Missionaries Concede: Yad L’Achim Is Influencing Our Members to Abandon Christianity and Return to Judaism
February 11, 2019
Thousands of copies of Mechapsim are stacked at Yad L'Achim's main office.
It’s been five years since Yad L’Achim introduced its Mechapsim (“Searching”) magazine to provide theological answers to Jews who’d fallen into the trap of the “Messianic Jews” cult.
Each issue contains an interview with a major cult figure who has returned to Judaism with the help of Yad L’Achim, in which he tells the story of his life, the circumstances that led him to enter the cult and what convinced him that he’d made a mistake. Additional articles expose the missionaries’ lies, the distorted way they present Judaism in order to attract Jews, the contradictions and falsehoods in the “new testament,” as well as short stories on other Jews who have left the cult.
At first, the missionaries didn’t take the magazine seriously. But when they saw Jewish cult members begin to ask questions based on what they’d read in Mechapsim, they understood that it threatened them and their agenda.
After the second edition came out, when Jewish cult members began calling Yad L’Achim for assistance in leaving, the missionaries began telling their members not to take the magazine being distributed by Yad L’Achim’s field workers at the entrance to their churches, and even began to threaten the activists.
After the third issue came out, when a senior missionary openly left the cult, it decided to come out with its own magazine to respond to the charges raised by Yad L’Achim. It also produced a series of videos on topics raised by Mechapsim.
Yad L’Achim officials note with satisfaction that “the laughable answers the missionaries come up with in no way address the charges raised by Mechapsim. Indeed, the low level of their discourse was a boomerang, convincing even more Jews to leave the cult and return to their faith.”
The missionaries’ attempt to produce a magazine to counter Mechapsim, called Motz’im (“Found”) was quickly discontinued, after Yad L’Achim put together responses to each of the cult’s counterclaims showing them to be false.
Though the missionaries officially deny Yad L’Achim’s success at extracting Jews from the cult, internal memos that reached Yad L’Achim with the help of a Jew who is in the process of returning to Judaism, reveals their concern at how successful Mechapsim has been.
The missionary Eitan Bar, who is known for his anti-Semitic provocations, wrote in a book distributed internally that: “The magazine contains objections and disproofs from Orthodox rabbis on yeshu and belief in the ‘new testament’ … this causes some Jewish believers, including those who were missionaries, to abandon their belief in yeshu and return to Orthodox Judaism.”
Yad L’Achim officials said the panicked reaction of the missionaries attests to the the importance of the organizations’ activities. “Every evening, our teams stand outside missionary congregations operating in Israel. We’ve been aware of our success in keeping Jews from entering the cult congregatoins and extracting those who fell into them, but there is no doubt that this confession from the missionaries themselves shows the extent to which we are succeeding, with G-ds help, in stymieing the influence of the missionaries.”
