Torah's theft highlights dispute

CONGREGATION EMMAUS CALLS ITSELF a synagogue and embraces Jesus as its Messiah - but traditional Jews adamantly say that the Bellevue congregation can't claim to be one while advocating the other.

Something intense has invaded the body of Jerry Graves. Standing in a back row at his place of worship, his head is thrown back, his eyes are closed, his arms are extended, and his palms are turned up.

"Thank you, Father," he says softly, over and over. He is in the throes of praise for Jesus Christ.

The spell that has come over Graves, however, occurs in a place adorned with the outward trappings of Judaism, during a Saturday-morning service dedicated to the Jewish Sabbath. A place called Congregation Emmaus.

Colorful satin banners representing the 12 tribes of Israel hang in the sanctuary. The names, from Asher to Zebulun, are written in English and Hebrew. A brass candelabrum, or menorah, sits on one table, and a ram's horn, or shofar, rests on another. The focal point of the room is an oak ark with glass doors. A depiction of the Ten Commandments - two tablets containing 10 Hebrew letters - is etched into the glass.

Is this a synagogue or a church? Is this Judaism or Christianity?

Are these people Jews or Christians?

The only thing certain about this Bellevue congregation is the uncertainty over how to define it. Most of its congregants identify themselves as messianic Jews who have accepted Jesus as their Messiah and God.

But the vast majority of Jews consider embracing Jesus a fatal contradiction to the faith, as oxymoronic as kosher pork. They brand messianics as stealth Christians with an agenda to convert Jews via deception.

Congregation Emmaus' ark is conspicuously empty. It once housed a beautiful Torah, a sacred scroll dressed in velvet and silver that contains the five books of Moses hand-scribed in Hebrew on delicate parchment. The Torah was stolen Feb. 15, according to Emmaus' spiritual leader, Hylan Slobodkin. Bellevue police have no leads.

Underground fencing operations exist for the valuable scrolls. But surrendering to impulse and instinct he now says he regrets, Slobodkin speculated the culprit was a Jew who might think something as divine as a Torah deserved to be rescued from a place as unholy as Emmaus.

His comments angered many in the Puget Sound area's Jewish community and exposed the tense relationship between messianic and mainstream Jews.

"I am just constantly aggravated at the continuing dishonesty of these people who are Christians saying they are Jews," says Scott Sperling, associate rabbi of Temple De Hirsch Sinai, a 100-year-old synagogue with sanctuaries on Seattle's Capitol Hill and in Bellevue.

Some branches of Judaism believe a Messiah will come, but Sperling says all Jews agree the Messiah was not Jesus Christ.

"The rock-solid, non-negotiable, bottom-line principle for all Jews is that once you profess Jesus as your Messiah, you have left Judaism and become a Christian," he says.

An acceptance of Jesus is crucial to the theology practiced at Emmaus, although services there are decked out as Judaism.

A typical Sabbath-morning service last Saturday drew about 75 worshippers. It began with 45 minutes of song, led by a six-piece, amplified musical group featuring Slobodkin on guitar. The group set up in front of an Israeli flag. Slobodkin, as well as a few of the worshippers, wore a traditional Jewish prayer shawl and skullcap. Lyrics to the songs, which mixed English and Hebrew verse, were projected on a wall so congregants could follow along. One said:

"We do not seek Your hand

"We only seek Your face

"We want to know you

"We want to know you

"Reveal Your glory in this place."

Congregants occasionally left their seats to join a circle in front of the ark. Men, women, boys and girls joined hands in an Israeli folk dance. A step, a bow, a kneel, a twirl.

Bryan Weed, who was leading the congregation, filled the gap between songs.

"Yeshua, our salvation," he said.

Yeshua is the Hebrew name for Jesus.

`A believer of Yeshua'

Asked if he is a born Christian or a born Jew, Graves says, "I'm a born-again Christian."

Graves, of Renton, prefers not to brand himself Jew or Christian, but rather "a believer of Yeshua. . . . I wanted to learn more about the Old Testament and explore my Jewish roots. So I asked God for guidance, and he directed me here."

Congregation Emmaus, wedged within a business park along 124th Avenue Northeast in Bellevue, follows both the Old Testament, which Jews regard as their only Bible, and the New Testament, a book Jews reject. Some congregants were raised Jewish and others Christian. What binds them are their beliefs that Judaism is at the root of Christianity and that an acceptance of Jesus is Judaism come full circle.

"The gentiles who come here know the early church was all Jews and they know they've been duped because the church has no semblance of Judaism," Slobodkin says.

Brenda Weed, whose husband led the Sabbath service, was raised in a messianic household. Her father was a born Jew who embraced Jesus at age 15, and her mother was a born Christian with a Zionist's fanatical devotion to Israel.

"I identify myself as a Jew and a believer in Yeshua," says Weed, whose five children range in age from 10 to 16. Her family observes the Sabbath each Friday night with the traditional prayers and lighting of candles, and her children do not attend Friday-night events, such as high-school football, in keeping with the sanctity of the Sabbath.

Weed dismisses the idea that the messianic movement is a scheme to convert Jews.

"Convert them to what?" she asks, extending her arm in a sweeping motion to underscore the Jewish artifacts that fill Emmaus. "This is not Christianity."

Gulf is wide

To Sperling of Temple De Hirsch and other leaders in Seattle's Jewish community, the artifacts are artifice.

"If I print on my laser writer a diploma that says I'm a thoracic surgeon, does that make me a thoracic surgeon?" Sperling asks. "I don't think so."

Temple De Hirsch's Bellevue sanctuary and Emmaus are separated by about 1 1/4 miles. The theological gulf is much wider.

"I carry the weight of 2,000 years of baggage of being told that my religion is inadequate and that my people are condemned to eternal damnation if we don't accept Jesus," Sperling says. "Emmaus is the embodiment of 2,000 years of some elements of Christianity oppressing Jews."

Formed in 1980, Emmaus has 200 or so worshippers, making it the largest of what Slobodkin says are about a dozen messianic congregations in the Puget Sound area. Everything about Emmaus chafes Sperling, from its listing in the Yellow Pages as a synagogue to its World Wide Web site.

He homes in on a sentence on the site that attempts to describe Emmaus. It says, "Understanding the meaning of our Jewish traditions is helping us break down prejudices and misunderstandings which keep fellow Jews from receiving their Messiah."

"That's it! That's it!" Sperling says. "The intention here is to bring the rest of Judaism to Jesus."

Missionaries in disguise?

The hostility mainstream Jews have toward messianics hangs on a belief they are part of a Christian missionary movement that disguises its motives.

"Jews of all types have an aversion to giving up their Judaism," says Rabbi Yechezkel Kornfeld of Congregation Shevet Achim, an Orthodox synagogue in Mercer Island. Kornfeld also is the adult-education director for Chabad House in the University District of Seattle.

"So a new tactic is to convert Jews to Christianity by telling them they can believe in Jesus and still be Jewish."

Mark Sanders, West Coast outreach director for Jews for Judaism, a national organization that works to counter the efforts of missionary groups that target Jews, says even the name "messianic Jews" is an attempt to deceive. Many Jews are taught to believe in a Messiah, although not Jesus, so the term "messianic Jew" seems not to be in conflict with traditional Judaism, he says.

One well-known term for the movement is Jews for Jesus, after a San Francisco group by that name. The movement had favored "Hebrew Christians," but the name advertised that Jews would convert to Christianity upon accepting Jesus, which is counter to the movement's conversion strategy, says Sanders, a former evangelical Christian minister from Los Angeles who converted to Judaism.

Jewish leaders are especially sensitive to recruiting by messianics of recent Russian Jewish refugees, many of whom have settled in Bellevue.

"Russian Jews are more vulnerable because of their limited knowledge of traditional Judaism," says Brian Goldberg, Pacific Northwest regional director for the Anti-Defamation League.

Local Jewish leaders, though, present scant evidence of organized recruiting. The best they can offer is Emmaus' service in Russian each Saturday night.

The messianic movement began in the 1970s and has about 600 congregations nationwide. Mainstream Jews speculate - but have little concrete proof - that the movement receives generous financial support from Christian groups, such as the Southern Baptist Convention. An arm of the convention distributed 12-page prayer guides to its churches last September instructing followers to befriend Jews as a step toward converting them. In 1996, the convention passed a resolution directing members to intensify efforts to spread the Gospel to Jews.

Jim Sibley, coordinator of Jewish ministries for the convention's North American Mission Board, says that the convention does not donate to messianics but that individual Southern Baptists undoubtedly do.

"I know there is a concerted effort among many leaders in Jewish communities to insist on a complete and total wall of separation between Judaism and Christianity," says Sibley, of Dallas. "We think that's an artificial distinction."

That distinction, however, is so genuine to many mainstream Jews that a story about a Torah being stolen from messianics elicited more enmity than empathy.

Stuart Eskenazi's phone-message number is 206-464-2293. His e-mail address is seskenazi@seattletimes.com.