The God of Vegeance

Translation of a full three-page article regarding dangerous attitudes of the ultra-religious community towards Messianic Jews in Israel, published in the “Ma’ariv” newspaper. Ma’ariv is the newspaper with the second largest distribution in the nation of Israel.

On Purim, Ami Ortiz, a Messianic Jew, received a letter bomb that looked like mishloakh manot (traditional Purim gift). Why? Because he and his friends are “murderers of souls” and “destroyers of Jews”. A voyage through towns in which ultra-orthodox Jews persecute them because of their religion.

The captain of the Hapoel Ariel youth soccer team is lying in bed on the fifth floor of the Schneider Medical Center trying to defend himself from the orogastric tube, the TV and other tubes. He doesn’t see very well and his hearing is impaired, and he has lost four of the toes on his left foot. His lungs are deflated, his face is charred, his stomach has no skin covering it and his chin has a scar over which a scab has yet to develop. The scar marks the point of entry the team of doctors, led by Dr. Meir Cohen, used to access the system of tendons and nerves that leads to the brain. This was performed in order to ascertain if the 15 year old blond youth, who fills the entire length of the bed from the beige wall to the iron frame, is capable of thinking. “What’s that?” Ortiz whispers, who first wokOn Purim, Ami Ortiz, a Messianic Jew, received a letter bomb that looked like mishloakh manot (traditional Purim gift). Why? Because he and his friends are “murderers of souls” and “destroyers of Jews”. A voyage through towns in which ultra-orthodox Jews persecute them because of their religion. The captain of the Hapoel Ariel youth soccer team is lying in bed on the fifth floor of the Schneider Medical Center trying to defend himself from the orogastric tube, the TV and other tubes. He doesn’t see very well and his hearing is impaired, and he has lost four of the toes on his left foot. His lungs are deflated, his face is charred, his stomach has no skin covering it and his chin has a scar over which a scab has yet to develop. The scar marks the point of entry the team of doctors, led by Dr. Meir Cohen, used to access the system of tendons and nerves that leads to the brain. This was performed in order to ascertain if the 15 year old blond youth, who fills the entire length of the bed from the beige wall to the iron frame, is capable of thinking. “What’s that?” Ortiz whispers, who first woke up in the small hours of the night. I am told he feels like the explosion just happened and as if he just woke up bandaged, scarred and ripped to shreds.

“The mishloakh manot was nicely decorated. I put it on the table and opened it and then there was an explosion and I was thrown backwards. I didn’t hear anything until someone told me ‘don’t move’. I knew something had exploded. I realized “The mishloakh manot was nicely decorated. I put it on the table and opened it and then there was an explosion and I was thrown backwards. I didn’t hear anything until someone told me ‘don’t move’. I knew something had exploded. I realized my body was in shock. I thought to myself: What’s this? What happened? I was confused.” -Ami Ortiz

The look in his eyes reflects horror, loss and a fierce will to escape. He fears what he cannot see, and he can’t see much.

“Those are bandages,” says the nurse. “We can’t take them off now.”
“There’s someone there,” says Ortiz.
“That’s a chair.”
“Where?”
“There. There. Who’s that there?”
“That dad,” says the nurse and looks at Ortiz’s father David, dressed in a checked shirt, his brow deeply furrowed. He stands with his arms folded, looking at his shattered son with sleepless eyes.

Pact of the Disappointed

Two weeks earlier Ami Ortiz was lying in bed in his bedroom facing Avner Street in Ariel under the small basketball hoop with “New Boom Action” written on it. Marina, the cleaning lady, was working in the house which comprises two not particularly spacious apartments on the third floor of an apartment block. One of the apartments, which includes Ami’s room is mainly used as a residence. The other, on the other side of the stairwell, is mainly used for meetings of the Messianic Jewish community in Ariel, headed by David Ortiz, Ami’s father.

Translation of a full three-page article regarding dangerous attitudes of the ultra-religious community towards Messianic Jews in Israel, published in the “Ma’ariv” newspaper. Ma’ariv is the newspaper with the second largest distribution in the nation of Israel. Ortiz Sr. was born in Puerto Rico. Six months later he emigrated with his parents to Brooklyn, New York. He spent his youth on the border between the Hispanic part of Brooklyn and the ultra orthodox Jewish part of Brooklyn, Flatbush, Crown Heights and Williamsburg. This ethnic-cultural mix led to an interest in the Jewish faith which, in turn, led to a visit to a store that sold Jewish sacred literature which led to the young boy visiting a store managed by a Jewish American by the name of Arnold Ross, formerly Rosenberg. Rosenberg explained to Ortiz that he was a Jew, but not just that. He believed in Jesus. He called him “Yeshua”. He is a Messianic Jew that belongs to a theological faction that became a movement sometime in the sixties, particularly in the United States, in an effort to “fuse” the Jewish and Christian faiths into one. This was part of a general reaction to frameworks, institutions and ancient traditions.

In order to gain an understanding of the movement, and this is based on discussions with dozens of believers and on participation in their ceremonies; it should not only be placed within an Israeli context but also in an Anglo-Saxon American context. The Messianic faith has attracted, and is attracting, Jews and Christians who became disillusioned with their parents’ traditional beliefs after the latter filled them with feelings of rejection and offence. The Jews, who were accustomed to thinking of God as a kind of bearded accountant who counts up their daily failures, embraced the Christian Messiah, who accepted them – for a change, they felt – unconditionally and without taking stock. “I was bothered by the fact,” wrote Yaakov Damkani, one of the heads of the Messianic communityin Tel Aviv, in his book Why Me? (like many other “believers” Damkani converted from a Jew to a Messianic Jew following a visit to the United States) “that synagogue congregants did not see God as a loving father but rather related to him as a strict and authoritarian master whose commands must be followed, and they felt they must do everything in their power to justify themselves. I wanted more  than that.”

The Christians, like David Ortiz for example, who were used to thinking of the church as a strict, formally dressed and condescending guardian of morals, adopted the Jewish tradition as well as its strong links with Israel. Instead of adapting themselves to the religion of the ruling Christian elite they became better. “Perfect”, in the eyes of the Lord Savior, despite their unsuitability to the high demands of the priest. Easter became Passover. The Eucharist of Jesus became matzot, the Jews and the Christians became Messianic believers. Their belief, in one sentence: the Bible prophesied the coming of Jesus and he, the Christian savior, was and remained a Jew.

There is another matter: the faith, according to the Messianics, should be simple to practice. The practice should be enjoyable, including musical accompaniment with a guitar, chord booklets and spontaneous prayers. The Messianic belief is a type of associative improvisation of the classic Judaism and Christianity. As such it is attractive for people from cultural and ethnic margins: mixed couples, immigrants from Russia, and Jews and Christians who are disappointed with their respective original beliefs.

Nazi with Cross-eyed Children

Around a decade and a half after meeting Rosenberg, in Brooklyn of the seventies, David Ortiz immigrated to Israel with his (Messianic Jewish) wife Leah and three children. He settled in Beersheba, later in Jerusalem and then moved to Avner Street in Ariel. He joined the IDF reserves and paid his taxes and began to disseminate his Judeo-Christian belief. The second floor of his home became a study room with an organ, drums, a painting of Moses splitting the Red Sea and a stand with a Bible and the New Testament in a single volume.

The problems began around a decade ago. The meeting place of the Messianic community in Kiryat Yam was set on fire. Members of the Beersheba community were set upon by an angry crowd of ultra orthodox Jews after the Chief Rabbi of Beersheba, Yehuda Deri, compared the Messianics to members of the inquisition in Spain, Nazis in Germany and Hamas activists. Three Molotov cocktails were thrown into the home of a resident of Migdal. The chess club of the Messianic community in Arad was set on fire. The Messianics blamed the Gur Hassidim. Later, the club manager, a black American from Harlem called Ari Beckford, lost his cool and ferociously attacked a Gur yeshiva student who called him a “nigger”. Beckford was found guilty and returned to New York. Meanwhile, the head of the Arad Messianic community, Yakim Figurt, began to be shadowed by a gang of eight to ten Gur activists who called him “Haman the evil”. Once, when he took his children to kindergarten, the Hassidim waited for him and said: “Here’s the Nazi priest with his cross-eyed children.”

Around two years ago an unsigned flyer was circulated in Ariel, in Hebrew and Russian, warning residents of Ariel against David Ortiz. “These people,” it said, “are Christian missionaries pretending to be Jews!” The flyer contained clandestine photographs of Ortiz and seven other believers. The person who took the pictures had followed Ortiz and the others, so Ortiz installed cameras around his home. One camera was concealed in the stairwell, one outside the window of 15 year old Ami Ortiz’s room, and another five cameras on the outside walls of the building. The quality of the pictures is very good. The head of the Beersheba community, Howard Bass, who is particularly reviled by the ultra orthodox community (and whose eye was almost gouged out with a key in the writer’s presence – more about that later) also covered the walls of his home with cameras, although of an inferior quality.

Since the beginning of March this year the cameras captured a series of acts of harassment by yeshivah students dressed in black: throwing stones, throwing garbage.

Meanwhile, in Ariel, on March 20 Ortiz’s cameras photographed a uniformed man with a hat on climbing up the steps. Next to the small wooden gate that leads to the doors of the Oriz home, he bent down and placed a small parcel there and rang the bell. Marina, the cleaner, when she left the apartment saw the small parcel on the floor, with colorful wrapping and with the words “Hag Same’akh” (Happy Holidays) on it.

Marina took the parcel inside and put it on the floor inside the apartment, and called Ami from his room. Ami went over to the parcel lifted it up and put it on the table. He called his mother Leah, who was on her way to Jerusalem with Messianic friends who were visiting from Denmark, and told her: “we have received mishloakh manot for Purim.”

“It must be from one of the neighbors,” said Leah.

Ami then sat down on the chair next to the wall and placed the parcel on the table. He could see a chocolate wafer through the cellophane wrapping paper. He fancied it and pulled one of the ribbons, was blown backwards and, for a long time, couldn’t hear or see anything, until an ambulance arrived, wheeled him along the sidewalk to a car that took him to Schneider. In retrospect, he recalls that he groaned in agony every time the stretcher wheels crossed from one paving stone to another.

Don’t Move, Don’t Move

A week had passed since my previous visit to Ortiz. He looked better. The scar above his neck had changed from red to pink. His emotional state had improved but was not stable. This week the young basketball player discovered some of his toes were missing.

“My vision was blurred before,” he said weakly. “Now I can see okay, but not entirely. I can’t read the sign over the door. I feel hot.” David Ortiz, standing to the right of his son’s bed, turned on a small ventilator.

“I’m tired,” says Ami Ortiz. “I hardly sleep because of the pain and I wake up at four or five in the morning. I remember everything that happened. It was scary. The mishloakh manot was nicely decorated. I put it on the table and opened it, and then the explosion happened and I flew backwards.” When I visited the Ortiz home in Ariel I find the table leaning against a wall and covered by a woolen blanket. There was an enormous hole in one of the corners of the table and gave it the appearance of a matza with a great bite taken out of it. In the middle of the table there were marks fused into the wood by the base of the vase that stood there, until it exploded.

“I didn’t hear anything,” Ortiz Jr. continues, “until someone said to me: ‘don’t move, don’t move.’ I knew that something had exploded. I realized my body was in shock and I thought to myself: What’s this? What happened? I was confused. All sorts of thoughts passed through my mind. I thought: Why me? Who could do such a thing? I couldn’t understand it. Someone had tried to harm us, my father. Two years they circulated posters with his picture. That was annoying. I went around with my friends and I took it down. They think we are different. That’s not true. I feel Jewish, I feel Israeli. Sorry, I don’t feel. I know!”

Ortiz was tired. I closed my notebook and prepared to leave. He asked me to come closer. “I want you to note,” he gasped, “that it’s lies. Everything that… they wrote about… my parents… everything… they say… it’s lies. Make a note of that.”

Murdering our Souls

Rabbi Shalom Dov Lifschitz sits in his office on the lower level of an office block on Jerusalem Street in Bnei Barak. The corridor leads to his which is festooned with posters that depict the extent of the threat posed by the Messianic movement to the ultra orthodox community. For them, and particularly for the Yad LaAkhim semi-commando organization of the Bnei Barak dedicated to combating the “mission phenomenon”, Ortiz and his colleagues are soul murderers, destroyers of Jews, the descendants of the Crusaders who swamped Jerusalem in rivers of blood. They are smiling monsters with pockets full of cash sent from America whose sole objective is to convert the Israeli people to Christianity and not to leave a single pure soul.

“They want the entire Jewish nation to convert to Christianity,” says Rabbi Lifschitz, who heads Yad LaAkhim. “Every Jew that does not convert to Christianity, for them, is an obstacle to the coming of the Redemption. What does Hamas want? The land. They want something else: our souls… Every Jew they take is an enormous gain for them. Every Jew is prey. They must be caught.”

I asked about Ami Ortiz and about what happened in Ariel. “According to what I heard,” said the rabbi, “there were just a few fire crackers inside the box that exploded.” (“I have been treating victims of terror attacks for 15 years,” Ortiz’s doctor Dr. Cohen told me. “He was injured by hundreds of pieces of shrapnel, from his feet up to his head.”) “Besides,” said Meir Cohen, who is responsible for “the mission file”, “the violence is not one-sided. A while ago I was sitting with a Messianic and he said to me: ‘You killed the Messiah’.”

“We do not have any intention of causing harm,” said Yisrael Lifschitz, the rabbi’s son. “It would also be idiotic for us, like shooting ourselves in the foot, or the head.”

Members of the Ortiz family doubt whether the sweet mishloakh manot was sent to Ariel from Jerusalem Street. The believe that all the talk about “worse than murder”, “worse than Hitler” and “English-speaking Nazis” may have fuelled the imagination of an unstable yeshiva member, or may have incited a new extreme right wing activist group which began to operate independently in the area in and around Ariel. That is also one of the investigation directions being pursued by the police, as far as the Ortiz family knows.

“It is unnatural for there not to be violence,” Lifschitz says defensively. “Considering what they have done to us, we should have killed one Christian every day, right? (he laughs). So, 60 years have gone by and there has been one incident. It’s not a representative incident. It’s an isolated case.”

You are a Russian, You Are a Dog

Beersheba, the old city, the blue iron door of Lilly Sher who was born in Russia 67 years ago and came here 12 years ago, is covered most of the week with egg shells which give the metal the appearance of an avant garde art work. The eggs are thrown by students of the nearby yeshiva which is just 100 meters from the Messianic community center in Beersheba. The community is based at a beautiful fortress from the 12th century which arouses the ire of the neighbors because, according to the neighbors, they provide evidence of the inexhaustible sources of money of the Messianic community.

The community, it should be said, is connected to missionary evangelical organizations that mostly work out of the United States, and who consider the Messianics a variation of the principal belief according to which Jesus is about to arrive from the Mount of Olives. As such, the Jews should be supported until he arrives, then most of us will be destroyed, or at least those who do not accept Jesus as their Messiah.

On the other hand, one must point out that Israel, and particularly the right wing parties (principally Binyamin Netanyahu) have joined forces in recent years with those very evangelist groups who pour into the hands of “the sons of Jesus” (us) millions of dollars, in the hope that the dollars will prod the rear-end of the white donkey. The official representatives of Israel are regular guests at conferences which convey “support for Israel”, held at mega churches in Texas.

With regard to Lilly Sher, the immigrant from Russia in whose tiny home I am sitting, she is concerned because she has just seen the tip of a hat worn by a yeshiva student. In other circumstances, he would have knocked on the glass, shouted something out or thrown a stone or an egg. “Why?” asks Lilly the Messianic Jew. “I came here from Russia 12 years ago. I went to the synagogue. They told me: ‘You are a Russian. You are a whore, a dog, go to America.’ America? What is there in America? I am from Azerbaijan.”
 

One day the head of the Messianic community in Beersheba, Howard Bass, knocked on the door. He didn’t call her a whore, or a dog. He offered her a mixture of Judaism and Christianity based on the idea that God loves her as she is. Even joining the community did not require a special effort, changing her way of dress or learning new material. Now she “believes in Yeshua.” The orthodox Jewish world, which threw her out of the synagogue, is sorry she has left and takes it revenge on her at the same time. She is both a victim and a criminal. “Yeshua is love,” she says. “For the religious everything is closed, closed, closed. They throw things and shout things. Why? I pray: please, kindness!” She gets up from the bed, throws herself of the floor, folds her hands and starts to cry. “There is no love in Israel,” she wails. “Everything is so tough… but God loves everyone… Jews and Arabs… and Russians… everyone… hallelujah!”

After that, we got up and went outside to count the new eggshells on the door. We took our leave and I went back to the Messianic community center. I asked some yeshiva students why they throw eggs. One of them identified himself as a member of Yad L’achim and began to answer me but, suddenly, the head of the yeshiva appeared – we will call him “C”. He took out a sharp key and held it up against Howard Bass’s eye, stood up close to him and, for half an hour, growled in refined English acquired in Brooklyn:

“You made a big, big mistake Howard… I will f*** you now… f*** you good… if I see you one more time here, or your wife the bitch, I will f*** you, ohhhh Howard, you made a big, big, big mistake today… you motherf***er… I will f*** you, you will be sorry… you and your wife the whore… if you come here one more time.”

That’s how it went on, until I identified myself as a journalist at which time the rabbi, after pausing in surprise, explained to me in Hebrew, winking, that “that’s the only way to talk to them. They are considered important people in their community,” the honored rabbi explained to me, “so you have to trample their honor, humiliate them.” After that he got angry again: “They are murderers, these people. Don’t you understand?! Can’t you imagine him with great big cross on his chest! And he rides a horse! That’s what they do here! If he had a knife he’d stick it in your heart. You’d defend yourself, right? That’s what they do here. They murder innocent souls! They are like the Hamas, only worse!”

I asked the rabbi if it bothers him that there are seven young men behind him listening to his obscenities, particularly after what happened in Ariel. He said he wasn’t concerned. Anyway, he added, the Ortiz family in Ariel sent the bomb to themselves, to arouse Jewish sympathy. Just before I left the town, Bass pleaded with me not to mention the name of the rabbi. He was afraid he’d take revenge.

In the Name of Yeshua, Amen

Downtown Arad. Nighttime. On the third floor of a nondescript building, in the apartment of a Muslim from Nazareth, there are five Messianic believers. Two are Jewish, three are not. One has a guitar and is leafing through a book of chords with Christian tunes for verses from the Psalms. The blinds are drawn, the door is locked, the air conditioner rumbles. They bow their heads and close their eyes, and one of them says: “Our lord in heaven, help us to love those who hate us. Help Ami Ortiz and help to heal him from this trauma. Protect IDF soldiers and stop any terrorist attacks during this Passover. In the name of Yeshua. Amen.