How to know when someone is trying to convert you

How to know when someone is trying to convert you
By Author Unknown

If someone asks you any or all of these questions, it is wise to assume that they are trying to convert you.

1. "Now that there are no more sacrifices, how do you have your sins forgiven?" One of the first lines of a attack by some missionaries is to scare you into converting by trying to show that your sins cannot me removed (HV) by yourself and you need j.c to save you from Hell.
2. "Do you read the Bible?" "Have you ever read the prophets?" These are set up questions, firstly for them to show you their "knowledge" of scripture and secondly to begin discussing messianic prophecy.
3. "Who do you think the prophets(esp. Isaiah) were talking about?" This is question will lead directly into quoting Tanach and showing how J.c(HV) fulfilled them.
4. "Do you have a personal relationship with G-d?" Christians believe that sins separate us from G-d and that there is no way for us to return accept through faith in J.c(HV)
5. "Do you believe in Yeshua Ha Mashiach?" This is the Hebrew version of Jesus Christ. This switch to make it more comfortable for Jews and to make it sound more authentic.
6. "Are you happy with your life?" Christians missionaries seek out those in trouble or who are at a week moment in order to catch you will your defenses down.
7. "Do you feel separated from G-d?" Christians believe that we are all separated from G-d and that only through faith in J.c can we come close.
8. "Have you found the L-rd"

A few hints on how to debate with a Missionary

1) The first trick the missionary will use is redirection. If a missionary senses that he will be refuted, he will immediately change the subject and switch to another verse.

Do not allow him to change the subject or to go to another verse. Hold your ground and finish explaining the verse in question. Only when the verse has been completely explained, should you continue in the debate.

2) The missionary will use speed, quickly quoting and making his point quickly. This is an attempt to show you his knowledge and to keep you from thinking. You don't have to race! Slow done the pace and take your time. The last thing a missionary wants is for you to think .

3) The Missionary will almost always start in the middle or end of a chapter.

Check the beginning of the chapter and verse which follow the one in question. Nine times out of ten it will be enough to refute him.

4) Missionaries will try to make connections between unrelated things using logic. Think!Think!Think! Then respond, for if you listen closely to what he has said you will see the trick and be able to us it against him.

5) Do try to debate someone, unless you are knowledgeable in the proper responses. This applies more to public debates than to personal. If you do debate and the missionaries brings a point that you can not answer tell him that you don't have all the answers and just because I can't answer does mean that there isn't an answer.

Alleged Cult Leader - Founder of Jews for Jesus

Alleged Cult Leader - Founder of Jews for Jesus
By Vicki Polin, MA, LCPC, NCC
The Awareness Center's Daily Newsletter - June 21, 2010

I have a cousin who is deaf who got involved with (the cult like group) Jews for Jesus when she was a teenager.

My cousin grew up in Oklahoma, and I grew up in Illinois. Because of the miles between us, I barely knew her as a child. As adults we developed a friendship do to the connection we made using the internet and AOL.

About 13 years ago I wanted to learn as much as I could about Judaism, to help my cousin. 

During these early years of my own learning, I volunteered time on line as a counter-missionary in Jewish chat rooms on AOL and was also a JCOMM (in AOL's Jewish Community online). Doing this type of volunteer work is what eventually lead to me going to Neve Yerushalayim (a women's yeshiva in Jerusalem) and eventually lead me to creating The Awareness Center.

At one point a rabbi involved in the counter-missionary movement donated an Art Scroll Chumash to me to give to my cousin –– in hopes of helping her learn. At the time I was told that my cousin would most likely not take the book, without the approval of Martin (Moishe) Rosen –– who was a close friend of hers. Around that same time my cousin told me that Rosen was going to be in the Chicagoland area for a high school graduation of one of his granddaughters. She told me he wanted to meet me, and asked me if I would agree. So I did.

During the 2 1/2 hour meeting (at an upscale hotel in Skokie), Martin Rosen went on and on about how he started Jews for Jesus. He told me that it was originally an idea he had for a project for a marketing class he was taking back in the late 1950's. He told me that he had no idea that his idea would take off the way it did. When I asked him about the Chumash, he told me it was "treif", and did not want to encourage my cousin to read it. When I offered it to my cousin she took it.

As the months went on, my cousin began disclosing her own child abuse (over the years she's became public with her history, which can be found on the internet). As she began to disclose her past, I started to discontinue trying to persuade her to rethink her religious beliefs.

As survivors we all need to realize that we need to find things to help us heal. Though her views are different then mine, she deserves the right to choose what is helpful to her –– to make it through the day. She needed to find her own answers to make sense of the insanity she grew up with. I honor and respect my cousin for being able to survive and to grow into the beautiful person she has become.

What I do want to say is that it saddens me a great deal to know that one of the major things that pushed my cousin over the edge -- of not wanting to learn about "real" Judaism, came from the hands of a few Torah observant Jews in NYC. I say this because Martin Rosen was pretty smart. He set her up.

Martin Rosen knew that if his people would send her to various locations in both Manhattan and Brooklyn, that he could count on the fact that orthodox Jews would spit at her and use possible physical force against her, when they saw the literature she would handout regarding his organization. You have to understand, my cousin was in her late teens - early adulthood. She knew nothing about Judaism when she was sent by Jews for Jesus to New York to prothelytize. All she knew was how Rosen would demonize those from the Torah observant world. She was basically told that only "completed" Jews behaved civilly. Handing out his literature would prove his point. Besides being very young and deaf, my cousin is under five feet tall. Can you imagine how scared she must have been when her own people attacked her?

If only those who assaulted her back in the 1980's, knew her history, I'm sure they would have treated her differently, and perhaps she would have been more open minded in learning more about "real" Judaism.

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Founder of Jews for Jesus Embraced Controversy 

Wallstreet Journal

By Steven Miller
 
Moishe Rosen, who died Wednesday at age 78 was founder of Jews for Jesus, an organization bent on converting Jews to Christianity.

Martin Rosen

A Christian convert from Judaism who became a Baptist minister, Mr. Rosen insisted that Jews could keep their cultural identity while accepting a new religion. But Jews for Jesus became a lightning rod for criticism. Many Jews resented the attention and declared the idea of a "Jewish Christian" to be an oxymoron. Many in the public thought the group's swarms of young evangelists clad in identical T-shirts, encountered in airports or on street corners, were cult members.

Undaunted by critics, Mr. Rosen kept up a cheerful front while building an organization that today claims to have a presence in 22 cities in 11 countries.

"God has a great sense of humor letting an over-aged, overweight and overbearing person like me lead a youth movement," Mr. Rosen once said.

Mr. Rosen encouraged his converts to keep their traditions by converting Passover into a Christian holiday and the Bar Mitzvah into a Christian coming-of-age ceremony. He wrote tracts with titles such as "Jesus Made Me Kosher;" a band called "Liberated Wailing Wall" used to play at the organization's events.

Raised in an orthodox household in Denver, Colo., Mr. Rosen was the son of a scrap-metal dealer. He converted at age 21 to evangelical Christianity and his parents disowned him.He attended a seminary in New Jersey and was ordained a Baptist minister in 1957.

The same year, he joined the American Board of Missions to the Jews, an evangelical organization, which eventually put him in charge of its mission in San Francisco. Although he professed a conservative faith that included biblical inerrancy and premillenialism—the idea that Jesus will be returning soon—Mr. Rosen came to favor a form of outreach more suited to the 1960s San Francisco youth scene.

When the mission board became uncomfortable with him, Mr. Rosen in 1973 founded his own organization, Jews for Jesus, with its headquarters in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district.

"When I came out here, the people doing the best communicating were the anti-war activists," Mr. Rosen told the San Francisco Chronicle in 1996.

Emulating them, he began distributing homemade tracts illustrated with his own scratchy drawings. His first pamphlet was titled "A Message from Squares," using the slang for someone uncool.

Mr. Rosen was an effective preacher, and given to pithy sayings such as "An atheist who is looking for God is like a hooky player looking for a truant officer" or "My boss is a Jewish carpenter." He could also be blunt. "Jewishness never saved anybody," he wrote in a statement on the Jews for Jesus website.

At the same time, he sought to assure Jews that they were not betraying their culture by embracing Jesus—something many Jewish leaders rejected. " 'Jews for Jesus' are dishonest. They are hypocrites," write Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust survivor and Jewish commentator, in a 1988 essay. "They do not even have the courage to declare frankly that they have decided to repudiate their people and its memories."

The group grew quickly, but so did the controversies it generated. Mr. Rosen sometimes welcomed the publicity garnered by its various legal scrapes. He was a fan of Saul Alinsky's book "Rules for Radicals," and he boasted to the Washington Post of having been arrested in seven different airports and "clubbed, manacled, and thrown down a staircase" for his efforts.

"When Moishe Rosen came into a city there was either a revival or a riot," said Vernon Grounds, president emeritus of the Denver Conservative Baptist Seminary, in a statement.

Jews for Jesus began evangelizing Jews in Israel, in the former Soviet Union, and also Russian immigrants to the U.S.

The group won't say how many people it has converted, but a spokesman estimated that it has had "hundreds of thousands" of conversations with potential converts. Converts are normally referred to evangelical churches within their own communities, much like those garnered in Billy Graham's crusades.

Mr. Rosen retired as executive director of Jews for Jesus in 1996. In a final farewell posted after his death his organization's website he cited a New Testament verse about how no man knows what Heaven is like.

"I have a big curiosity, and now I know," Mr. Rosen wrote.
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Missionaries Impossible

Missionaries Impossible

By Rabbi Avi Shafran

"Jews for Jesus," perhaps the best known of an assortment of Christian missionary groups that target Jews for conversion efforts, has adopted a creative new advertising campaign. It has enlisted a Holocaust survivor to convince Jews to consider accepting the Christian messiah.

The group, possessed no doubt of deep convictions and apparently of deep pockets, has purchased space in a number of national media to feature a close-up of the kindly face of a Jewish woman of a certain age who spent part of the war years in a concentration camp. "Before you judge my belief, listen to my story," she implores the reader, and then proceeds to tell of her personal adoption of Christianity. The ad offers a video featuring footage of cattle-car trains and corpses with voices-over of Holocaust survivors who embraced Christianity. Verses from the Jewish Bible appear on the screen, and the viewer is told to say a prayer in acceptance of Jesus. The words "Mazel Tov" then flash on the screen.

The Jewish community's encounter with the Christian one has a long and largely inglorious history. From the harsh anti-Jewish rhetoric of early Church fathers (the apostle John claimed Jews are born of "their father the devil"; Chrysostom of Antioch, that they "murder their own offspring to worship the avenging devils") and Protestant leaders (like Martin Luther, who asserted that the devil "through the Jews his saints... mocks and curses God and man") down to the pogroms, blood libels and "Christian Identity"-genre internet hate-sites of more recent years, the Prince of Peace has all too often been invoked to provide Jewish people anything but peace.

Jews, as a noted basketball player/theologian recently reminded us, are stubborn folks, and one of our adamant stances is our refusal to divest ourselves of our religious heritage, including the conviction that the Messiah, at present writing, still tarries - a belief that, while it threatens to harm no one, has resulted over the centuries in untold hatred and violence on the part of countless Christians. The Holocaust itself can be traced in part to the religion-based Jew-hatred that was so endemic and deeply rooted in European lands.

To be sure, here on this side of Vatican II and the Lieberman candidacy, relations between Christians and Jews are much improved. Both the Catholic Church and many Protestant churches have straightforwardly rejected anti-Semitism, and that is deeply appreciated by all Jews. But the past cannot but continue to inform the present.

Jews have suffered beyond belief at Christian hands. And Judaism, in the end, remains a faith entirely apart from Christianity.

With its new ad campaign, Jews for Jesus cynically overlooks the former fact in an effort to deny the latter one. For Jewishly-conscious Jews, nothing could be more outrageous or insulting.

The contemporary Jewish religious world is famously fractious. There are deep ideological and theological differences among Jews today. But one belief that Orthodox, Reform, Conservative and Reconstructionist Jews share entirely in common is that the assertion that the Messiah has arrived in the person of Jesus of Nazareth is simply incompatible with Judaism.

Which is why the claim of missionary groups that one can be a good Jew by accepting the fundamental belief of Christianity - indeed that one can be a "fulfilled" one only by embracing Jesus as Messiah - is anathema to the broad Jewish community.

As members of a faith that eschews the proselytizing of others and counsels "outreach" only in the sense of helping our own brothers and sisters come closer to our religious heritage, most of us Jews are irked when others target our coreligionists for conversion efforts. And the irk turns to irritation, even outrage, when misleading tactics are employed, when "sharing the good news" becomes "suckering the uninformed," when groups like Jews for Jesus adopt, as they do, Jewish holidays, symbols and trappings like prayer shawls and phylacteries in an effort to convince Jews that being a good Jew can include, indeed requires, adopting Christianity.

And when they go further still in their attempts to lure Jews from their ancestral heritage, and seek to enlist the Holocaust - a horrific happening that fed heartily on the fecund medium of a Europe steeped in centuries of Christian anti-Semitism - their efforts creep, slowly but unmistakably, beyond the bounds of even outrage, and enter the realm of the grotesque.

With thanks to Am Echad Resources