In the fundamentalist regions of the American South, where religious revival meetings can still draw large crowds away from the movies, a modest but secure niche is occupied by the so-called “Hebrew-Christian evangelists,” Jewish converts who seek to bring “their people” to Christianity—an undertaking that has so far produced more tumult than conversions. Harry L. Golden, who here reports on this aspect of Jewish Americana, is editor of the Carolina Israelite, a newspaper published in Charlotte, North Carolina, and has written for the Charlotte Observer and the Charlotte News.
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Revival fires are burning, and the Lord is pouring out His blessings on those who are ready to receive them, even his matchless grace. in the meetings which are now being held in charlotte, the lord is mightily using Hyman Appelman, international known Hebrew-Christian evangelist. Already three jewish people have accepted christ, and many Gentiles.
Quarter-page advertisements such as this appeared daily in the newspapers of Charlotte, North Carolina, during the most recent revival staged by Hyman Appelman, “the Jew who preaches Christ crucified.” Appelman conducted twenty-one meetings, and he brought more people into the Civic Auditorium in two weeks than the Shakespeare Society, the Symphony Association, and the Community Concert Guild, combined, were able to attract in an entire year.
A wave of revivalism is sweeping the South. Traveling “gospel witnesses,” typified by Mordecai Ham and the phenomenal Billy Graham, are multiplying with a rapidity unmatched since the days of Billy Sunday, Gypsy Smith, and Baxter (“Cyclone Mack”) McLendon. One tangible result of this revolt against so-called modernism in religion, and one that is causing considerable concern among leaders of established Protestant organizations, is the expansion of the Church of God, a tent-and-camp-meeting religious group which is by all odds the fastest-growing sect in the United States. The gospelers of the Church of God, as well as the unaffiliated evangelists, both Gentile and Jew, preach the “old-time Bible religion,” based on what fundamentalist William Jennings Bryan described at the Scopes trial as “belief in the Bible as the spoken word of God, with no twilight zone in the intellectual processes and with no mental reservations in its preaching.”
Along with other revivalists, the “Hebrew-Christian” evangelist also finds his business booming in this supercharged fundamentalist atmosphere. And in his case there is an additional impetus supplied by the establishment of the State of Israel. “The prophecy is being fulfilled . . . the Jews are once again gathering in Palestine . . . the Second Coming is at hand,” shout Appelman and Fleischer in North Carolina; Eddie Lieberman in South Carolina; Joseph Cohen in Virginia; Arthur Glass in Tennessee; Jacob Gartenhaus and Martin Chernoff in Georgia—to mention some of the more important and more successful “Hebrew-Christians.”
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To Jews in the South, the “Hebrew-Christian” evangelist is no unfamiliar figure. Such organizations as the Hebrew-Christian Alliance, the Baptist Board of Missions to the Jews, and the Gospel to Israel maintain connections in various Northern cities, but the real center of their activity and support is in the South. The well-established and conservative Protestant churches do not sponsor these “revivals,” but the “Hebrew-Christian” evangelists are able to draw huge audiences from the great mass of unaffiliated and Church of God fundamentalists, who believe in the “old-time religion” and get their solace (and excitement) in the tents and auditoriums along the “sawdust trail.” The evangelists proclaim in their literature and from their pulpits that their mission is to “bring the message of Christ to the Jews”; this is the basis for their solicitations at the revivals and among missionary-minded Christian laymen. But in their audiences there are no Jews. A curiosity-seeker or an occasional committee of observers from the B’nai B’rith will wander in, but beyond that the only way the evangelists catch the attention of Jews is by the hit-or-miss distribution of tracts and gospels on the streets and from store to store.
Appelman, the most successful of the “Hebrew-Christian” evangelists, is a dynamic speaker endowed with some of the histrionic ability of the late Billy Sunday. A resident of Kansas City, Missouri, Appelman spends most of his time holding revivals in the Carolinas, Tennessee, and Georgia. His “shows” are handled in a thoroughly professional manner, complete with advance man, advertising manager, and musical director. Before his arrival, the surrounding rural and mill communities are placarded with thousands of posters: “Appelman Is Coming-The Jew Who Preaches Christ Crucified.” During his recent revival in Charlotte, Appelman took fifteen quarter-page advertisements in each of the two daily papers at $3.5.0 an inch, total, about $3,000. To meet this large expense an offering is taken up at each meeting. In addition, some outside donations come from businessmen and civic leaders who support all “religious” activities. The average attendance at meetings is two thousand.
Whether conducted by Gentile or Jewish evangelists, the revivals follow the same pattern. Next to the “witnessing” (a term used for the sermon), hymn-singing led by a soloist or a quartet plays the most important part in the services. Usually the meeting is opened with a rendition of “Stand Up, Stand Up for Jesus,” followed by such other tent-meeting favorites as “The Old Rugged Cross,” “Throw Out the Lifeline,” “What a Friend We Have in Jesus,” the doleful “Almost Persuaded,” and the rollicking “When the Roll Is Called Up Yonder, I’ll Be There.” Appelman, conscious of the fact that many a member of the Church of God may be in the audience, includes the sect’s official hymn, “The Great Speckled Bird of God,” sung to the tune of either “Blue Eyes” or “The Wreck of the Old 97.”
The last night of the revival is reserved for the climactic sermon that always draws the largest attendance: “How I Became a Christian”—or, as Appelman advertises, “From Jewish Lawyer in Chicago to a Gospel Preacher for Christ.” On this occasion Appelman asks for a special “love offering” for which his attendants distribute small envelopes bearing the following inscription:
In the name of Jesus Christ
My love offering
To human Appelman
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Appelman can sway his listeners with the best of them, and his performance is constantly interrupted by excited shouts: e.g., “I’ll pray for you, Brother Appelman, and I’ll never smoke again!” While the collection plate is going around, Appelman keeps his audience of farmers and mill hands in stitches with such subtleties as: “Don’t let that plate pass you by—remember, you can’t put it over on a Jew.” And he never misses an opportunity to assure his listeners of their “superiority,” shouting intermittently: “Have mercy and pray for this old Jew!—Pray for all the Jews!—The Jews need your prayers to be saved.” Wherever he goes, Appelman organizes a “prayer group” to hold weekly services in a church or a home to “bring the Jews to Christ.” On many a Monday morning, as a Jewish merchant opens his store, he may not know it but the group of women passing by on the street are on their way to the Baptist church to pray for his salvation.
The “big” sermons of the “Hebrew-Christian” evangelists, in which they describe their conversions, are all cut from the same pattern. Every Jewish evangelist comes from a “very strict Jewish orthodox home,” and had some “rabbinical connections”: either he once studied for the rabbinate or there was a rabbi in the family. Then one day he came across a copy of the New Testament—and saw the light. They all heighten the drama by emphasizing their “Jewishness,” using every trick of the stage or pulpit to fit themselves to the stereotype of the Jew that they know exists in the minds of their listeners. An exaggerated accent and overemphasized gesticulations in speaking are standard. A further emphasis on their “Jewishness” is obtained by the use of Hebrew phrases in sermons and printed tracts. Arthur Glass and Jacob Gartenhaus habitually punctuate their sermons with quotations from Isaiah and the Psalms, which they call “the prophecy,” and, after giving the English translation, they quote from the New Testament, which they call “the fulfilment.” In the autobiography that Arthur U. Michelson sells, there are ten pages of Hebrew passages from the Bible. At least once during a meeting the evangelist repeats in Hebrew a quotation from Isaiah 53:7—“He is brought as a lamb to the slaughter”; then he reads from John 1:29—“John seeth Jesus coming and saith, Behold the lamb of God.” Gartenhaus calls this part of his sermon “the shadow and the substance.”
Most of the converts are foreign-born; probably an American-born Jew would lose most of his appeal as a “Hebrew-Christian” evangelist. Appelman, perhaps, might compete on his own merits as an evangelist, but like the others he chooses to make his appeal as a Jew, i.e., talking as a Jew is supposed to talk, looking and acting as a Jew is supposed to look and act. For the revival audience of Christian fundamentalists, the picture of a Jew witnessing for Christ reinforces their own fire-and-brimstone beliefs—and the effect would be dissipated if the Jew did not live up to their image of a Jew.
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One recurrent theme of the evangelists is the claim that Jews are “not allowed” to read or own a copy of the New Testament. This is why they are not yet in the fold, and it is for the purpose of somehow “getting New Testaments into Jewish hands” that the evangelists solicit funds. They continually belabor the conflict between their “strict Jewish orthodox homes” and their “acceptance of Christ.” Jacob Gartenhaus tells his audience that when he was a little boy in Europe he once found a gold crucifix on the street and when he brought it home to his mother she made him wash his hands “in three waters.” Both Lieberman and Cohen tell how it was necessary to “smuggle” copies of the New Testament into their homes and keep them hidden from relatives. Appelman relates that his conversion came about on a business trip to Kansas City. He rented a room at the YMCA, and one day “there was a knock on the door and a man handed me a copy of the New Testament and wrung from me the promise that I would read it, especially the Gospel of John.” A few days later, while he was still beset with some doubt, his mysterious friend pointed out to him Romans 10:9-“If thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord, Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised Him from the dead, thou shalt be saved.” This convinced Appelman, “and the following Sunday I was baptized. . . . I knew that my people in Chicago would think I had gone crazy. . . . I wired for money . . . none came. . . . I realized that my parents had disowned me, but I was not sad, because a song came into my mind, ‘I Walked and I Talked with the King.’”
Eddie Lieberman was converted while serving a term in prison. A woman welfare worker brought him his copy of the New Testament and helped him in his decision. His sphere of activity is centered in the mill towns around Greenville and Spartanburg in South Carolina. During his revivals a huge banner usually hangs across the main street of the town: HEAR EDDIE LIEBERMAN, the Jew who preaches Christ.
Joseph Cohen calls himself “The Russian Jew Who Preaches Christ,” and advertises himself also as carrier of “The Prophecy Against Communism.” He has a female assistant who shares his billing as “Ruth Drucker, a Brooklyn Jewess Who Preaches the Risen Christ.” Once Cohen called at the store of the only Jew in a small town in Virginia to invite him to his revival; the invitation was declined, Cohen became abusive, and both men raised their voices. That night Cohen’s sermon was devoted to his “suffering” at the hands of his “own people,” and he shouted that “in this very town a Jew spat upon me and threatened me with violence because of my love for Christ!”
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Jacob Gartenhaus, the dean of the “Hebrew-Christian” evangelists, received his copy of the New Testament as he came off the gangplank on his arrival in America: “A Christian lady thrust it into my hands, and when I finally meet her in Glory, I shall fall upon my knees and beg a blessing on her for all eternity.” For many years Gartenhaus was the head of the Hebrew-Christian Alliance, and was also affiliated with the Baptist Board of Missions. Recently, however, he has cut out a good deal of his administrative work and taken to the revival road himself. A veteran with over twenty-five years of this sort of activity in the South behind him, he nevertheless refused to answer when I asked him: “Nu?—How many converts do you have to your credit?”
Martin Chernoff is a beginner, recently come to Georgia from Toronto, Canada. He was an apprentice shohet when his “call” came. He does not conduct revivals of his own, but fills speaking engagements before civic organizations, women’s groups, and Sunday school classes, and sometimes occupies a pulpit at a Sunday evening service in Baptist churches around Atlanta. Many churches include the item “Jewish work” in their home missions budgets, and these funds help defray expenses for speaking engagements and distribution of the various tracts.
Jerome Fleischer, the head of the Southern Evangel to Israel, with headquarters in Charlotte, North Carolina, came to America as a child about twenty-five years ago, and after finishing high school in New York intended to become a partner in his father’s meat market. But during the war a fellow soldier took him to a mission, where he read the Gospels. He was “amazed,” he told me, when he saw that “they contained such names as Abraham, Jacob, and Isaac,” and he immediately realized that “the Gospels were indeed the fulfilment of the Messiah prophecy in the Jewish Bible.” He used his GI Bill benefits for a course at the Moody Bible Institute, was ordained, and came South several years ago. He told me that his great ambition is to “lead his old Jewish mother to Christ before it is too late”; but the elderly woman remains in New York, as “stiff-necked” as ever. Fleischer is a personable young man with a sense of humor, and he calls on Jewish businessmen in the towns he visits; he offers them his tracts, and they, in turn, usually offer him a job.
Arthur U. Michelson, in some ways the most flamboyant of all, operates the Jewish Hope Publishing House in Los Angeles, but directs his appeals to the Southeast through transcribed radio broadcasts. At one time he had as many as forty-two weekly broadcasts beamed to the Carolinas alone. Once or twice a year he follows up these broadcasts with personal appearances under the sponsorship of one of the local churches of the lesser-known Protestant fellowships. He holds two-or three-day revivals at which he sells his autobiography, From Judaism and Law to Christ and Grace. Like Appelman, Michelson had been a lawyer, and the story of his conversion follows the regular pattern—he came across a copy of the New Testament, etc., etc. But Michelson adds that Jesus himself visited him and urged him to “carry the message of Christ to the Jews.” Born in Germany, Michelson claims to have been an “advocate-assessor” in the German legal profession. After his conversion he came to America and was “amazed that so few Jews in this great Christian country knew Christ.” The story Michelson tells is full of incidents of “persecution suffered at the hands of the Jews because of my love for Christ.” He writes: “Ever since the day when the Holy Spirit made it plain to me that the Lord had chosen me to present Christ to my people, they have persecuted me, shouting after me many times, ‘apostate, kill him—burn him!”’
In recent months Michelson’s radio broadcasts in the South have been considerably curtailed, and his solicitation of funds “for starving children in Palestine” has been seriously questioned by Better Business Bureaus in three cities as well as by some broadcasting managers. A few years ago he made a donation of $1,000 to the Youth Aliyah Committee of the Los Angeles Hadassah, and then promptly broadcast the news of his gift as a basis for new solicitations. The Youth Aliyah returned his donation.
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The message of these evangelists is that “Judaism is false, and a sin from which the Jews must be saved.” At the same time, both Gartenhaus and Fleischer protest that they are actually making a “contribution to the fight against anti-Semitism.” They point to the “pleas” they make in every sermon to “love the Jew and pray for the Jew, because only through love and prayer will the Jew accept Jesus.” Granted that nobody has yet discovered the magic formula for combating anti-Semitism, it may still be doubted that these “pleas” represent any contribution to the problem.
The reaction of the non-Jewish community, so far as it can be ascertained, seems to fall into three patterns.
First, that of the members of the evangelists’ audience, who seem to leave the tent or auditorium convinced that all the troubles of the world, including their own, would be cured if only the Jews were led to Christ. The evangelists distribute thousands of pamphlets, free of charge, asking their listeners to carry on the work of propagating the faith among the Jews. Those distributed by Jacob Gartenhaus carry this message: “The Jew has been sick for 2,000 years; in vain has he sought healing and help of his physicians; in vain has he spent all his substance. By contact with Jesus, by the power which goes forth from Jesus, can he find healing.—(After you read this booklet please pass it on to some Jew or Jewess.)” Since the Jews remain stolidly unimpressed, they put themselves in the position of stubbornly refusing to hasten the redemption, and thus, one suspects, the “love” that seeks to convert them may all too easily be transformed into more hostile feelings.
Another kind of reaction is to be found among the genteel anti-Semites at the country-club level, who are likely to regard “Hebrew-Christian” evangelism as “just another Jew scheme to make money.”
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But the vast majority of our Christian neighbors, friends, and associates simply remain amazingly naive. A Gentile friend or neighbor meets you on the street during one of the revivals and, in an obvious attempt to be pleasant, says, “Great work that Appelman is doing, isn’t it?” Occasionally, a Christian clergyman will invite the local rabbi to hear a “great Jewish preacher” during one of these revivals. And this is not for any lack of respect for the rabbi and his congregation: it is just that to many Christian Southerners a Jew is a Jew the way a Frenchman is a Frenchman. More than one Jew in the South has at one time or another been asked in all sincerity: “Are you a Baptist Jew or a Methodist Jew?”
As for the Jews themselves, they maintain a discreet silence. I have never been able to get the name of a single convert from Gartenhaus, Appelman, Fleischer, or any of the other “Hebrew-Christians.” The rabbis deliver no sermons on the activities of the evangelists, the leaders make no statements. Every effort is made to avoid theological disputation. On the other hand, there is an element of risk in extending hospitality, and the few experiments in that direction have been hardly encouraging. Once one of the evangelists was invited to a Jewish temple, and later was a guest at the social hour following the Friday evening service. At his next meeting he shouted: “The Lord led me up into the synagogue last night, and the rabbi and the Jewish leaders are beginning to show interest in our work.” He should live so long.
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