c. 2003 Religion News Service

TORONTO _ A tense three-week game of theological warfare played out on the streets of Toronto and its Jewish suburbs over the last month as Jews for Jesus pressed an aggressive campaign to win Jewish souls for Christianity.

About 15 followers of the evangelical group came to Toronto to conduct a splashy drive called “Behold Your God.” Launched in 2001, the five-year, $22 million campaign is intended to spread the Christian gospel in 66 cities outside Israel with Jewish populations of 25,000 and more. It already has reached Jews in 22 cities, including Tehran, Istanbul, Minsk, Budapest and Detroit.

Toronto’s Jewish community, which considers Jews for Jesus and similar groups deceptive for blurring the line between Judaism and Christianity, mounted a military-style response.

Jews for Judaism, the counter-missionary group, deployed two shifts of three or four volunteers daily in what the group called “sorties” to shadow the missionaries on busy street corners in a war of religious tracts.

Jews for Judaism said it took great care not to confront Jews for Jesus or engage in aggressive behavior. The counter-missionaries stood only a few feet away from the adversaries, handing out their own leaflets and engaging the occasional passersby in conversation.

“Our volunteers were carefully screened and given clear direction not to engage the Jews for Jesus campaigners and not to even talk to them,” said Rabbi Michael Skobac, education director of the Toronto branch of Jews for Judaism.

“We kept our distance and stayed on public property. We didn’t engage in shouting matches and weren’t confrontational in any way,” said Jews for Judaism’s Toronto director Julius Ciss, himself a former “Hebrew-Christian” who returned to Judaism in 1976.

Almost every day for three weeks, Ciss and several volunteers donned Jews for Judaism T-shirts, grabbed a cooler of cold drinks and piled into a donated minivan to scour the streets for the Christian missionaries.

“We had a 50-50 chance of catching them,” Ciss said, noting the Jews for Jesus followers are identified by their own brightly-colored T-shirts and brochures.

“We had 80 volunteers ready at a moment’s notice and others on stand-by. We had sorties going out twice a day. The problem is, (Jews for Jesus volunteers) were out earlier in the morning and stayed out later at night.”

The atmosphere at Jews for Judaism’s office in a Jewish suburb north of Toronto resembled that of a bunker: Brochures were stacked high. Cell phones rang steadily to reveal the other side’s position, followed by lightning deployment of volunteers fresh from training.

The cat-and-mouse tactics resulted in few confrontations between the two sides.

While groups of four to six Jews for Jesus have threatened to call police to allege they were harassed, the law was involved only once _ at a busy downtown intersection where three officers were stopped by Jews for Jesus, who said they were being shadowed and bothered by Jews for Judaism. Unimpressed, the officers said the counter-missionaries were doing nothing illegal.

Jews for Jesus targeted busy corners with high pedestrian traffic. They also went door-to-door in Jewish areas to hand out leaflets. The group reportedly printed 300,000 brochures for the Toronto blitz.

In the counter-effort, Jews for Judaism mailed 55,000 copies of an eight-page booklet titled “Missionary Impossible,” which detailed what Jews for Jesus is about and how to respond to them.

Jews for Judaism charged that several Jewish-sounding surnames, including “Katz,” received unsolicited telephone calls from Jews for Jesus.

The counter-missionary campaign saw a well-publicized success when a Jews for Jesus billboard was taken down from a Jewish section of the city only hours after it went up.

Russian-language brochures were delivered to members of the city’s 30,000-strong Russian-speaking Jewish community, which the missionaries are said to specifically target.

The Jewish community also responded with a “Proud to be Jewish” campaign and set up a telephone hotline to answer concerns and questions.

Community officials noted proudly that Toronto mounted the strongest resistance of any city to date to the presence of Jews for Jesus.

But the Canadian director of Jews for Jesus complained his group’s message was lost in the din.

“The issue is not whether or not we’re Jewish,” said Andrew Barron. “Rather than interacting with our message, we’re called sinister or deceptive. (We’re accused of) preying on ignorant people. This keeps people from considering the claims of Jesus.”

People are free to ignore the message, he added. “It’s a free country.”

DEA END CSILLAG