c. 1999 Religion News Service
UNDATED _ The Canadian Jewish Congress is battling to stop a Christian missionary group from registering a stylized Jewish menorah as its official trademark.
The CJC challenged the trademark application last Friday (Jan. 8) in Ottawa after finding out Chosen People Ministries, which tries to convert Jews to Christianity, has applied to the Canadian Intellectual Properties office to use a menorah on ball caps, mugs, calendars and bumper stickers.
Mark Weintraub, national communications officer for the CJC, called the trademark application”scandalous”and”immoral.” The CJC, he said, will also resist Chosen People Ministries’ attempt to convince Jews that Jesus is the messiah their religion seeks.
The group’s appropriation of a seven-candle menorah symbol amounts to”religious and cultural domination,”Weintraub said.
He said the Jewish organization became aware Chosen People Ministries wanted to register the menorah as a trademark only after two sympathetic lawyers noted its November application in an industry journal. The expected legal tussle between the CJC and Chosen People Ministries will explore the question of whether a religion can lay exclusive claim to its symbols.
Chosen People Ministries in the United States has also applied to make the menorah a trademark, said an official in its New York office, who would not give her name.
Scholars say the menorah was first mentioned in the book of Exodus and probably stood in the Second Jerusalem Temple. It has now become a national symbol of modern Israel.
But Larry Rich, Canadian director of Chosen People Ministries, said the menorah is a legitimate Christian symbol because Jesus and the early Christians were Jews who reinterpreted the symbols of the Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament.
Alan Shore, a Washington state resident who works for Chosen People Ministries in Vancouver, British Columbia, insisted it is not unethical for his group to use the menorah because it’s not doing so”deceptively.” His group, which has several hundred members across Canada, has used the simple, stylized menorah, alongside its name, for more than a decade.
He said he believes Christians are”fulfilled”Jews.
James I. Packer, a prominent professor of theology on both sides of the border who teaches at Vancouver’s evangelical Regent College, said Chosen People Ministries may be taking a needlessly”tactless”and”imperialistic”approach by trying to make the menorah its legal trademark.
At the same time, Packer, who is considered one of the top conservative evangelical theologians in North America, disagrees with groups such as the CJC that argue”you can’t be a Jewish Christian.” Judaism has become much more insular and”anti-Christian”than it was in the first century after Jesus because of centuries of Christian persecution, Packer said.
Although many liberal Christians would disagree, Packer in principle supports groups such as Chosen People Ministries and Jews for Jesus because he believe it’s obligatory for Christians to try to convert Jews. Yet Packer insists Christian evangelization must be done in an open way, without demeaning or condemning those who don’t become Christians.
The CJC’s Weintraub said he agreed there is room in”the marketplace of ideas for any religion to try to welcome people into their tent.” But, he added, the Canadian Jewish group is particularly offended by the approach of Chosen People Ministries because it inappropriately uses a Jewish symbol to”target the vulnerable,”such as new immigrant Jews and young people who aren’t firm in their faith.
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