The Deputy Mayor of Jerusalem, Aryeh King, tells in an interview with Israel National News about the claim of Christian missionary officials about their success in converting about twenty to thirty thousand Israelis, including from the religious Zionist community.
"We remember the missionary conference that took place after Shavuot on the Huldah steps of the Southern Wall on the Temple Mount. We found out that as part of the event there we interviewed someone named Chad Holland, a Messianic Jew in Jerusalem. We ask him how many like you there are in Israel and he says between twenty and thirty thousand. He added that there are many more who have not revealed that they accepted Jesus as their leader and as their idol, and they do it in hiding."
"He also says that they operate within the religious communities in Jerusalem. This is something that was revealed to us for the first time," says King. "Another woman who was interviewed there says that they send children with missionary material to kindergartens and through the children they want to attract the Jewish children to stories about 'that man'."
"I don't know if 'Orthodox' means haredi or religious Zionists, but it is clear that if we thought that this only happens in secular populations, because it is easier there, it turns out that the religious public is also in their sights," says King, noting that the demonstration included those wearing knitted Kippas - a style of the traditional religious head covering for Jewish men popular among the religious Zionist community.
"It could very well be that he is merely boasting to raise funds, but I can testify, as someone who walks the streets of Jerusalem a lot, that their number is much greater than what we knew before the coronavirus," King warns. "I hear about materials in mailboxes in every neighborhood in the city, including Givat Shaul, Har Nof, Givat Mordechai, etc. They arrive everywhere and that means a lot of people, beyond the streetcar in the Safra square and the Western Wall. When you reach so many people, you have to be much more connected. He may be from Paris, but there is no doubt that there is a much larger number of Messianic Jews and missionaries on the streets of Jerusalem."
King says that as a member of the groups that report the distribution of mission materials, he urges anyone who comes across such material in their mailbox to understand that the material has probably been distributed in the entire neighborhood, to go out and remove the materials, throw them away or burn them.
The law, he says, prohibits the solicitation of religious conversion only towards those who have not yet reached the age of 18, but as long as they are adults it is not possible to act against them through the enforcement authorities and the only answer is one-on-one
persuasion.