Nearly one year after Jews for Jesus launched one of its most successful and controversial evangelism campaigns, more than 1.3 million people worldwide have watched That Jew Died for You.
The three-minute YouTube video depicts Jesus carrying the cross to a gas chamber. The film’s goal was to “reshape views of Jesus and his relationship to the Holocaust.” Pegged to Yom HaShoah, a day when Israel remembers the Holocaust (held the evening of April 15 this year), many Jews called it the “most tasteless YouTube video ever.”
In Ukraine, where nearly 1 million Jews were murdered during World War II, Holocaust references are usually used to make political points. During January’s 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, Russian and Ukrainian leaders compared each other to Nazis and publicly fought over which country should get the credit for freeing the concentration camp in occupied Poland.
But Ukraine’s Messianic Jewish community is talking about the Holocaust in its evangelistic efforts. And now Messianic congregations are thriving in many of the same communities that suffered the deepest Holocaust wounds.
Remembrance and education
The Soviet Union suppressed information about the Holocaust in its effort to create a “common Soviet people,” said Igor Rusniak, director of the Bible college at Kiev Jewish Messianic Congregation (KJMC). Thus, many Ukrainian Christians still don’t grasp that the Holocaust targeted Jews in particular. Rusniak says, “Practically every Jewish family in Ukraine has relatives who were murdered by Nazis during the war.” For these Jews, the Holocaust only proved that Christians with power are not to be trusted.
One way Messianic congregations like KJMC have tried to bridge the gap between Jews and Christians is through an annual interdenominational prayer meeting against anti-Semitism. Rusniak’s Bible college also trains Jewish and Gentile ministers how to identify, understand, and oppose anti-Semitism, and teaches how the Holocaust shaped modern Jewish identity.
It has also shaped their location. KJMC, reportedly the world’s largest Messianic congregation with 1,600 attenders, is less than 10 miles from the site of one of the Holocaust’s largest massacres: Babi Yar. This Kiev ravine is where Nazi soldiers and local police killed more than 33,000 Jews in 2 days. In Berdichev, a northern city where German soldiers slaughtered 15,000 Jews, a Messianic Jewish congregation of about 200 people gathers weekly.
“We . . . rejoice that many Jewish people are coming to faith in Messiah in places that witnessed some of the worst atrocities of the Holocaust period,” stated the Lausanne Consultation on Jewish Evangelism (LCJE). The group met in Kiev for its 10th European conference last April. More than 80 participants from 19 nations gathered largely “to affirm and encourage these Jewish followers of Jesus,” and to recognize “the enormous number of Jewish followers of Jesus who perished in the Holocaust.”
Today, an estimated 10,000 to 15,000 Ukrainian Jews worship Jesus as Messiah. This makes Ukraine, a nation of 45 million, the region’s fulcrum of the Messianic Jewish movement. (By comparison, Ukraine has about 1.7 million evangelical Christians and more than 23 million Orthodox Christians, who constitute about half the country’s population.)
Now, as Jews emigrate en masse from Ukraine, its Messianic believers are planting churches around the world.
From Christianity Today