Jewish People

Around half of adults across the world hold antisemitic beliefs and deny the historic facts of the Holocaust. This is according to the latest edition of the largest global study of anti-Jewish attitudes by the Anti-Defamation League, a New York-based advocacy group.

The study surveyed more than 58,000 adults from 103 countries and territories representing 94% of the world’s adult population. It found that 46% of them—which when extrapolated to the global population would equal an estimated 2.2 billion people—display antisemitic attitudes. A fifth of the respondents haven’t heard of the Holocaust, during which six million Jews were killed, while 21% believe it has either been exaggerated by historians or it never happened.

According to the survey, the level of antisemitism in the global adult population has more than doubled since it was launched in 2014. The report is the latest among a number of surveys charting a steep rise in antisemitism across the globe.

As a prisoner in Nazi death camps during World War II, Lily Engelman vowed that—if she survived—she would one day bear witness to the systematic slaughter of Jewish people. After the war, she emigrated from Hungary to Israel, where she found sewing work in a mattress factory. She married another Hungarian-speaking Jew, Shmuel Ebert, who had fled Europe before the war.

Despite her vow, however, she found herself rarely even mentioning the Holocaust after the war. People noticed the number tattooed on her left forearm but didn’t ask questions. They could never fathom the horrors she had endured, she thought. As for her own children, she preferred not to terrify them.

Only in the late 1980s, spurred partly by questions from one of her daughters, did she begin to open up. Resettled in London, she told her story in schools, in gatherings of other survivors and even in the British Parliament. Once she sat in a London train station and talked about the Holocaust with anyone who stopped to listen. In one video recounting her experiences, she says the Holocaust was the first time factories were built to kill people.

Lily Ebert, who died October 9, 2024 at the age of 100, once summed up her mission as trying “to explain the unexplainable.” But one of her obituaries noted that according to Ebert, words really matter. As she explained, “The Holocaust didn’t start with actions. It started with words.”

What did Jesus really look like? Western art has frequently stumbled over the contradiction between the ascetic figure of Jesus of Nazareth and the iconography of Christ inspired by the heroic, Hellenistic ideal: Christ as beautiful, tall, and broad-shouldered, God's wide receiver; blue-eyed, fair-haired, a straight aquiline nose, Christ as European prince.

Rembrandt van Rijn, in a career rich with artistic innovation, begged to differ. An exhibition at Paris's Louvre Museum showed in dozens of oils, charcoal sketches, and oak-panel studies how the 17th-century Dutch painter virtually reinvented the depiction of Jesus and arrived at a more realistic portrait.

Before Rembrandt painters tended to reiterate the conventional imagery of Christ. Where artists did rely on life models, they were uniquely beautiful specimens, such as in Michelangelo's Pietà. Rembrandt, working in the relatively open and tolerant society of Golden Age Holland, turned to life models for Jesus to give an "earthly reality" to the face of Christ. He often relied on one model, a young Dutch Jew, whose face appears in the seven oak panels. The result was a more realistic, culturally-appropriate, and biblical portrayal of Jesus.

The poor and ascetic Jesus likely was small and thin and almost certainly olive-skinned, with black hair and brown eyes, and so Rembrandt painted him. In this he anticipated much more recent studies of what the historical Jesus was like. The savior of Rembrandt's faith was a young man with a sweet, homely face, heavy-lidded, stoop-shouldered, and wan.

Viewing the pictures in order of their creation shows how Rembrandt's own features gradually infiltrated the images of Christ. It feels like the most spiritually edifying aspect of these works: When Rembrandt looked into the face of his Savior, he saw his own.

Rabbis in Israel have spent many years searching for a qualified red heifer. Finally in September of 2022, a Texas man has delivered five red heifers to four Israeli rabbis so the young cows can be slaughtered and burned to produce the ash necessary for a ritual purification prescribed in Numbers 19:2–3.

Some Jews believe the ritual is a step toward the reconstruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. Some Christians believe that “third temple” will set the stage for the Antichrist.

Editor’s Note: The red heifers must be monitored for defects by the rabbis until they are three-years-old. At that time, if unblemished, they would be suitable for use as sacrifices in the red heifer ritual. The Mishnah, which is a written embodiment of Jewish oral tradition, teaches that only nine red heifers were sacrificed from the time of Tabernacle worship until the Second Temple was destroyed in 70 AD.

A series of political, cultural, and social events in the early 1980s led to many Germans to deal honestly with the Nazi horrors of the past. Before 1980 most Germans regarded themselves as victims of the Second World War. Vast numbers had lost family members, friends, colleagues. As the post-war generation was coming of age, "more and more Germans came to grasp the enormity of Nazi crimes against others, especially Jews." The actions of the nationally repentant were numerous and mostly local.

In schools and communities, research soared, as ordinary people … got to work. Teachers, housewives, retirees, and students researched what happened in their neighborhoods. They affixed plaques to destroyed and desecrated synagogues, and restored local cemeteries (often with the help of Jews who could read the Hebrew inscriptions). They figured out the places where Jewish people were deported from and where the barracks of nearby concentration subcamps were located. They also established an enormous network of contacts.

In many communities, Germans wrote letters to Jews who were forced to emigrate or had lost kin in the Holocaust. They wrote to get their stories. They wrote to help identify other Jews from the city, town, or neighborhood. And they wrote to invite them back. In large and small cities communities invited Jewish people to return for a “visitor week,” with the communities typically paying for travel and lodging. People gave speeches, wrote articles, and even books. Some local historians wrote about nefarious hometown Nazis. Other historians worked out the fate that befell local Jews, “members of our community,” as many Germans began to call them.

This German-version of the civil rights movement, if it may be called that, dramatically changed how people in the Federal Republic thought about their history and who belonged to it.

Jewish novelist Andrew Klavan shares his testimony of coming to faith in Christ:

When he was 13-years-old Andrew Klavan received thousands of dollars in gifts at his bar mitzvah. But over time his pleasure in his riches soured and died and he realized the truth—he hated all that they stood for. He writes:

The majesty and profundity of the Jewish coming-of-age ceremony … and of Judaism itself—were lost on me. For the simple reason that my parents did not believe in God. ... Despite our dutiful celebration of Jewish holidays, God had no living presence in our family. We did not say grace before meals or prayers before bedtime. We did not read the Bible at home.

Andrew could not overcome the feeling that in undergoing bar mitzvah he was not being true to himself. So, one winter’s night he took all of his riches and threw them in the trash. With that gesture he hoped to leave Judaism far behind him. For the next 35 years he was a practical atheist.

Yet, as Andrew looked back over his life, he could see that Christ had beckoned to him in many circumstances. The kindness of a Christian baseball player who gave a radio interview that inspired him to keep going when he contemplated suicide. And especially in his marriage that taught him the reality of love and led him to contemplate the greater love that was its source. He writes:

But perhaps most important for a novelist who insisted that ideas should make sense, Christ came to me in stories. I was in my 40s, lying in bed with a novel. One of the characters, whom I admired, said a prayer before going to sleep, and I thought to myself, “Well, if he can pray, so can I.” I laid the book aside and whispered a three-word prayer in gratitude for the contentment I’d found, “Thank you, God.” God’s response was an act of extravagant grace.

I woke the next morning and everything had changed. There was a sudden clarity and brightness to familiar faces and objects. I called this experience “the joy of my joy.” I realized that prayer—that God—had transformed my life utterly, giving me a depth and pleasure of experience, I had never known. I asked God, “How can I thank you for what you’ve done for me? What could I possibly offer you in return?” And as clearly as if he had spoken aloud, God answered, “Now, you should be baptized.”

I was stunned. Nothing could have been further from my mind. I was a realist who believed in science and reason; a worldling who loved sex, politics, and a good single malt scotch. I feared that becoming a Christian would estrange me from my past, my parents, my culture, and from reality itself.

My bar mitzvah had been an empty ritual, devoid of God. But my baptism was the outward expression of an authentic inner conviction. The moment I rose from my knees by the baptismal font, I knew I had stepped through some invisible barrier between myself and a remarkable new journey. Within a week or so, my wife noticed it too: a new joy and easiness. My soul had found its northern star. And that star still leads me on.

Many Jerusalem residents believe not only that the Messiah will return, but that his arrival is imminent--so imminent they have taken legal precautions to ensure they can return to Jerusalem immediately upon his return.

In apartment contracts around the city, there are clauses stipulating what will happen to the apartment if or when the Jewish Messiah comes. Using something called a “Messiah Clause,” the contracts stipulate that, in the event of the coming of the Moshiach, or Jewish redeemer, the lease “may be immediately terminated at the will of the landlord.” The owners, generally religious Jews living abroad, are concerned that he will arrive, build a third temple, and turn Israel into paradise--and they will be stuck waiting for their apartment tenants' contracts to run out before they can move back.

It is prophesied in the Jewish scriptures that there will be no more war, murder, or theft, the Jerusalem Temple will be rebuilt, and all the Jews will return to the land of Israel upon his arrival.

There is no count of how many leases in Jerusalem contain such a clause. But although not standard, the Messiah clause is requested enough that every Jerusalem property manager and real estate lawyer contacted by reporters had heard of it, and all except one had dealt with it firsthand.

The fact is, with only biblical prophecy and the conjecture of religious leaders upon which to rely for sketches of the next world, the level of zeal surrounding the associated legal and spiritual preparations is astonishing. Perhaps it’s all a safety net, just in case the scriptural forecast ends up being correct, but what a statement of faith, nonetheless.

The opinion among the property managers and real estate lawyers was unanimous that their clients would know the Messiah when they saw him. Sarah Eiferman, a real estate agent said, “When he comes, we’ll know. It’s in the Old Testament.”

In the early 1960s, political writer Hannah Arendt attended the trials of Adolf Eichmann, the German officer who had orchestrated much of the Holocaust. In 1934, Eichmann had been appointed to the Jewish section of the “security services” of the SS. From then on, he became deeply involved with the formulation and operation of the “final solution to the Jewish question.” He drew up the idea of deportation of Jews into ghettos, and went about gathering Jews into concentration camps with murderous efficiency. He took great pride in the role he played in the death of six million European Jews.

At his trial, Arendt expected to find a monster. Only a deranged psychopath could lend his considerable organizational skills to the mass murder of millions in Nazi Germany. What stunned Arendt was her startling discovery of a “normal” and “simple” man at the trial. The notorious architect of the Holocaust did not appear as a devil but as a banal bureaucrat doing what he was told.

Hannah Arendt’s book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, provides an unnerving account of unreflective living. Eichmann insisted in the trial that he was not a murderer but that his conscience demanded of him unquestioning submission to the demands of his superiors. Those demands resulted in the calculated deportation of millions of women, children, and men to their orchestrated deaths.

As Arendt reported, psychologists diagnosed Eichmann as “normal” with familial affections that were enviable. Herein lies the horror. Eichmann loved his wife; he was a good father. He was not a monster. He was banal, unremarkable, and commonplace. This “normal” man could be transformed into the abhorrent perpetrator of humanity’s grossest crimes because his banality and ambition kept him from an inner examination of his life.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Eichmann’s crimes seem far removed from anything ordinary people would commit. But without self-reflection and confession, normal people are capable of horrific evil. Psalm 36:2 (“In their blind conceit, they cannot see how wicked they really are,” NLT) has something to say about Eichmann and the banality of evil. It has something to say to us.

On August 11, 2017, the world's oldest man passed away, just a month short of his 114th birthday—making him one of the 10 longest lived men since modern record keeping began. If you knew nothing else about him than this, you might expect to discover that he had led a peaceful life, free of fear, grief, and danger.

The truth is the opposite. The man in question was Yisrael Krystal, a Holocaust survivor. Born in Poland in 1903, he survived for years in the Lodz Ghetto, and was then transported to Auschwitz. In this ghetto, his two children died. In Auschwitz, his wife was killed. When Auschwitz was liberated, he was a walking skeleton weighing a mere 82 pounds. He was the only member of his family to survive.

He was raised as a religious Jew and stayed so all his life. When the war was over, with his entire world destroyed, he married again, this time to another holocaust survivor. They had children. They moved to Israel and centered in Haifa, there he began again, setting up in the confectionary business, as he had done in Poland before the war. He made sweets and chocolate. He became an innovator. If you have ever had Israeli orange peel covered in chocolate, liqueur chocolates shaped like little bottles, and covered with silver foil, you are enjoying one of the products he originated. Those who knew him said he was a man with no bitterness in his soul. He wanted people to taste sweetness.

In CT magazine, writer Dikkon Eberhart shares his personal testimony of progression from theological drifter to Orthodox Jew to a born-again experience with Jesus Christ:

I grew up in the Episcopal Church. But in my high teens and young twenties I drifted. At seminary in Berkeley, California, during the 1970s—I created my own religion. I called it Godianity. Certainly, I believed in the existence of God, hence the name of my religion. But I didn’t know much about that Son of God fellow, and the little I did know seemed impossibly weird.

Then something happened. I married a Jew who was an atheist. Then my wife became pregnant and nine months later, our first daughter squirmed in her mother’s arms. Here’s the sudden realization of an atheist: Such a perfect and beautiful creature must be the gift of God, not the product of some random swirl of atoms. My wife’s atheism bit the dust. Her new God belief was Jewish. My Godianity should have taken notice. “Listen up!” it ought to have heard. “You’re in trouble, too.”

That trouble came five years later. Our daughter and I were swinging in a hammock under a tree on a windy day. Normally an eager chatterer, our daughter fell silent and then said, “Daddy, I know there’s a God.” I was enchanted. “How, sweetie?” She pointed at the tree and its leaves. “You can’t see God. He’s like the wind. You can’t see the wind, but the wind makes the leaves move. You can’t see God, but you know he’s there, because he makes the people move, like the leaves.”

My heart swelled with love for this perceptive child, but then she crushed me. She continued, “Daddy, what do we believe?” Really, what she was asking was, “Mommy’s kind of Jewish. You’re kind of Christian. So what am I?” And despite my three advanced religious degrees and seminary employment, I couldn’t answer.

In that instant, I shucked my Godianity. Right away, my wife and I retreated into an urgent executive session. She was a Jew who was no longer an atheist. We resolved, we shall raise our children as Jews. And we did—as Reform Jews. Yet I still teetered on uneven ground, conscious of being an outsider. Then something else happened. During services on the eve of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, God spoke to me: “If you should desire to come to me, my door is open to you.” Right away, I knew I needed to become a Jew myself, and three years later my conversion was complete.

For some time, my wife and I had noticed something: While Reform Judaism respects Torah, many Reform Jews themselves were selective in their adherence to its strictures. But we objected. We wanted a faith that wasn’t in the habit of accommodating itself to the surrounding culture.

Across our rural road, there happened to be a small Baptist church. Some of our neighbors had invited us to visit, in case we Jews should ever want to know more about Christ. We realized that—oddly—these neighbors seemed concerned for our souls.

More than a year later, desperate for direction, I crossed the road to the church one Sunday morning. That day, the pastor was preaching from 1 Timothy. I was astonished to hear a Baptist preacher using Old Testament references within his message—and with accurate Hebrew nuance. The pastor and I began meeting each week and my wife frequented the women’s Bible study. She and I began devouring book after book, faster and faster, thrilled by each new discovery of seemingly impossible truths that were actually true.

Even as a Jew, I knew the Passion story. But it occurred to me that maybe, just maybe, that story might be real—and if it were, then everything would need to change. Our Torah-based lives would be as dead and ineffectual as Godianity. Instead, we would give our souls to the personal love of the Incarnation, the God-man who dwelt among us. We realized that the Old Testament begged for the climax of the New Testament.

It took nine months, an appropriate duration for re-birth, before I committed myself to Jesus. My wife did the same three months later. Our younger two children followed soon thereafter. When God spoke to me in the synagogue all those years ago, inviting me through his open doorway, I had assumed he was summoning me into Judaism. Little did I know he was actually calling me to Christ.

In the book, The Zookeeper's Wife, author Diane Ackerman describes the brutal occupation of Warsaw, Poland by the Nazis. The Warsaw Zoo became a hiding place for members of the Resistance and Jewish refugees.

Keeping one person alive often required putting a great many in jeopardy. It tested them nonstop as they resisted both propaganda and death threats. Yet 70,000-90,000 people in Warsaw, or about one-twelfth of the city's population, risked their lives to help neighbors escape. Besides the rescuers and Underground helpers, there were maids, postmen, milkmen, and many others who didn't inquire about extra faces or extra mouths to feed.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Many working together, doing even a little, can do much to conquer evil.

At 101-years-old, Eddie Jaku has over a century of wisdom and life experience to draw from—and he's trying to use it to help others see the world in a more positive light. The self-described "happiest man in the world" has given a TED Talk and written a book about his philosophy.

Jaku is also a Holocaust survivor. He was born in Germany and said that “I thought I lived in the most civilized, most cultured and certainly the most educated country in Europe. And I was German first, and German second, and Jewish at home.”

On November 9, 1938, after Nazi forces burned synagogues and destroyed Jewish homes, stores and other property, Jaku returned home from boarding school to an empty home. In the morning, he was taken to Buchenwald concentration camp. Over the course of years, Jaku and his family reunited, escaped and lived in hiding. But in 1943, they were arrested again and sent to Auschwitz.

Jaku said, "I was finally transported to my hell on Earth, Auschwitz. My parents and my sister were also transported to Auschwitz, and I was never to see my parents again." More than 6six million Jewish people were killed in the Holocaust. In 1945, Jaku was sent on a "death march" but escaped into the wilderness. He was rescued in June of that year.

Jaku said that after the war, he was miserable—until he met his wife, Flore, and started a family. He said, “Eighty years ago, I didn't think I (would) have a wife and children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren. This is a blessing."

Jaku said that despite his experiences, he does not hate anyone. "Hate is a disease that may destroy your enemy, but will also destroy you in the process. Where there is life is hope. If there's no more hope, you're finished.”

He added, “Family and friends are key to that hope. Friendship is priceless. Shared sorrow is half sorrow, but shared pleasure is double.” He said that he hopes his story inspires others to make positive choices every day. “I want to make this world a better place for everyone. I want everyone to take a step back and say ‘We are here for all of us.’”

You can watch his TED talk here.

In a recent issue of CT Magazine, Astronomer David Block tells how he learned that the same God who numbered the stars knew and loved him personally:

I grew up a Jewish boy in a South African gold-mining town known as Krugersdorp. I remember sitting in (synagogue), enthralled as our learned rabbi expounded how God was a personal God—he would speak to Moses, to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and to many others. Growing up, I often pondered how I fit into all this.

By the time I entered the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, I was deeply concerned that I had no assurance that God was indeed a personal God. I was confident that he was a historical God who had delivered our people from the hands of Pharaoh. But he seemed so far removed from the particulars of my life. Where was the personality and the vibrancy of a God who truly could speak to me?

I became friendly with Professor Lewis Hurst. He had a great interest in astronomy, and we would discuss the complexities of the cosmos for hours at a time. I remember attending a meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society graced by Stephen Hawking. The atmosphere there was intellectually stimulating, but inwardly I could tell that something, or someone, was missing. To be brutally honest, I did not know God.

Back in South Africa, my friendship with Professor Hurst grew, and I started sharing with him my thoughts and feelings about the cosmos. I said, “The universe is so beautiful, both visually and mathematically.” The idea of the universe being designed by a Master Artist continued to resonate with me, but I struggled to find evidence that this artist had any interest in knowing me personally.

I shared further doubts: “Are we,” as Shakespeare said in Macbeth, “just a fleeting shadow that appears and then disappears? What is our reason for living? What is the purpose of life? Is it possible to have a personal encounter with the creator of the cosmos?”

Hurst listened intently. He said, “There is an answer to all the questions you are asking. I am well aware that you come from an Orthodox Jewish family, but would you be willing to meet with a dear friend of mine, the Reverend John Spyker?”

My Jewish parents had taught me to seek answers wherever they might be found, so I consented to meet with this Christian minister. Taking the Bible in his hands, Spyker turned to Romans 9:33 where Paul affirms that Y’shua (Jesus) is a stumbling stone to the Jewish people but that those who freely choose to believe in him will never be ashamed.

By divine grace, suddenly everything became perfectly clear. Y’shua was the stumbling stone—my stumbling stone! Jesus had fulfilled all the messianic prophecies in the Hebrew Scriptures (where the Messiah would be born, how he was to die, and much else besides). While most Jewish people today are still awaiting the Messiah’s coming, I knew I had found him and that all I had to do was respond to his free offer of grace.

Immediately, I asked Spyker to pray for me, which he did. And on that day, at the age of 22, I surrendered my heart and my reason to Christ Jesus. His Spirit spread through every cell of my being.

(Reflecting on my early days), I realize they had been infused by God’s grace. He had been planting spiritual seeds every time I gazed up into the heavens. And I still marvel that a God so majestic and powerful would know my name—and love me as intimately as his own begotten Son.

The PBS documentary titled, GI Jews: Jewish Americans In World War II is about the 550,000 Jewish Americans who served their country in World War II. There was remarkable heroism, but also great loss endured by the Jewish soldiers and nurses.

As American forces marched through Hitler's Europe in the winter of 1944, rumors that the Nazis were murdering Jewish prisoners of war continued to spread. Hearing news that Jewish soldiers in the Soviet army had been singled out and shot, some American officers encouraged their men to destroy their dog tags.

On December 16, deep in the Ardennes Forest in Belgium, the Germans launched a massive assault on American forces. This became known as the Battle of the Bulge. 19,000 Americans died in the Battle of the Bulge, and 15,000 more were captured.

The documentary then focuses on Sergeant Lester Tanner and his unit as they were taken prisoner in late January. He and the other officers were moved to a prison camp called Stalag IX A.

Lester Tanner said:

When the Germans came at us in force, I threw away my dog tags, which had my religion on it. The (Germans) announced that the Jews had to form up in front of the barracks the next morning, and those who did not would be shot.

Narrator:

Master Sergeant Roddie Edmonds, a Protestant from Knoxville, Tennessee, was known for his strong leadership and deep moral conviction. He was the commanding officer in charge of the 1,275 American prisoners.

Tanner continues:

Master Sergeant Roddie Edmonds said, “We will all be there in the morning in formation, and I will be at the head.” The next morning, we were lined up. German Major Siegmann marched over. “Roddie said to him, 'We're all Jews here. Siegmann said, 'You can't all be Jews.’”

The German took out his Luger, pointed it at Roddie's forehead, and said, “You will order the Jewish-American soldiers to step forward, or I will shoot you right now.”

Edmonds replied “Major, you can shoot me, but if you do, you're going to have to shoot all of us. We know who you are, and this war is almost over, and you will be a war criminal.” The major spun around and went back to his barracks, and Roddie dismissed the men.

Edmonds saved nearly 200 Jewish-American men that day. They would never forget the extraordinary risk he took on their behalf.

You can watch the video here (timestamp: 55 min 31 sec –58 min 49 sec).

In 2013, New York City narcotics agents announced an unusual indictment of five Brooklyn men. These types of indictments are, unfortunately, commonplace in metropolitan areas like New York, but this one did stand out.

The men who were charged were members of a Sabbath-observant drug ring. Though cavalier about New York’s drug laws, the group was scrupulous about observing the Sabbath. Text messages from members of the gang show them alerting their clientele of their weekly sundown-to-sunset hiatus.

Text messages, used as evidence against the group, included group chats to clients, “We are closing 7:30 on the dot and we will reopen Saturday 8:15 so if u need anything you have 45 mins to get what you want." The name of the NYPD sting operation that led to the drug bust: "Only After Sundown."

It's hard to imagine that anything literally hanging from utility poles across Manhattan could be considered "hidden." But throughout the borough, about 18 miles of translucent wire stretches around the skyline, and most people have likely never noticed. It's called an eruv (pronounced “ay-rube”) and its existence is thanks to the Jewish Sabbath.

On the Sabbath, which is viewed as a day of rest, observant Jewish people aren't allowed to carry anything—books, groceries, even children—outside the home (doing so is considered "work"). The eruv encircles much of Manhattan, acting as a symbolic boundary that turns the very public streets of the city into a private space, much like one's own home. This allows people to freely communicate and socialize on the Sabbath—and carry whatever they please—without having to worry about breaking Jewish law.

As the writer Sharonne Cohen explains, eruvin were created by “the sages of the Talmud” to get around traditional prohibitions on carrying “house keys, prayer books, canes or walkers, and even children who cannot walk on their own.” New York City isn't the only metropolis in the US with an eruv. They are also in St. Louis, Atlanta, Baltimore, Chicago, Dallas, and numerous other cities across the country.

A cynic might wonder at the effort required to string wire around huge swaths of public space, in order to allow adherents of a religion to do what the tenets of that religion would otherwise prohibit. Even some religiously-minded observers might find it hard to imagine a God that wouldn’t regard this as the flagrant concoction of a city-sized loophole.

Possible Preaching Angle:

1) Excuses; Rationalization - We might shake our heads to think that anyone could believe that they could get around God’s law using this scheme. But in retrospect, aren’t we guilty of the same thing when we push the boundaries and think that we can get away with finding a loophole in God’s laws when we sin? 2) Jewish People; Law; Sabbath - As a positive illustration, this might be a loophole but at least this story shows how seriously our Jewish friends take their commitment to honor the Sabbath.

Rabbi Adam Mintz, co-president of the Manhattan eruv, talks more about it in this video.

Mary Jo Sharp writes in her book, Why I Still Believe, “There’s something else going on here. Humans don’t always ‘believe it when they see it.’” She then offers the example of General Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was careful to document his visit to a concentration camp during the Second World War.

In an April 1945 letter to George C. Marshall, he wrote this about his visit to a concentration camp in Germany: “The things I saw beggar description … The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty and bestiality were so overpowering as to leave me a bit sick … I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to ‘propaganda.’”

Eisenhower ordered the collection of documentation of the Holocaust, resulting in 80,000 feet of film footage, which was used as evidence in the Nuremberg trials. Eisenhower also collected numerous photos, including ones of himself at concentration camps to provide evidence of first-hand witness.

Yet it didn’t take long for Holocaust deniers to appear. These deniers are people who have access to an abundance of testimony and evidence of the existence of the Holocaust. Somehow, with all the evidence available, the Holocaust deniers remain unconvinced of this horrific event in human history.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

Apologetics; Resurrection of Christ; Unbelief – So also many deny the resurrection of Jesus, in spite of “many convincing proofs that He was alive” (Acts 1:3) and hundreds of eyewitnesses (1 Cor. 15:6).

Writer/historian John Dickson writes about a social media post that annoyed his atheist friends. It was a portion of a 1929 interview of Albert Einstein by journalist George Viereck. What annoyed them was Einstein’s admiration for a historical figure found in the New Testament Gospels.

Veireck: To what extent are you influenced by Christianity?

Einstein: As a child, I received instruction both in the Bible and in the Talmud. I am a Jew, but I am enthralled by the luminous figure of the Nazarene.

Veireck: You accept the historical existence of Jesus?

Einstein: Unquestionably! No one can read the Gospels without feeling the actual presence of Jesus. His personality pulsates in every word. No myth is filled with such life. How different, for instance, is the impression which we receive from an account of legendary heroes of antiquity like Thesus. Thesus and other heroes of his type lack the authentic vitality of Jesus.

Dickson writes,

I literally had folks suggesting Veireck’s interview itself was a fraud, even though – as I pointed out – it was published in one of 20th-century America’s most widely read magazines. I had to dig it out of the archives and post screenshots of the relevant pages of the interview before some would believe that Einstein said such a thing … Such is the power of preference to shape what we believe!

In the fall of 1943 German soldiers began rounding up Jews in Italy and deporting them by the thousands to concentration camps. Simultaneously a mysterious and deadly disease called “Syndrome K” swept through the city of Rome causing dozens of patients to be admitted to the Fatebenefratelli Hospital. The details of the disease are sketchy, but the symptoms include persistent coughing, paralysis, and death. The disease was said to be highly contagious.

But “Syndrome K” was different. There was no mention of it in medical textbooks, and outside of the hospital staff, nobody had heard of it before. It sounded similar to tuberculosis, a terribly frightening disease at that time. When the German soldiers went to raid the hospital, the doctors explained the disease to the soldiers and what lay behind the closed doors. None of them dared to go in. And that’s how at least a hundred Jews who were taking refuge at the hospital escaped death. “Syndrome K” was a made-up disease.

The disease was created by Giovanni Borromeo, the hospital’s head physician, to save Jews and anti-fascists who sought refuge there. Borromeo began providing Jews a safe haven in the hospital from 1938, the year Italy introduced antisemitic laws. In October 1943, the Nazis raided a Jewish ghetto in Rome. Many Jews fled to Fatebenefratelli, where Borromeo admitted them as “patients.” The refugees were diagnosed with a new fatal disease—“Syndrome K”—in order to identify them from the actual patients.

When the Nazis came to visit, patients were instructed to cough a lot whenever soldiers passed by their door. The ruse worked. “The Nazis thought it was cancer or tuberculosis, and they fled like rabbits,” said Dr. Vittorio Sacerdoti during an interview with BBC in 2004, sixty years after the event.

How many lives “Syndrome K” actually saved is hard to tell, but accounts vary from two dozen to over a hundred. After the war, Borromeo was honored by the Italian government by awarding the Order of Merit and the Silver Medal of Valor. He died in 1961 at his own hospital. He was posthumously recognized as a “Righteous Among the Nations” by the Israeli government.

Possible Preaching Angles: Lying; Protection; Racism; Rescue – In the tradition of Rahab (Josh. 2:1-24) and the Egyptian midwives (Exodus 1:10-22) lives were protected from an attempt to murder God’s people. Concealing the truth by telling a lie to protect innocent lives appears to be accepted by God during persecution and extreme situations.