Scandal: Who Gave Missionaries Home Addresses of Israel’s Teachers?
November 28, 2012
Thousands of teachers across Israel recently received missionary material in their home mailboxes, together with copies of the “New Testament.” As a result, Yad L’Achim has been inundated with calls from teachers who are furious that their private property had been violated by such objectionable material.
Especially disturbing was the ruse the missionaries used, inserting the material in envelopes marked “Important information for educators.” Only after opening the envelopes did the teachers understand the nature of the materials they had brought into their homes.
Yad L’Achim investigated the matter and learned that the group behind the campaign was the messianic organization “Hope of Israel,” headed by Andrew Lewis. It immediately fired off a letter to the education minister and distributed flyers warning potential recipients of the nature of the material arriving at their homes.
The missionary material sent to teachers, with the misleading marking on the envelope: “Important information for educators.”
In an urgent letter to Education Minister Gideon Saar, Yad L’Achim wrote: “There’s no need to elaborate on the seriousness of the matter – when a missionary who has succeeded in converting many Jews to Christianity is able to appeal directly to those charged with educating Israel’s children.”
Moreover, warns the letter: “Many of the teachers were deeply disconcerted at the news that their names had been disclosed. They want to know how the ministry’s teachers’ lists ended up in the hands of this missionary. Who knows where else their names will wind up?”
Yad L’Achim asked the minister to “warn the teaching community that we are speaking of missionary material whose implications could be serious for the teachers’ Jewish identities,” and called on the ministry to “investigate how the list of teachers ended up in such dubious hands.”
At the same time, Yad L’Achim distributed flyers headed, “The target: Jewish children.”
“It’s no coincidence that the missionaries took aim at the teachers,” the text read. “They plan to use the teachers to pass on missionary messages to hundreds of thousands of Jewish students across the country in order to convert them out of their faith.”
The flyer calls for immediate action to amend the missionary law in order to put an immediate halt to attempts to convert Jews out of their faith. “Areivus, the feeling of mutual responsibility that we were commanded to demonstrate at Har Sinai, requires that every Jews seek to instill faith inHashem in each and every Jewish child, wherever he may be.”
The flyer Yad L’Achim has been distributing around the country
Yad L’Achim’s urgent appeal to the education minister
