Religious Persecution in Israel

The arrest of a Messianic Jewish evangelist in Israel reflects the strife that often confronts Messianic Jews despite Israel’s guarantees of religious liberty and without any repercussion from law enforcement officials, the leader of a Messianic congregation told Baptist Press.

Messianic evangelist Eddie Beckford was arrested outside his business, the Chess and Bible Shop in Arad, after a mob of ultra-Orthodox Haradim Jews surrounded his van in the parking lot and beat him Feb. 25. “In general over the years here in the south in the Negev, in Arad and in Beer Sheva, there has been some form of harassment or persecution,” Howard Bass, leader of the Nahalat Yeshua congregation in Beer Sheva, said.

Groups of ultra-Orthodox Jews seem to have a difficult time accepting the fact that some Jews would believe that Jesus is the Messiah and that they would want to evangelize other Jews, Bass said. So those anti-Messianic groups work to stop the people they consider “missionaries” through various degrees of persecution. “In Arad, for instance, for almost three years they have been hounding the believers there at their services, in front of their homes,” Bass, an American Jew with Israeli citizenship, said. Full story here.