Unwelcome Immigrants

Israel's Law of Return offers automatic citizenship to any Jew who comes there to live. Some of the recent returnees, however, are hardly what Israeli legislators had in mind: zealous young Jews for Jesus (TIME, June 12), whose purpose in coming to the Promised Land is to engage in aggressive Christian evangelism. Some even passed out New Testament tracts at the Wailing Wall last year.

The proselytizers have mostly aimed their message at Israeli youth. Responding to the fears of alarmed Orthodox Jewish parents, Harold Fenton, a Jerusalem pharmacologist, has organized a spiritual counterattack. His committee has infiltrated Jews for Jesus meetings and discovered that some 1,270 youths (predominantly American Jews) are in operation. Fenton and friends now drop in on Christian youth hostels and missionary schools, seek out young Jews wearing Jesus buttons, and try to persuade them to move out.

The most bizarre immigrant is Shira Lindsay, 32, daughter of a Dallas Pentecostal evangelist. Shira converted to Judaism in Boston, then moved to Israel in 1970 to spread the Gospel. The rabbis in Boston have now annulled her conversion. Says Shira: "I do not want Jews to convert to Christianity. I merely want them to believe in Jesus and accept the New Testament."

The Jews for Jesus invasion and Fenton's counterattack have helped revive an Orthodox campaign to expel all Christian missions from Israel. Some of the uproar has spilled over into the Israeli government. Last month four Cabinet ministers were assigned to consider drafting a new law to curb "the Christian missionaries of the Jews for Jesus movement." But Justice Minister Ya'acov Shapiro believes that Israel must continue its liberal policies toward other religions: "If you want to rule Jerusalem, you must accept this kind of thing." And the Liberal Party's Yitzhak Golan says: "In a democracy like Israel, ideology must be combatted with ideology and education, not by legislation."

Speaking to a trade-union group in Jerusalem, the Ashkenazic Chief Rabbi of Israel, Shlomo Goren, demanded that Israel "uproot this affliction. There is nothing antidemocratic about such legislation, and decent people of all faiths will support it." About the last point the rabbi is partly right, since most established Christian groups have little use for the Jews for Jesus and other overzealous evangelists. In a letter to the Jerusalem Post, Franciscan Father Joseph Cremona, who has lived in Israel for 30 years, protested the missionaries' efforts. "I am not here to suggest that the government curb missionary activity," he wrote, "but to suggest to these sects that they should not be so fanatical and aggressive, but respect the freedom of conscience of everyone."

Some militants are pursuing their own solutions. Two weeks ago, eleven members of the Jewish Defense League were charged with arson against a missionary bookstore. At a protest fast at the Wailing Wall, the J.D.L.'s rabble-rousing Rabbi Meir Kahane announced, "If you lose a Jew in Auschwitz or through conversion, it's still a soul lost." He later proclaimed the formation of a 25-member countergroup called "Christians for Moses."

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