Called to Controversy (35 page)

—MOISHE ROSEN

H
ey, Goldstein, what are you doing with that broadside?” Moishe frowned.

It wasn't like Baruch to waste gospel literature.

His curly headed, barrel chested cohort grinned mischievously. “You'll see.” Within seconds, Moishe saw that Baruch had made the tract into a paper airplane. “Okay, watch this—” Baruch said, as he opened the window of their sky-high Sheraton hotel room on 35th Street and 8th Avenue.

Before Moishe could protest, Baruch had sent the paper airplane gently sailing down to the street below. Both watched as it glided over the traffic and across the street. It continued to glide up the street, then down the street, as if it were looking for somebody. A man stopped and reached up to grab it. Moishe and Baruch watched in wonder as he unfolded what must have seemed like a strangely contorted leaf from a mysterious gospel tree. The magical moment passed as Baruch hooted with glee. “Didja see that, Moishe? The guy's reading it!”

For the next ten minutes the two of them took turns launching gospel missives out the window, watching eagerly to see what would become of them. Nearly all the pamphlets were picked up and read by curious New Yorkers.

Moishe and Baruch Goldstein were in New York City for the Jesus Joy Festival, set to take place on Labor Day. Baruch, who received a disability check from the army, was practically a full-time volunteer with his own means of support. He had come along as Moishe's bodyguard.

Moishe could still hardly believe it was all happening. Originally, he'd been asked to fill a ten-minute speaking slot.

“You're going all the way to New York to talk to a bunch of people for ten minutes?” Ceil was dubious when he first mentioned the opportunity.

Moishe explained, “It's the venue—New York City and the Felt Forum! Imagine 3,500 New Yorkers—plus they're bringing in all these Christian folk rock artists. Even if it is a Christian concert, a lot of the young people who'll want to come to hear them are going to be Jewish.'”

Ceil nodded appreciatively. “Okay, I can see why you're excited.”

Moishe grinned. “You should have seen Susan Perlman's eyes light up when I told her about it. She started putting together a press release right away. 'I think she's sent one to just about every local radio and TV station plus every newspaper in every borough of New York. If there's a plumbers' association of Staten Island and they have a newspaper, you can bet she's sent them a press release too.”

Susan's work had paid off; she'd been able to line up numerous media opportunities before the event. As soon as the Jewish newspapers picked up on the fact that Moishe Rosen was coming to New York, the flurry of articles and interviews had snowballed and the festival organizers decided to change his original ten-minute slot to a twenty-minute keynote speaker spot.

He smiled as he recalled how Susan had practically shrieked, “Moishe, you gotta see this!” Then she showed him a copy of the
Jewish Press
. There on the front page was the decree that all Jewish organizations had forbidden their members to attend the Jesus Joy Festival because “an apostate who calls himself Moishe Rosen” was to be a speaker!

“So who,” Moishe asked in his most ironic tone, “is this new ‘Jewish pope' that thinks he can forbid every Jew in New York from coming to a concert?”

“Exactly!” Susan replied, brimming with satisfaction. “Who
wouldn't
want to come to the concert after this?”

Susan was right. Not only was the prohibition bound to roll off the backs of a strong-minded, independent, think-for-themselves community of New York Jews, but it turned the event into a matter of great curiosity.

The festival itself was quite an event. Intense Christian rock music and several dynamic speakers electrified the crowd. As Moishe stepped up to the podium, his adrenaline pumping, cameras flashed to capture images of the denim-clad forty-year-old. He had a palpable feeling that the crowd was with him. They punctuated his most passionate points with applause—whereas if he paused to create suspense, there was silence as the crowd waited eagerly to hear what he would say next.

And then it was over. He'd gotten his message across. Jesus was not some namby-pamby figure portrayed in so many religious paintings. He was a radical, relevant Messiah who came first to the Jewish people, but would bring purpose and meaning to the life of any Jew or Gentile who would turn to him.

Moishe was well aware that some very angry people were awaiting him near the exits. The police had suggested that he and his four-person entourage leave the Forum incognito since they were going to walk back to the hotel. But Moishe felt it would be wrong to show fear or compromise their visibility. He told the young men with him,

“We've got to double time it out of here and keep it up all the way to the hotel. Don't run. Don't lag behind. Keep in step. And whatever you do, don't answer back or engage in conversation no matter what they say. Now is not the time. If we stick together and stay focused, I don't think anyone will get hurt. Got it?”

On the city sidewalk the small band of Jews for Jesus was met with shouts and jeers, and perhaps a shove here and there. For the most part, the group tried to follow Moishe's instructions. But one man turned to answer a particularly provocative remark from the hostile knot of protesters. His brief reply was enough to make him a target, and as he turned back to continue pace with the rest of the group, he received a hard kick in the behind.

Despite the hostilities, the overriding emotion back in the hotel room was excitement bordering on euphoria. Moishe called the rest of the group back in California. His blow-by-blow description of the events helped to expend some of his adrenaline. Yet in the days that followed, Moishe reflected that for the good of his own soul, he would prefer not to speak in front of a crowd of thousands again.
*

The media coverage of Moishe Rosen and the early Jews for Jesus catapulted the issue of being Jewish and believing in Jesus into the public arena. In June 1972,
Time
magazine published the article “Jews for Jesus” in the religion section. The article covered the phenomenon of Jewish people as part of the Jesus Movement (already waning by 1972), which was far broader than Jews for Jesus. The phrase “Jews for Jesus” was already being applied to all kinds of Jewish Jesus-believers, partly because it was so catchy and simple to say, and partly because under Moishe's leadership, Jews for Jesus was highly visible and very colorful. That same month a clip of Jews for Jesus aired on network TV.

While the
Time
article was objective and fair, and the TV clip allowed the group to speak for itself, that was not always the case with the publicity that swirled around Jews for Jesus. But though the coverage was often unflattering and sometimes inaccurate, for the most part, Moishe saw it as beneficial to the cause.

Nevertheless, the publicity had a downside. Early on, Moishe had numerous opportunities to talk to Jewish groups but once the press picked up on Jews for Jesus, helping to make the group into a phenomenon, the Northern California Board of Rabbis issued an edict forbidding Jewish organizations from inviting Jews for Jesus to speak to their groups.

The prohibition against inviting Jews for Jesus to speak did not prevent individuals from agreeing to meet privately with Moishe, who frequently took his young volunteers to observe how he shared his faith in one-on-one situations.

To Moishe, the crux of ministry was always the opportunity to relate to people as individuals. However, he believed that because most Jewish people are taught automatically to dismiss the possibility of Jesus being the Jewish Messiah, the public needed to be continually challenged to reconsider that response. That is why visibility and a high profile were indispensable to the Jews for Jesus project.

That is also why Moishe eventually embraced the slogan “Jews for Jesus” after originally dismissing it as too unsophisticated. When people used the phrase to try to dismiss the group, saying, “You can't be Jews for Jesus,” Moishe realized the slogan was invaluable and had it copyrighted. No other phrase and no other name brought the issue to the forefront so succinctly.

The Jews for Jesus project presented a creative and determined band of obviously Jewish people who not only raised the image of Jesus as a Jew, but also insisted that there was absolutely nothing un-Jewish about embracing him as the promised Messiah. Jews for Jesus challenged the cardinal “rule” that being Jewish and Christian are mutually exclusive. That challenge was (and is) seen as a threat to Jewish identity and survival.

Suddenly, the Jewish community felt it had a war on its hands, and it was mostly a war of words. Many Jewish newspapers labeled Jews for Jesus a cult and warned parents about soul-snatching missionaries. Ironically, Moishe had made it very clear that no one was to approach a minor with the gospel or make a nuisance of himself or herself when offering the message.

None of the unfounded accusations came as a shock to Moishe. His response was to educate people about what constituted a cult, the characteristics of cult leaders, and the dynamics of brainwashing.
*

He never desired to antagonize the Jewish community, but he recognized that anything that made Jesus an issue to Jewish people would be considered antagonistic. He therefore did his best to prepare the group to take the heat. He continued to adapt some of the revolutionary tactics of the antiwar movement to suit the group's purposes.

Moishe said, “I learned something from my father. He used to say, ‘Either people threaten or they strike.'” Jews for Jesus did take its share of “strikes.” A bullet through the Corte Madera office window, for example, was cause for a police investigation.

Some of the strikes were predictable, as when Jews for Jesus showed up at an event to let people know that they were not going to be intimidated, despite the rumblings of the Jewish Defense League (JDL) about how they would “defend” the Jewish community from the missionaries. The only missionary “attack” was a handful of smiling people who, identified by their clothing as Jews for Jesus, might offer gospel tracts. The public was always free to refuse the literature, and no one was forced to talk to the pamphleteers. The “defense” the JDL spoke of seemed to consist mainly of attempts to scare off the Jews for Jesus and/or prevent Jewish people from seeing and interacting with them.

Some in the Jewish community recognized that the Jews for Jesus were interested in Jewish causes and were also some of the best volunteers when it came to a good rally or demonstration for causes like freeing Soviet Jewry. Susan Perlman recalled,

We had, as individuals, gone to different Jewish events—some attended local synagogues, some went to Hillel on the campuses. We were always marginalized and Moishe knew and accepted that. But that didn't deter him and the rest of the tribe from wanting to identify and support the Jewish community.

I remember when the Munich Massacre happened; Steffi silk-screened red circles for the Olympic symbol onto black armbands. And we wore them, you know, as a badge of identification.

We had “Free Soviet Jewry” buttons; we worked with Hal Light, who headed up the early Soviet Jewry demonstrations in San Francisco that really were a precursor for the Jewish emigration out of the former Soviet Union.

Jews for Jesus lent a strong presence to several Bay Area demonstrations, and they came without the Jews for Jesus T-shirts and jackets because that would have been counterproductive to bringing attention to the plight of Soviet Jews. But some of the organizers and community leaders knew Moishe—had actually met with him—and appreciated him and the group, though they could never publicly acknowledge it.

While opposition was mounting, Moishe sensed that something even bigger was about to happen, but he did not know what. In January 1973, in a staff meeting—though most of the “staff” were volunteers—he asked the group to make a commitment to one another to keep working together for the next eighteen months, whatever might happen. And they did. No one, not even Moishe, realized how vital that commitment would soon prove to be.

Meanwhile, the ABMJ home office in New York was not particularly pleased about the publicity. After all, who was to say that some of their Christian constituents might not believe the accusations against the Jews for Jesus? Daniel Fuchs had been happy about much of what Moishe was accomplishing, but he also had concerns. As previously mentioned, somebody within the mission had sowed seeds of suspicion regarding Moishe's supposed aspirations to take over the mission. Moishe found this ridiculous because, as he put it, “The fact of the matter is, the second man in charge has the most fun. I never wanted to be the top man, because the top man has to be a figurehead, has to go around, has to nod politely and be seen in the right places and affirm everything and be a diplomat. The second man usually gets to plan and lead operations, and that's the position that I liked.”