Hebrew Christians

Standing before an embroidered Star of David and a seven-branched menorah (candlestick). David Bronstein faced his congregation and began: "This is Hanukah week, as we all know. And we all know that Hanukah, the Hebrew feast of lights, has a special meaning for us." The meaning: that Jesus Christ is the Light of the World.

The Rev. David Bronstein is no rabbi but a pastor, and the 100-odd members of his Chicago congregation, almost all of them born Jews, call themselves Hebrew Christians. Their group is the first of five organized Hebrew Christian churches in the U.S. (the others: Detroit. Philadelphia. Miami and Los Angeles). In 1934 David Bronstein founded the Chicago church--not formally affiliated with the others--out of a feeling that "I was chosen to bring the Jewish people to Christ."

Born 71 years ago in a small town in Bessarabia, Bronstein grew up as an Orthodox Jew. He came to the U.S. at 22 to work in a Baltimore sweatshop with his brothers, began to take free English lessons at a Baptist church. Soon he was reading the New Testament as well as the Old. One day he came home and told his young Russian wife that the Messiah had come and that his name was Jesus. She was horrified, contemplated divorce. "Next day, after his father came home from the synagogue," says she. "I told him his son had become a goy. 'Don't breathe a word about it.' he said. He thought I'd gone crazy."

David Bronstein moved to Chicago, and his wife took in sewing to support him while he graduated from the Moody Bible Institute in 1916 and the McCormick Theological Seminary in 1919 as an ordained Presbyterian minister. The Presbyterian Church set him to doing missionary work among the Jews. But Bronstein considers his a separate church and in no way a branch of Presbyterianism.

Pastor Bronstein's services follow a conventional Protestant order, with special emphasis on the connections between the Old Testament and the New. Jewish holidays are celebrated with Christian interpretations. Example: the blowing of the shofar on Rosh Hashanah--to remind God of Abraham's offering of his son Isaac and. for Isaac's sake, the forgiveness of sins--contains for Jewish Christians the additional idea that Jesus died to atone for the sins of the world.

"The New Testament is the fruition of Biblical Judaism," says Hebrew Christian Bronstein. "To me, any Bible student, if sincere and wide-awake, will see that the Old Testament is just promises. The New Testament is a fulfillment of these promises. The first church in Jerusalem was a Hebrew-Christian Church entirely. We are reviving the original Jewish atmosphere of that first church."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.