May 20, 2002
Messianic Jews gaining ground in Russia
___ALMATY, Kazakstan (RNS) --Even now, long after he chose Jesus over his wife, Isaak Abayev's voice is colored with anguish when he speaks of the years he spent struggling between what God was telling him and what everyone else expected.
___"Everybody rejected me. My wife's family thought I had gone crazy. Other relatives just couldn't understand me because they had always thought of Jesus as the Russian God," said Abayev, a 45-year-old soft-spoken former shoe repairman. "Until this very day, some people still think I am lost."
___Abayev's problem is simple. He is a Jewish man who, through a series of what he calls divine revelations, came to believe that Jesus is the Messiah.
___In the eyes of many traditional Jews, this makes him a heretic and an idolator, taking part in what they sometimes call "The Silent Holocaust."
___No matter how controversial, Abayev is not quiet about his new faith. He tells any Jew who will listen that Jesus is first and foremost for them and that Jews may synthesize Jewish and Christian traditions and worship as Messianic Jews.
___When Abayev first started gathering in 1998 with other like-minded Jews from a local charismatic Christian congregation, there were three people, including himself, meeting in private homes. Now, the Beit Shalom Synagogue numbers about 100 and has its own American Messianic pastor.
___It is a pattern repeated throughout the former Soviet Union, in Germany and the United States, as dozens of other congregations of Messianic Jews have sprung up among Russian-speaking Jews. They range from a handful of believers in the Kazak cities of Astana and Karaganda to more than 1,000 in Ukraine's capital, at Kiev's Jewish Messianic Congregation.
___Although no one has reliable figures, in the 10 years since the collapse of communism, Messianic Judaism has spread quickly among Soviet Jews.
___Traditional Jews are alarmed enough at the trend to have launched an anti-messianic organization in Moscow.
___Kazakstan's Messianic Jewish leaders are ready, saying that the days of easy evangelizing are long gone anyway. "Rabbi" Jeffrey, the American leader of the Beit Shalom synagogue, contrasted today's situation with his arrival seven years ago in the former Soviet Union.
___"I saw more Jewish people make professions of faith, answer the altar call, in one night than in 10 years of working in America. Thousands responded in a positive way," said the pastor, who asked that his last name not be used out of a fear of being refused the Israeli citizenship for which he plans to apply.
___The city has an estimated 10,000 Jews with another 5,000 scattered around Kazakstan, a nominally Muslim country of 14 million located between Russia and China. The vast majority of Jews are not religious, much less Messianic. But every Saturday evening in a rented hall, pastor Jeffrey plugs away, staking Jews' claim on Christianity.
___"My whole life, when I heard about the New Testament, I thought it was their book, the book of the Gentiles," the Brooklyn-raised pastor preached recently to an attentive congregation of about 100. "Then I realized that it was my book."
___"I used to think that St. Paul was a Catholic, that all these saints were Christians, not Jewish," he continued, pacing back and forth and zeroing in on the scriptural basis of that evening's lively sermon: Paul's letter to the Romans.
___Later he explained: "I try to teach them that in Romans where it says 'the gospel is for the Jew first' is just as valid today as it was in the first century."
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