VOL. 39            NEWSLETTER           JAN./JUNE 2000

Dear OR TZION family,

“Shalom shalom” and blessings and prosperity in the Name of our Lord and Savior, Yeshua HaMashiach. You may wonder why you have not received an Or Tzion newsletter since December 1999. The reason is very simple --- lack of funds. In our Media-oriented days it is vital to be heard and seen, and be personally present for people to identify with and support a ministry. Our Aliyah to Israel diminished the continuity of my voice and my presence, and with it, the funds J.

Hence I ask you, dear friends, to please bear with me and Or Tzion’s ministry. As Joseph waited patiently for the fulfillment of the divinely inspired dreams, so am I patiently waiting for the last twenty years in the assurance that G-d’s promises never fail.  In the meantime the Lord has been at work in me to put to death all that is carnal. It took forty years to get Egypt out of Moses. Hence twenty years to get the world out of me is not so bad J.

The prophet Zephaniah exhorts us to “seek the L-RD, all you humble of the land, who do His commands; seek righteousness, seek humility; perhaps you may be hidden on the day of the wrath of the L-RD”¹. And the apostle Peter admonishes us to “clothe yourselves, all of you, with humility toward one another, for ‘G-d opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble.’ Humble yourselves therefore under the mighty hand of G-d, that in due time He may exalt you.”² This I have sought to do, although it is not very effective in covering the costs of Or Tzion’s ministry. But G-d, who richly supplies all our needs, will also grant the funds and prayer support needed for Or Tzion’s ministry to be unfettered.

The world watched as Pope John Paul II steered the rudder of eighteen hundred years of catholic anti-Semitism into a new direction of reconciliation³.

However, the political reality of Jewish sovereignty over Israel and its holy places was carefully avoided by speaking of the “Holy Land” instead of “Israel”. The title “Holy Land” sidesteps recognizing Jewish sovereignty while supporting the cherished idea that the “Holy Land” belongs to ALL. 

As Jews are only “subjects”, according to traditional Christianity and Islam, Jewish sovereignty is wholly unacceptable to both. (However, Spirit-led Christians love and support Israel, rejoicing in her restoration in fulfillment of G-d’s promise.) 

We listened intently to what the Pope said, hoping that he would acknowledge his Church’s guilt and seek forgiveness. But his words, “How could man have such utter contempt for man… and carry out the extermination of a whole people?” fell short of that hope. 

It was the ideology of the Church of Rome that brought unspeakable suffering and humiliation upon the Jewish people for almost two millennia. How could the religion of “brotherly love” have had such utter contempt for the brethren of the One they confessed as their Savior and professed to love?

Nonetheless, when John Paul II stood in the Hall of Remembrance at Yad Vashem and lit the eternal flame, he said, “I have come to Yad Vashem to pay homage to the millions of Jewish people who, stripped of everything, especially of their human dignity, were murdered in the Holocaust.“ It moved many of us to tears. We felt comforted when he said, “Men, women, children cry out to us from the depths of the horror that they knew. How can we fail to heed their cry? No one can forget or ignore what happened. No one can diminish it.”

His words witnessed against the Holocaust deniers. Yet it was a "woman of valor", historian Deborah Lipstadt, at Emory University in Atlanta, who triumphed over the deniers at the London Royal Courts of Justice by publicly defeating the Holocaust denial movement in the libel suit  David Irving - the champion of Holocaust denial – had filed against her⁴.