces you, so be it,” he said, swallowing a tight-end-sized portion of Spanish omelet.

  Pastor Ann didn’t want to leave it there. “You have no idea how much we love Jews in New Jersey,” she said.

  I thought about all the great Garden State yid-wop collaborations: Abner “Longy” Zwillman (aka “the Al Capone of Newark”) and his associate Willie Moretti; Harold “Kayo” Konigsberg and his boss, Anthony “Tony Pro” Provenzano of the Teamsters. Even the Hebrew University in Jerusalem has a Sinatra Building.

  “There’s love there, no doubt,” I said. “But love doesn’t get you into heaven.”

  “Look, that’s not the case,” said Pastor Ann. “God loves Jews so much that he has a special deal for them. Here’s how it goes. The instant before a Jew is about to die, Jesus appears right before his eyes and gives him one last chance to repent and accept salvation.”

  “And what if he doesn’t want to repent and become a Christian?” It was the same question I had asked Sue Ricksecker, the secretary at Emmanuel Baptist, a few months earlier. But Pastor Ann had a Jersey answer. She fixed me a direct stare and said, “If Jesus shows up on your deathbed? Come on. What are ya gonna do—tell him to get lost?”

  FIVE

  DOC AND THE PAT

  There are hundreds of conservative Christian institutions of higher learning all over the United States, but the cradle of evangelical education is Virginia, home to both Liberty University in Lynchburg and Regent University in Virginia Beach. These schools owe their importance to their respective founders, Jerry Falwell, known to his students as Doc, and “The Pat,” Pat Robe
rtson. They are the Ruth and Gehrig of Zionist evangelism, the first truly big hitters. In the fall of 2005, I went south to see the universities they have built.

  THE MUNICIPAL SLOGAN of Lynchburg is engraved on the tile floor of its modest airport: “The most interesting spot in the state.” This was the assessment of an early resident of the place, Thomas Jefferson, who also predicted that someday Lynchburg would be a great metropolis.

  Jefferson, right about so much, was wrong about this. Lynchburg is a sleepy little town of 65,000 on the banks of the polluted James River. Its municipal website lists just two “Famous Products”: the Fleet enema and the disposable douche. The website is discreetly silent about the fact that a local firm, Babcock & Wilcox, designed the nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island. And, oddly, there is no mention of Lynchburg’s only national claim to fame: Liberty University.

  The first thing you see when you enter the Liberty University visitors center is a museum dedicated to the life and times of Jerry Falwell, the institution’s founder and chancellor. And the first thing you see in the museum is a Model T Ford. A mannequin dressed in 1920s gangster garb is loading illegal booze into the car. That man is supposed to be Reverend Falwell’s father. Carey Falwell was a successful businessman who founded bus companies. He was also a hoodlum who, in addition to moonshining, organized illegal cock and dog fights and ran a notorious nightspot. In 1931, he shot and killed his own brother, Garland. The killing was ruled self-defense, but it cemented Carey Falwell’s reputation in Lynchburg as a very bad man.