New Zealand edition Word from Jerusalem May.2013

ICEJ NEW ZEALAND

This is what the Lord says: “I will return to Zion and dwell in Jerusalem. Then Jerusalem will be called the City of Truth, and the mountain of the Lord Almighty will be called the Holy Mountain.” Zechariah 8:23 INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIAN EMBASSY JERUSALEM May 2013 Iyar–Sivan 5773

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Two special evenings Derek McDowell

Images from the evening to farewell the ambassador of israel H.E. Mr Shemi Tzur and his spouse Mrs Orit Shem Tov

We have had two very special evenings recently.

Ambassador farewell evening On 19 March, nine Israel NZ based Christian focus groups --of which seven are internationally affiliated-- came together for a special occasion to farewell Israel’s ambassador to New Zealand, H. E. Mr Shemi Tzur who has completed his term here after three years service.

In between short addresses from each of the groups, we were treated to a selection of rich instrumental and vocal musical pieces from gifted artists Christine and Jenny Rawlings (violin/keyboard), Julia Vincent and Avril Greybe and Leand Macadaan (vocalists solo and duet).

The ambassador was the first ambassador of Israel to NZ after a seven year hiatus due to financial restraints, so the ambassador had an important role to rebuild the Israel - New Zealand relationship. He has done an excellent job in nurturing relationships across the spectrum with political, commercial, sporting, cultural and religious groups, always being the quintessential ambassador for his nation. He recognizes the important role Christian groups like ours have to play and has warmly embraced our friendship and unconditional commitment to Israel and the Jewish people.

We too are called to be ambassadors for Israel, not so much in the political sense, though our advocacy for Israel is an essential component, but out of our sense of calling in the Lord to be ambassadors for the Messiah. As believers that is our primary calling (2 Cor 5:17-20). Just as God reconciles the world to Himself in our precious Messiah, Jesus, we are called to embrace the ministry of reconciliation and reflect 2 INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIAN EMBASSY JERUSALEM NZ BRANCH

the righteousness of God to Israel and to the nations. This includes reflecting his heartbeat for Israel as part of His wider purposes to those around us in the church and beyond in the spirit of love, truth, reconciliation and ambassadorship.

And if like the Apostle Paul found himself, we feel like an ‘ambassador in chains’ (Eph 6:20) will we remain ambassadorial, yet fearless in declaring the mystery of the gospel which includes the mystery of Israel? (Rom 11:25, Eph 3:6) That is our collective challenge.

Yom HaShoah commemorative evening On 8 April on Yom HaShoah Day (7-8 April this year) we hosted two special ladies at the Barry Court Quality Hotel in Parnell, Auckland who shared their experiences during the holocaust.

Our main speaker Eva Lavi shared her experiences as a young child survivor on Schlindler’s List. She was invited by the Zionist Federation of NZ to share in New Zealand and she was also able to share in a number of schools reaching the young generation. This is so important when you realise how little history some young people know, things which others of us assume to be common knowledge.

The other lady was Hansi Keating, who shared for a few minutes of her experience as a survivor from Auschwitz.

How do you share for a few minutes something of such magnitude? Both stories were riveting for us to hear and a real privilege for us to hear first hand while they are still with us.

In May I am looking forward to attending the directors’ conference in Israel and will take time to visit the Haifa home for Holocaust survivors. Shimon Sabag whose vision brought about the facility is a special man. He features in

this month’s WFJ – I encourage you to read his story. This project is such a wonderful ongoing expression of love and joint partnership between ICEJ and Yad Ezer L’Chaver (Helping Hands to Friends). It is a real privilege for ICEJ to get in behind a man with such a vision and reach out with practical love to some of the ever dwindling number of living holocaust survivors. There is a great update in this month’s WFJ magazine in this mailing…

Contact us at icejaid@icej.org for more information.

Derek McDowell, Director ICEJ-NZ Cover image: Jerusalem at night

Images from the evening to farewell the ambassador of israel H.E. Mr Shemi Tzur and his spouse Mrs Orit Shem Tov

Shavuot - a festival of harvest Todd and Rev. Julia Vincent Most of us know that our God, the God of Israel, is by nature orderly, and His order extends to nature.

He created our world with seasons; autumn, winter, spring and summer.

These seasons are both physical and spiritual, and with this comes a time to sow and a time to harvest. So it’s no surprise that God’s biblical feasts fit in this order and neatly parallel particular seasons.

As we look at the feast of Shavuot/ Pentecost, we shouldn’t be surprised that it happens in Israel around spring, a time of new beginnings. Agriculturally, it commemorates the time when the first fruits were harvested and brought into the Temple. But to get some understanding of what God is trying to show us, it’s important to look at when it was first revealed.

Passover celebrates when our LORD made the angel of death pass over the houses in Egypt that had the blood of the lamb on their door frames. While the instruction was given to Israel for her salvation, some Gentiles also did this (Exodus 12:38 Ephesians 2:12-13).

These Gentiles were saved and even came out with Israel to worship the God of Israel. From Passover the people of Israel preceded towards Mt Sinai.

Tradition says, that after a period of 7 ‘weeks’ (Shavuot in Hebrew) or ‘50’ days (Pentecost in Greek) Torah was given.

It’s Leviticus 23:15-16 that gives the instruction to count the Omer. “‘From the day after the Sabbath, the day you brought the sheaf (Omer) of the wave offering, count off seven full weeks.

Count off fifty days… and then present an offering of new grain to the LORD”.

Why? To remind us that our beginning is not in the giving of Torah or the giving of the Spirit but in the acceptance of the Lamb who ‘takes away the sin of the world’. A house that is covered by the blood is a house that can be filled by the Holy Spirit.

At Mt Sinai God gave the people of Israel his Torah i.e. teaching/instruction.

Some interesting events were to unfold at this mountain; things that would be played out again on another mountain in

Mount Sinai - photo by Ehab Samy, www.ehabweb.net

Jerusalem some 1,500 years later, where a harvest of souls occurred. We read that at Mt Sinai God’s presence descended onto the mountain as a cloud with fire, thunder and the sound of a trumpet (Ex 19:16-19). When we get to Shavuot/ Pentecost in Acts 2:1-12, we read that tongues of fire descended on the disciples and the sound like a strong wind was heard. Interestingly thunder in Hebrew (kolot) means voices; Jewish tradition said that God spoke in 70 languages at the first Shavuot. In Acts the disciples were heard speaking in many different languages. Also, Exodus 32:28 highlights that 3000 Israelites were killed because of their sin, while about 3,000 Jews believed and were born again when the Holy Spirit came in Acts 2:41. In this, God would write his Torah on their hearts.

This is understood to have occurred in the Temple and as we have already noted, it commemorates the time when the first fruits were harvested and brought into the Temple.

Later we read that the ‘Holy Spirit had been poured out even on the Gentiles’ (Acts 10: 44-46). Had the Lord allowed for this in his special Feast? He had indeed! Traditionally the book of Ruth is read at Shavuot because the story occurs during Shavuot. During the spring barley harvest it mentions that Ruth the Moabite was picking up “the leftover grain” (Ruth 2:2). Later, Jesus was to have an encounter with another Gentile who was also gleaning leftover scraps (Matthew 15:21-28). After Ruth stays and finishes the Harvest she marries

Boaz and joins the house of Israel.

King David would be her descendant and much later Jesus/Yeshua. She also utters the important words, your people (Israel) will be my people and your God my God (Ruth 1:16).

Together Boaz and Ruth witness to God’s grace and provision.

Finally, God often uses two witnesses in the Biblical narrative, and we see this also in Shavuot, where two loaves are waved before God in the Temple. Many scholars believe that these two loaves symbolize the two peoples; the two witnesses, i.e. believing Jews and Gentiles in the body of Messiah. These two though different like a husband and wife, are one; Echad in Hebrew.

All of this speaks to the nature of the harvest; one harvest, two peoples. So, our orderly God, the God of Israel is faithful to complete that which He begins. And Shavuot continues to point us to the fullness of the harvest that is yet to come!

Todd and Julia are board ,members of Prayer for Israel New Zealand and long standing friends of ICEJ, Todd a former board member. Julia is an ordained minister in the Wesleyan Methodist Church of New Zealand

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Is the worst over?

David Parsons There is little doubt that the renegade Iranian nuclear program is the gravest threat facing the Jewish people since the rise of Nazism.

portended? Or is Israel’s destiny to be delivered from such calamity and instead redeemed by her glorious King, the Son of David – as the Bible promises?!

Today, nearly half the world’s Jews are re-gathered back in their ancient homeland and Iran could potentially do in only minutes what it took the Nazis several years to accomplish – the extermination of six million Jews.

Now we have to start out by admitting that, sadly, even some Christians – including many who genuinely love and support Israel – also believe the Jews have come back home in order to go through one more mass annihilation, whereby two-thirds are wiped out during the Great Tribulation so that one-third will finally get on their knees and call on Jesus.

This is a chilling thought, but for the radical Shi’ite clerics in Tehran it is actually a welcoming idea. They are driven by a hadith which holds that Muslims must kill Jews en masse in order to bring on Judgment Day, which also heralds the coming of their mythical Mahdi.

In founding the Islamic Republic of Iran, Ayatollah Rohullah Khomeini declared he was even willing to sacrifice his own country to reach this unreal moment.

“We do not worship Iran, we worship Allah,” Khomeini proclaimed. “For patriotism is another name for paganism.

I say let this land [of Iran] burn. I say let this land go up in smoke, provided Islam emerges triumphant in the rest of the world.”

Thus, the Iranian regime has been developing the means with which to carry out their madness. They have not been deterred by tightening economic sanctions and covert cyber-ops, and will stop at nothing to advance their clandestine nuclear capabilities, including lying at every turn.

Tehran may insist it is pursuing the “peaceful atom,” but there is only one known use for uranium enriched to 90% purity – and that is for military applications.

And Iran has been quite clear who will be the target of their nuclear prowess.

Former Iranian president Ali Rafsanjani, considered a ‘moderate’ cleric, once stated that “Israel is much smaller than Iran in land mass, and therefore far more vulnerable to nuclear attack.”

On Al-Quds Day in December 2001,

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Nuclear mushroom cloud

Rafsanjani also warned: “If one day, the Islamic world is also equipped with weapons like those that Israel possesses now, then the Imperialists’ strategy will reach a standstill because the use of even one nuclear bomb inside Israel will destroy everything. However, it will only harm the Islamic world. It is not irrational to contemplate such an eventuality.”

So it is “rational” in their minds to contemplate the instantaneous destruction of Israel. Further, the ayatollahs and their allies also have rationalized that their efforts to stop the return of more Jews to Israel may have failed for a reason. For instance, Hizbullah chief Hassan Nasrallah explained in 2002 that, “If they [the Jews] all gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide.”

This is not just a twisted Shi’ite fantasy.

A leading scholar of Sunni Islam, Prof.

Mustafa Muslim from the United Arab Emirates, told a Saudi TV channel in 2005 that Allah actually has been gathering the Jews in Israel to make it easier for Muslims to fight and destroy them in one place on Judgment Day – citing the very same hadith.

With that dark Islamic vision in mind, we have to ask the same pivotal question posed in this column last month: Has God indeed re-gathered Israel for annihilation or for redemption? That is, has Israel been restored only to be wiped out in some mass nuclear holocaust – as some Iranian and Hizbullah leaders have

Now this is a cruel theology and it is not how most of us got saved. It also gives Jews great pause to hear Christians declare their love for Israel while knowing some of us actually expect them to face one final, massive convert-or-die scenario.

One dear Christian lady even told me recently that the “two-thirds teaching” had always left her anxious about helping Jews make aliyah to Israel, due to fears she might be leading them to the gallows.

Yet this teaching is based on a poor exegesis of prophetic scripture and needs to be vanquished from our thinking.

The two-thirds teaching is based largely on Zechariah 13 and Ezekiel 5. In Zechariah 13, the prophet foresees a time when two-thirds “in the land” will be “cut-off” while the remaining one-third will go through “the fire” and come to know the Lord as their God. The overall context of this passage is an end-of-days prophecy, yet the verses immediately before it state: “Strike the Shepherd and the sheep will scatter” – which the New Testament writers applied to Jesus and his followers in the First Century. So there is nothing that demands we read this two-thirds reference as a Tribulation event.

Meanwhile, Ezekiel 5 contains a much fuller exposition of the twothirds scenario. Here, the prophet is speaking straight from the Law of Moses, specifically Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28, where God sets out continued on page 5

...is the worst over?

(continued from page 4)

Ahmadinejad at Iran’s’ Natanz nuclear facility

exactly how He would deal with Israel for rebelling against Him. The “curse” of the Mosaic Law always starts with Israel being caught in sieges on her cities that get so bad the Israelites turn to cannibalism, and the end result is always exile. Then once God returns Israel to the land (which He is duty bound to do under His covenant with Abraham – see Genesis 17:8), if they rebel again the curse becomes seven times worse.

Ezekiel 5 actually describes with chilling accuracy the events which led up to the Second Exile. The prophet warns that one-third of the Israelites would soon die by the sword, one-third by famine and disease, and one-third would be scattered to the four corners of the earth. And yet the Lord promised Ezekiel that this was something He had never done before to Israel and that He will never do again, “and so shall My wrath be spent.”

This is exactly what happened in the Jewish uprisings against Rome in the First Century, and we have exhaustive historic accounts by Josephus to verify this. One-third of the Jews died in battle, one-third fell to disease and starvation, and one-third were exiled to the nations.

Jesus also relies heavily on the Ezekiel 5 passage in his Mount Olivet Discourse recorded in Matthew 24 and Luke 21, in which he warns his disciples that horrific events are coming to Jerusalem in their lifetime. He knew the Law, he knew the Prophets, and he knew the worst that God would ever do to His own people was about to take place.

The key to understanding the prophetic outlook of Jesus is to realize he does not confuse the “tribulation’ and “days of vengeance” that God was bringing upon the Jewish people in those days with the Great Tribulation at the end of the age. The latter is presented in the Bible as chiefly a divine judgment upon the Gentile nations for their own rebellion against Him. This does not mean Israel will totally escape the perilous times ahead, but it does mean God already spent His harshest wrath against Israel during their long exile from the land.

Ultimately, those who maintain the two-thirds judgment on Israel is still to come face an insurmountable problem, because Ezekiel 5 is clear that it ends with the surviving onethird in exile, not redeemed. Yet the Bible speaks of only two exiles and two returns before Israel’s final redemption. Isaiah 11, for instance, says God would “set His hand again the second time to recover the remnant of His people,” while in Amos 9:15 we have God vowing to “plant them in their land, and no longer shall they be pulled up from the land I have given them.”

In other words, Israel’s exiles are over. And so is the worst God would ever do to them!

David Parsons is media director for the International Christian Embassy Jerusalem; www.icej.org This article was first published in the November 2012 issue of The Jerusalem Post Christian Edition; www. jpost.com/ce

Zion above and below I find Christians divide into two groups: those who so stress the heavenly Zion that they have little thought for the earthly one; and those who have so much thought for the earthly Zion that they forget the heavenly one. Which group do you belong to? At a great celebration, I recall hearing the words of a song which declared that: you have come to Jerusalem; you are standing within the gate; you have come to Zion. Ah but the letter to the Hebrews says that you have come to another Zion, the one in heaven: But you have come to Mount Zion to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem. You have come to thousands upon thousands of angels in joyful assembly, to the church of the firstborn, whose names are written in heaven. You have come to God, the Judge of all, to the spirits of the righteous made perfect (Hebrews 12:22ff). That is your home. God forgive us if we think more about this Jerusalem on earth than that one.

That is Zionism in the letter to the Hebrews. We have come to the heavenly Zion and we are citizens. That is our home. We are strangers here and so are the Jews. God has intended for all of us a better country, and another Zion. That is where I belong; that is where my passport is. And when I die, I go home… This is a profound truth. Whilst God has a future for this earthly Zion, and whilst Christ is coming back to this earthly Zion – yes we all believe that – if we are Zionists like Abraham, we are looking for another country, and a city whose architect and builder is God. (Heb 11:8-10) ~ by David Pawson

David Pawson is a well known international itinerant Bible teacher whose teaching covers ‘the whole counsel of God’. He is a regular speaker at the ICEJ annual Feast of Tabernacles celebration in Jerusalem. This is a short excerpt from his book ‘Israel and the New Testament’, chapter 4,’ Israel in Hebrews’ pages 208-9. This book and others of his can be purchased from Inspirational Media NZ -- http://www.inspirational.org. nz/acatalog/David_Pawson_Books.html

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Israel and the tension of Jesus Malcolm Hedding do is compelled by the love of Jesus in us.

Thus our conduct itself is a “witness” to the transformation Jesus has done in our lives, and if someone then wants to ask me about it, I will tell them.

As the Apostle Peter instructed: “But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts and always be ready to give a defense to everyone who asks you a reason for the hope that is in you, with meekness and fear.” (1 Peter 3:15) In other words if Jews do not want to know, they simply should not ask!

Jerusalem’s walls and the golden gate

For too long Jews and Christians have been engaging with each other by ‘dancing’ around the real issues. I have been involved in this field since 1975 and therefore can speak from experience.

Even though Christianity is an offshoot of the Jewish faith, the gulf between the two belief systems is great, and there is no reason for us to pretend otherwise. Judaism and Christianity have a lot in common, to be sure, but the stumbling point is most certainly Jesus and His mission to the world, including the Jewish world.

One of these ‘real issues’ confronting us is his command to His followers to go into all the world and preach the Gospel to “every creature” (Mark 16:15), even the Jewish ones. This is a major tenet of biblical Christian faith, but it is totally rejected by the Jewish world for many reasons, chiefly historical but theological as well. Sadly, the historical Christian obedience to this command was to persecute, harass and even kill Jews. One cannot therefore act surprised at the Jewish position on missionizing.

Nonetheless, you can still be in dialogue between the two distinctive systems if you dance around this issue as well. But such an approach is threatening to derail one of the greatest movements in history in terms of healing JewishChristian relationships.

Some Evangelical Christians say there can be no compromise and are publicly calling for aggressive missionary activity to be directed at Israel and the Jewish world. Others are so moved to engage with Israel that they feel a need to

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completely remove the ‘tension’ of Jesus from between us through Dual Covenant and other erroneous teachings.

Meantime, a small band of Jewish antimissionary activists are trying to spoil the burgeoning relationship between Christians and Jews by attacking the Christian belief system and even calling for benevolence organizations like the International Christian Embassy Jerusalem to be branded as missionary and thereby banned from Israel.

Now if I said to my Jewish friends that in order to have a meaningful relationship with me, they must stop celebrating Shabbat, they would be horrified and reject such a position out of hand. But this is what some Jews are doing to Christians! They assert that no relationship between Jews and Christians can take place unless the Christians disavow missionary activity.

The Jewish world must know that the call to be obedient to world missions, including the Jewish world, is not a small matter that can be compromised. No, this call is a major tenet of our biblical faith (Romans 1:16; Matthew 28:18-20).

It cannot be done away with easily, just as keeping Shabbat cannot be done away with easily. If pro-Israel Evangelicals reject this call they would be totally discredited in the wider Christian world.

So the question is: How do Christians obey their own Scriptures to preach the Good News everywhere and at the same time engage Israel in a non-offensive way?

First, by affirming who we are and not by trying to play at being Jewish.

Though our ministry does not engage in traditional missionary activity in Israel, neither do we hide who we are as devout Christians, and we make clear all that we

For nearly three decades now, the International Christian Embassy Jerusalem has embraced this position with integrity and been able to engage with Israel without compromising on our obedience to own faith. We have been sincere and honest and many Israelis know they can trust us because there is no hidden agenda.

This is who we are as both committed Christians and genuine friends of Israel, and we have the track record to prove it.

Malcom Hedding was executive director of ICEJ from 2000 - 2011. He is now vice chairman of the international board of ICEJ. This article was written in 2010.

ICEJ Australia / ICEJ New Zealand / ICEJ South Pacific’s

2013 ICEJ Feast of Tabernacles Israel Tour SEE FEAST FLYER WFJ back page Comprehensive Israel tour Sep-Oct (dates tbc) including attending the ICEJ Feast of Tabernacles celebration from Fri to Wed, 20-25 Sep 2013 with optional pre-Israel Berlin tour and / or post-Israel Turkey Tour Join Bruce and Merrilyn Garbutt for ICEJ’s official down under Israel tour Initial queries contact ICEJNZ office or Bruce Garbutt at mbgarbutt@ bigpond.com or 0061 7 3353 1589

What really happened in Jerusalem Charles Krauthammer US President Barack Obama made his first trip to Israel as President in March: “I honestly believe that if any Israeli parent sat down with those [Palestinian] kids, they’d say, ‘I want these kids to succeed.’ ” — Barack Obama, in Jerusalem, March 21 Very true. But how does the other side feel about Israeli kids?

Consider that the most revered parent in Palestinian society is Mariam Farhat of Gaza. Her distinction? Three of her sons died in various stages of trying to kill Israelis — one in a suicide attack, shooting up and hurling grenades in a room full of Jewish students.

She gloried in her “martyr” sons, wishing only that she had 100 boys like her schoolroom suicide attacker to “sacrifice . . . for the sake of God.” And for that she was venerated as “mother of the struggle,” elected to parliament and widely mourned upon her recent passing.

So much for reciprocity. In the Palestinian territories, streets, public squares, summer camps, high schools, even a kindergarten are named after suicide bombers and other mass murderers. So much for the notion that if only Israelis would care about Arab kids, peace would be possible.

That hasn’t exactly been the problem.

Israelis have wanted nothing more than peace and security for all the children.

That’s why they accepted the 1947 U.N. partition of British Palestine into a Jewish and Arab state. Unfortunately — another asymmetry — the Arabs said no.

To this day, the Palestinians have rejected every peace offer that leaves a Jewish state standing.

This is not ancient history. Yasser Arafat said no at Camp David in 2000 and at Taba in 2001. And in 2008, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert offered a Palestinian state on all of the West Bank (with territorial swaps) with its capital in a shared Jerusalem. Mahmoud Abbas walked away.

In that same speech, Obama blithely called these “missed historic opportunities” that should not prevent peace-seeking now. But these “missed historic opportunities” are not random events. They present an unbroken, unrelenting pattern over seven decades of

rejecting any final peace with Israel.

So what was the point of Obama’s Jerusalem speech encouraging young Israelis to make peace, a speech the media drooled over? It was mere rhetoric, a sideshow meant to soften the impact on the Arab side of the really important event of Obama’s trip: the major recalibration of his position on the peace process.

Obama knows that peace talks are going nowhere. First, because there is no way that Israel can sanely make concessions while its neighborhood is roiling and unstable — the Muslim Brotherhood taking over Egypt, rockets being fired from Gaza, Hezbollah brandishing 50,000 missiles aimed at Israel, civil war raging in Syria with its chemical weapons and rising jihadists, and Iran threatening openly to raze Tel Aviv and Haifa.

Second, peace is going nowhere because Abbas has shown Obama over the past four years that he has no interest in negotiating. Obama’s message to Abbas was blunt: Come to the table without preconditions, i.e., without the excuse of demanding a settlement freeze first.

Obama himself had contributed to this impasse when he imposed that precondition — for the first time ever in the history of Arab-Israeli negotiations — four years ago. And when Israel responded with an equally unprecedented 10-month settlement freeze, Abbas didn’t show up to talk until more than nine months in — then walked out, never to return.

In Ramallah last week, Obama didn’t just address this perennial Palestinian dodge. He demolished the very claim

that settlements are the obstacle to peace.

Palestinian sovereignty and Israeli security are “the core issue,” he told Abbas. “If we solve those two problems, the settlement problem will be solved.”

Finally. Presidential validation of the screamingly obvious truism: Any peace agreement will produce a Palestinian state with not a single Israeli settlement remaining on its territory.

Any settlement on the Palestinian side of whatever border is agreed upon will be demolished. Thus, any peace that reconciles Palestinian statehood with Israeli security automatically resolves the settlement issue.

It disappears.

Yes, Obama offered the ritual incantations about settlements being unhelpful. Nothing new here. He could have called them illegal or illegitimate. It wouldn’t have mattered — because Obama officially declared them irrelevant.

Exposing settlements as a mere excuse for the Palestinian refusal to negotiate — that was the news, widely overlooked, coming out of Obama’s trip.

It was a breakthrough.

Will it endure? Who knows. But when an American president so sympathetic to the Palestinian cause tells Abbas to stop obstructing peace with that phony settlement excuse, something important has happened. Abbas, unmasked and unhappy, knows this better than anyone.

Charles Krauthammer has been a columnist with the Washington Post since 1984. This article appreared in the Post on 28 March.

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The Kaifeng connection Howard Flower

“I will bring your descendants from the East…” Isaiah 43:5 In late December, a group of 53 members of the Bnei Menashe tribe arrived in Israel from India, fulfilling the promise in Isaiah 43 that God would bring His people home from the “East”. These are a people who claim descent from the tribe of Manasseh, which was exiled by the Assyrians from the Land of Israel more than 2,700 years ago. The community drifted eastward over time and at one point settled in Kaifeng, China.

Legend has it that they journeyed along the Silk Road and eventually ended up in China, forming part of what came to be known as the Kaifeng Jewish community. According to the early stone tablets of the Kaifeng Jews, there were Israelites in China during the period of the Han Dynasty, from around 206 BCE to 220 CE. One stele erected in 1512 detailed the earlier presence of Jews in the western part of China near the border of Uzbekistan.

Uzbekistan lies in Central Asia and the Silk Road runs from Kaifeng to Jerusalem right through the heart of this region. Indeed, Jews were considered some of the most successful traders along the Silk Road.

The seven men from Kaifeng, China, whom the ICEJ has supported during their yeshiva studies in Efrat. In the main group picture are: Shavei Israel Chairman Michael Freund (center), Rabbi Menachem Weinberg (far right), and (from left to right) Sheffi (Yonatan) Xue, Shai Shi, Gideon Fan, Yaakov Wang, Tony (Hoshea) Liang, Tzuri Shi, Fei (Moshe) Li.

There is also a map on the wall of the Kaifeng Jewish museum in China which shows the locations of the earliest Jewish communities in China and Central Asia.

According to the 1512 Kaifeng Stele, the Jewish community identified their home in western China, a settlement at the outskirts of the Taklimakan Desert, as prophetic according the scripture found in Psalms 104:8-10.

They were later exiled by a Chinese ruler during the turbulent period after the Han Dynasty, which ended in the year 220AD. After wandering south into Thailand and Burma, they eventually settled in the Manipur and Mizoram provinces of northeast India, where they have lived until today, still keeping Shabbat and observing kosher dietary and other Jewish rituals.

They were rediscovered in modern times and made contact with other Jewish communities in India’s larger cities. Today, the Bnei Menashe are finally realising their dreams of reuniting with the Jewish mainstream in the Land of Israel.

Meanwhile, a small remnant of the ancient Kaifeng Jewish community which stayed in China also has begun

their return to Israel. ICEJ-Finland was instrumental in bringing the first Kaifeng family to Israel as part of our “Far Distant Cities” aliyah program.

The Jin family even lived in the home of former Finnish director Dr. Ulla Järvilehto while they were applying for their visas to come to Israel. The ICEJ also covered a large part of their living expenses in Israel until they received their Israeli citizenship.

More Kaifeng Jews are now coming home to Israel to fulfil their hope of being reattached to the Jewish people back in their ancient homeland. To further this aim, seven young men from Kaifeng have been taking special Torah classes at a yeshiva in Efrat for the past three years. In December, the seven students passed their exams and can now serve as spiritual leaders for their community. Their 36 months of studies were sponsored by generous donations from the ICEJ’s Taiwanese and Finnish branches.

The ICEJ is actively working to bring Jews home from the North, East, West and South. The return of these “Lost Tribes” is an important marker in God’s plan for Israel and the Jewish people. The Bible says, “I will bring your descendants from the East”. Today we are witnessing this incredible miracle. Please join with us so that we can continue to play a major part in this amazing chapter of God’s plan for Israel and the Jewish people.

Howard Flower is ICEJ’s aliyah director and ICEJ Russia’s director. See WFJ, page 21.

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