Tsiyon Messianic Community

American Idol Finalist Shares of His Faith in Messiah and His Goals, in Video

Aimee Herd (December 12, 2008)
"…I said I wanted to be a loving father, a faithful husband, and a servant of all. I very much want to be those things…"

American Idol (AI) finalist, Jason Castro, openly shares his faith in a video on the site: IAmSecond.com.

Filmed in a cutting-edge, but very low-key style, the video shows Jason with his guitar and without, candidly talking about his song choice in one of the weeks on the show, and of how he came to accept Yahshua* as his Savior.

Regarding the song Hallelujah, by Jeff Buckley, which he performed on AI, Jason says, "…that word 'halleluYah.' It's a special word—a word reserved for The Creator. To be able to say that on a stage in front of millions of people, and to praise my King, it was… I got real excited about that."

After Jason performed that song last season, it immediately rocketed to #1 on the iTunes download chart.

"Music has that power… to move, or to just give you emotions of any kind," says Jason in the video. "That's where I've given my heart to Messiah, and I think that comes through, [though] sometimes people don't know what it is. They're like, 'What is it?'—people are drawn to it, they don't know but it's there behind the music, there's something bigger. There's always something bigger behind whatever you're doing.

"American Idol asked us to sum up our life's goals, and I said I wanted to be a loving father, a faithful husband, and a servant of all. I very much want to be those things, but I think the 'servant of all' is the main thing. That's what Yahshua* came to be, that's what we're called to be—to give our life for ELOHIM, for those around us, and to give our life for the good fight. That's what I'm here to do."

To watch Jason Castro's video, follow the source link provided.

Source: Jason Castro - IAmSecond.com
 
P/s * denotes edited text.

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What a testimony and courage from a young man, who is passionate about his faith and walk in the Messiah!
May ABBA YHWH bless, guide and keep him under His covering. May he fight a good fight, in Yahshua's Name, Amein!
Ester.

                                           Kinglake, Australia Resident says It was a "Miracle" and by the "Grace of YAHWEH*" that He Survived
Aimee Herd (February 17, 2009)
"When I was in the fire I thought 'this is just like hell.'"
(Kinglake, Australia)—Jason Lynn experienced horror and grace in the same afternoon during the recent Victoria bushfires in Australia that left massive devastation in their wake.
(To watch the Herald-Sun video report, CLICK HERE.)

Lynn's wife, Ruth, and two children had fled to neighboring town Yea for safety, while Jason stayed behind in an effort to stave off the fire from his property. However, as all too many discovered, there was no way to stop the raging inferno whose flames were leaping and catapulting toward the house, and soon there would be no escape whatsoever. (Photo by: Fiona Hamilton)
"You do fire guard meetings and they show you what it (fire) is like," Lynn told the Herald-Sun. "It comes along the ground, but this thing just came in the sky on the trees.
"When I was in the fire I thought 'this is just like hell,'" he added.
Jason retreated to the roof of his shed with buckets of water as the fire approached, but it began burning from within and exploded—throwing the 35-year-old man to the ground.
Struggling just to get a breath, Jason began running toward a paddock and then for a dam near the back of his property. His boss called him on his cell, urging him to use every last ounce of strength to get to the safety of the dam.
"I just kept going and I could feel the bank of the dam," said Lynn. At this point, he could only crawl, and sensing lightheadedness, he didn't venture in too far, but laid his head in the mud on the side of the dam.
Staying on the cell phone, Jason—bordering delirium by now—listened to the voices of friends and his minister talking to him, trying to keep him conscious.

"They were trying to tell me stuff and I just said 'just listen to me. Tell my wife and my kids that I love them'. I said I can't hang on much longer," he said.
But Jason was able to persevere until help arrived, and he was rescued. He told the Herald-Sun that his survival was a "miracle" and "by the grace of YHWH*."
To read the Herald-Sun account, use the source link provided.
Source: Gareth Trickey – Herald-Sun
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* Denotes edited text.

[size=10pt]British Court Justice Shakes the Nation:

Only Reaffirmation of Marriage Can Mend Britain's Broken Family Structure
Teresa Neumann (June 18, 2009)

"There is no quick-fix solution, although the reaffirmation of marriage as the gold standard would be a start: statistically, it has proved to be the most enduring relationship, and the best environment for children."

(United Kingdom)—UK newspapers are buzzing this week with statements from Justice Paul Coleridge who claims that only marriage can mend "broken Britain." The sensation his stand is causing in Britain may not get much airtime in the U.S., but it is here for you;  read about it.

Listing a litany of statistics regarding children from broken homes, The Daily Mail quoted Coleridge as saying marriage should be promoted by the government to end the "social anarchy of family breakdown." Coleridge also said mothers and fathers "who fail to commit to each other [are] engaging in a game of 'pass the partner' that has left millions of children scarred for life."

The Telegraph U.K. ran a commentary by Coleridge which read, in part: "There is a tendency, especially among the chattering classes, to assume that we have attained a social utopia, in which we are entirely and happily free from taboos, stigmas and other constraints on behaviour. It sounds so beguiling: let us all do what we want, when we want and sort out any mess as we go along.

"But surely the test of any social change is whether it enhances people's lives or makes them more miserable. And this is where I take issue with the modern view of the family. If it is so successful, why are the statistics for separation so large? More significantly, why are the family courts overwhelmed with cases involving damaged, miserable or disturbed children? How do other children, caught up in less serious separations, really feel? Do they relish the endless changes of partner, or adapting to a new step-parent and step-siblings?

"In the end, however," concludes Coleridge, "it is the behavior of individuals that has driven us here, and it is only changes in behavior that can make a radical difference. The time has come for a major examination of all the issues surrounding family life, so that we can stand back and remold our behavior for the benefit of us all—especially our children."

God bless you, Justice Coleridge.

Source: Paul Coleridge - The Telegraph U.K.

WOW!! what a fantastic Justice! Needless to say-We need more such MAN like him, who will use his position to uphold true family values!
What a blessing for UK, and a fine role- model ! ABBA YHWH's Presence with him and his household always! Amein, amein! Ester. [/size]

Friday, July 3, 2009

Israeli Supreme Court declares Messianic bakery ‘kosher‘

By Michael Ireland
Chief Correspondent, ASSIST News Service

JERUSALEM , ISRAEL (ANS) -- A bakery in Ashdod, Israel, owned by a Messianic Jew, may now continue to bake its own kind of bread, according to a news report from the International Christian Embassy Jerusalem (ICEJ).

Following a lengthy legal battle, Israel's Supreme Court on Monday (June 29) ordered the Chief Orthodox Rabbinate to grant 'kashrut' (or 'kosher') certification to an Ashdod bakery owned by a Messianic Jew, a decision likely to spark further confrontation between the nation's highest legal arbiter and the ultra-Orthodox community.

 
Challah Bread
 
In its verdict, the court ruled that the 51-year-old Yemenite baker's belief that Yeshua was the Messiah did not make her baked goods unkosher.

Furthermore, ICEJ reports, the court found that the Chief Rabbinate Council had exceeded the authority granted them by the Kashrut Law when they demanded that the bakery meet special conditions such as promising not to engage in missionary activity and turning the keys to the bakery over to a kashrut supervisor, conditions demanded solely because the owner is a Messianic Jew.

The ICEJ report says the owner, Pnina Conforty, who became a believer while working in Ohio for an evangelical  family, enjoyed impressive business success after returning to Israel and opening the bakery in 2002.

ICEJ says Conforty, however, quickly saw a sharp decline in sales after her faith was publicized in an article in a Messianic Jewish magazine. She suffered from demonstrations outside her bakery and posters with her picture distributed throughout the city warning that she was a missionary.

"Finally I won. This is my baby," said Conforty after giving credit to the Ohio family that led her to Messiah.

"God arranged it that I arrived at a place where there were Christians who love Israel more than most Jews do. Their love and faith were so different from the religion I learned at home that was based on fear. I was never taught to serve G-D out of love until then," she said.

According to the online encyclopaedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kashrut  , Kashrut (also kashruth or kashrus, כַּשְׁרוּת) refers to Jewish dietary laws.

Food in accord with halakha (Jewish law) is termed 'kosher' in English, from the Ashkenazi pronunciation of the Hebrew term kashér (כָּשֵׁר), meaning "fit" (in this context, fit for consumption by Jews according to traditional Jewish law).

Jews who keep kashrut may not consume non-kosher food, but there are no restrictions on non-dietary use of non-kosher products, for example, injection of insulin of porcine origin.

Food that is not in accordance with Jewish law is called treif (Yiddish: טרײף or treyf, derived from Hebrew: טְרֵפָה‎ trēfáh). In the technical sense, treif means "torn" and refers to meat which comes from an animal killed by another animal, killed with a dull knife (so that it felt pain) or having a defect that renders it unfit for slaughter.

Many of the basic laws of kashrut are derived from the Torah's Books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy, with their details set down in the oral law (the Mishnah and the Talmud) and codified by the Shulchan Aruch and later rabbinical authorities.

The Torah does not explicitly state the reason for most kashrut laws, and many varied reasons have been offered for these laws, ranging from philosophical and ritualistic, to practical and hygienic.

Islam has a related but different system, named 'halal', and both systems have a comparable system of ritual slaughter (shechita in Judaism and Dabīhah in Islam).

                          Arabs of Jewish Descent in Israel
by Hillel Fendel 

Up to 85 percent of Arabs in greater Israel stem from Jewish ancestors, it is estimated. Some of them want to become fully Jewish, but most are scared to even talk about it.

“In our search for the lost Ten Tribes in India and Afghanistan, we seem to have forgotten to look for their descendants in our very own backyard.” So says the narrator in a new film about the efforts of a former hi-tech pioneer named Tzvi MiSinai to search out the Jewish roots of Israel's Arab enemies – and to inform them of their Judaic heritage.

[weJe Email readers please click here to see the video footage.

MiSinai has spent about a half-million shekels, he estimates, on these efforts. They include visiting dangerous places deep inside Palestinian Authority-controlled territory, hearing the stories of Arabs who remember observing Jewish customs, and distributing literature to Jews and Arabs alike.

One Arab says his father told him the secret of his family’s Jewishness on his deathbed, while another one, on the backdrop of a photo of the saintly Cabalistic sage Rabbi Abuchatzeira on his wall, says their roots have been known in his family for generations. Wrapping what apparently used to be kosher tefillin on his arm, he says, “My father used to do this, and he taught us to do it whenever someone was sick or in trouble.”


The Jews Who Didn't Leave

It is generally accepted that most Jews left the Land of Israel after the failed Bar Kokhba revolt in 135 CE. Yet many remained, and of these, many are still here, after having been forced to convert to Islam. “It turns out that a large part of the Arabs of the Land of Israel are actually descendants of forced converts to Islam over the years,” says Rabbi Dov Stein of the nascent Sanhedrin rabbinical council. “There are some studies that say that 85 percent of the Arabs in Israel are descended from Jews; others say there are fewer.”

Ben-Gurion Agrees

The claims are not new. Early Zionist leaders David Ben-Gurion and Yitzchak Ben-Tzvi wrote in a book 100 years ago: “If we investigate the origins of the Felahim, there is no doubt that much Jewish blood runs in their veins.” The authors implied that these Jews loved the Land so much that they were willing to give up their religion. The reference is probably to an edict in the year 1012 by Caliph el-Hakim, who ordered the non-Muslims to either convert or leave the Land of Israel. It is estimated that 90 percent of the Jews chose the former, though many continued to practice Judaism in secret. The decree was revoked 32 years later - apparently too late for about 75 percent of the converts.

Tzvi MiSinai continues to convince Arabs in Judea and Samaria that they are likely Jewish. The film shows him passing through the Gush Etzion checkpoint and distributing  pamphlets both to Israeli soldiers – “so that you’ll know who you’re checking here” – and to the Arabs waiting there – “so that you’ll know who the majority of you are.” Asked by an Arab if he is from the peace movement, MiSinai answers, “Yes, yes, peace, so that we can live together as one nation.”

The Sawarka Bedouin Jews

One place where MiSinai has apparently found very strong Jewish roots is in the Bedouin tribe known as the Sawarka. There are about 3-4,000 of them throughout the Sinai and the Negev, and they “are all Jewish,” says a tribal leader in perfect Hebrew. With his face camouflaged for the cameras, the Bedouin says, “They had no choice but to convert; this was centuries ago… I remember my mother and grandmother wouldn’t light fire on Sabbath, and they had a special mikveh…”


Others, in a Bedouin village east of Hebron, also remember burning a small piece of dough (reminiscent of the Biblical command to separate a small piece of dough when baking bread), lighting candles at graves, and tearing clothes and sitting shiva for seven days, and not three as is Muslim practice.

Even today, ritual circumcisions are carried out after the seventh day of birth.  Many homes in some of the Arab villages have doorpost indentations for a Mezuzah, with a scroll placed in some of them.

In another village just south of Hevron, Muhammed Amsalem – a descendant of Spanish Jews - told Aharon Granot of Mishpacha magazine that everyone in town knows he and his clan are Jews: “Our elders tell us that our forefathers came to this land during the [15th centur Spanish Inquisition, via Morocco. They settled in Ramle. Then the Mamluks forced them to convert to Islam, and they moved to the South Hevron area.”

Amsalem says they decided to reveal their Jewish roots after the 1967 Six Day War when they learned that a Jewish community had been reestablished in Hevron. “But the Jews saw we had no knowledge of their religious practices and refused to accept us… If the Jewish community would be willing to receive us today, we would join them with great enthusiasm.”

In the area of the South Hevron Hills, half of the Arabs are aware of the Jewish origins. They used to talk about it openly, though no longer. One man who recently publicized a silver Chanukah menorah that had been passed down to him from his father and previous generations was hung by terrorists by his feet for six weeks, leaving him with permanent injuries.

Genetic Studies Back Claims

At the Hadassah Medical School labs, Prof. Ariela Oppenheim of Hebrew University performed an international genetic study that backs up conclusions of Jewish-Arab genetic similarities. “We found that despite the dispersion of Jews around the world for 2,000 years, they essentially kept their Jewish continuity,” Oppenheim said. “In addition, we found that the Jewish population is surprisingly close, genetically, to the Arabs living here in Israel.”

She said that the study shows that both the Arabs of Israel and the Jews are descended from the Kurds of Aram in Babylon – the birthplace of the Patriarch Abraham. 

“It’s clear that we’re all from the same family,” Oppenheim concludes. “Most unfortunately, however, there are conflicts even within families, and sometimes brothers fight as well. I wish this is what will bring the Redemption, but I’m very sad to say that I don’t think so.”

Some Want to Return to Observant Judaism

South of Hevron, in Yatta, there is a large formerly-Jewish presence – and some even want to return to active Judaism. It is widely known there that half the residents are of the originally-Jewish Mahamra clan – a name that means “winemaker,” a trade that is forbidden according to Islam. “The people in these areas converted to Islam later in history,” MiSinai says, “and therefore more customs and knowledge and artifacts have been preserved.” These include Jewish stars over the entrances to homes, while in at least one house, the family has hidden a mezuzah and tefillin in creative hiding spots. One man pulled out a small Hebrew booklet of Psalms and Tanya with which he says he continues to secretly pray.

Miro Cohen, a Jew from Tekoa, in eastern Gush Etzion, is very friendly with the Arabs in a nearby village known as Kawazbe – a name that he and they agree is merely a corruption of Kuzeiba, the original name of the famous Bar Kokhba.

“These people are the descendants of Bar Kokhba,” Cohen declares. One Arab sitting with him can count his ancestors eight generations back, ending with a grandfather named Kawazbeh.  Another village elder says openly that his grandfather was  a Jew who converted to Islam. Some of the residents want to return to Judaism; they don’t call it converting, because they are “already Jewish.”  On the other hand, Arabs with the name Kawazbeh have been arrested for terrorist activity against Israel.

Other areas where Arabs of Jewish descent reside are Kfar Anzah in Samaria, Samoa in southern Judea, villages in the Tel Arad area, and more. Rabbi Stein says, “We know that up to about 200 years ago, the Galilee village of Sakhnin was a Jewish town, with an active synagogue. The Turks pressured them to convert to Islam, but the people there know that they are of Jewish origins.”

===========================

What glorious exciting news indeed! ABBA YHWH's Hand upon these folks as they return to the roots of their ancestors, and, back to their Elohim! AMEIN!

I hope I can do this post Katka
Opinion

 

Yet again out of all proportion - Israel in Haiti

Israel is behaving disproportionately, overreacts and exaggerates. The whole world knows that, at the latest since the Goldstone report. The fact that Israel conducted itself with disproportionate reticence in the ten years preceding its Gaza campaign in December 2008 and January 2009, and tolerated missile attacks from its neighbours as no other country has done since the Second World War, is generously overlooked. And when the Israelis are now once again getting disproportionately involved in a crisis area, and are overdoing it all once again, there are ofcourse more important things to report about. Why is this the case?

While Europe and America were still rubbing their eyes and the Islamic world was gazing fixedly in the other direction, Israeli aeroplanes were already on their way to the Caribbean. If you want to save the lives of people who are buried under rubble, you are in a race against time. The Israeli rescue teams had to travel half the world. To give a comparison: a distance of 10,500 kilometers lies between Jerusalem and Port-au-Prince. The distance between the Caribbean earthquake region and the sourthern tip of Florida isn't even as much as 2,000 kilometers. Central Europaean cities like Berlin, Prague or Paris are about 8,000 kilometers from Haiti. Not only does the comparative distance between Israel and the catastrophe region make the Israeli's help appear disproportional, however, but also the amount of aid which seven and a half million Israelis managed to mobilize in comparison to other nations.

When the news hit the global networks that an earthquake of force 7 on the Richter Scale had shattered the poverty-stricken island state just before 5 o'clock on the 12th January, the Israeli Government Press office immediately announced that a 12-man-strong team of rescue and recovery experts from the organisation IsraAid was on its way to Central America. The following morning an Israeli Army spokesman announced that seven engineers, doctors, logistics and rescue experts had left the country and were heading for Haiti, in order to invesigate the situation there on the ground. Shortly after that, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued an official mandate to send unburocratic and immediate aid to the island state. The Israeli Ambassador in the Dominican Republic, Amos Radyan, was sent to Haiti to provide news coverage. By the evening fifty Israeli soldiers were on their way west.

The first aid team to arrive in Port-au-Prince consisted of four staff workers belonging to the ultra-orthodox organisation ZAKA. ZAKA is a voluntary organisation which originally committed itself mainly to the recovery of terror victims who had lost their lives, but subsequently saw the need to care for and rescue first and foremost those still living. This means that many ZAKA volunteers are trained in First Aid. The four ZAKA workers were flown in from Mexico, where they had been involved in the recovery and identification of the Jewish businessman Moses Saba and his family. Saba's helicopter had crashed, and all its passengers had been killed.

On the evening of the 14th January, two Boeing 747s took off, with 220 Israeli helpers on board under the command of Brigade General Shalon Ben-Arye. As well as relief supplies, the planes also had a fully-equipped field hospital unit on board. The hospital is run by 40 doctors, 25 nurses and paramedics, as well as other staff. It contains an apothecary and childrens' department, a radiologists' unit, an intensive care ward, an emergency unit, two operating theaters, a surgical department, an inboard department, and a maternal care unit. When the Israeli machines took off, the Port-au-Prince airport was still closed. One only hoped that the planes could actually land when they arrived.

A landing was possible. The Israeli aid workers took over a football pitch in the city center and began their work. A week after the devastating earthquake, which had caused more than 100,000 fatal casualties, 250 Israelis were working in Haiti round the clock. The field hospital treated 383 people, carried out 140 life-saving operations, and delivered seven babies - one of them was named "Israel". The surgeon in charge,  Colonel Guy Lin, former commander of the rescue units on the Isreli northern front, saved the life of a three-day-old baby by donating his own blood. 60 patients are being treated as in-patients. Emergency doctors on the ground consult via satellite with Israeli specialists back home, who, for example, can watch operations by video, and give their advice. Israeli search and rescue dogs found more than a dozen survivors under the rubble. And the ZAKA volunteers, in the meantime six in number, in an operation which lasted 38 hours, rescued eight students from the ruins of the university.

Since it was founded, the State of Isreal has provided humanitarian aid in over 140 different countries. Some of these countries had no diplomatic relations with the Jewish State, or were even vehemently opposed to having such relations. In December 2004 a Tsunami tidal wave caused devastation in huge parts of Southern Asia. Israel sent 60 tons of relief to Indonesia, the largest Islamic land which has no diplomatic relations with Israel. At the same time, a small team belonging to the Israeli army flew 82 tons of aid material to Sri Lanka. In November 2005 Israeli organisations provided aid following an earthquake in Kashmir, Pakistan. In August 2007, the "Fast Israeli Rescue and Searth Team" (FIRST) sent three doctors and three nurses into the earthquake zone of Peru. FIRST was engaged in recent years in operations in Turkey, India, Mexico, the Congo, Chad, Sudan (Darfur) and Malawi.

It's interesting to note that, even in this situation, Israel's critics are not silent. Sitting comfortably behind their laptops, they draw up calculations of the suffering of the people in Gaza - for which Israel is, ofcourse, the sole culprit! - against calculations of Israeli aid in Haiti, and come to the conclusion that war crimes cannot be atoned for in this way. The Jewish State is accused of using its aid to Haiti simply  as a means of distracting from the Goldstone report. They remember that Israel also offered earthquake aid to Iran in 2003, and describe this as "Chutzpe". "Commendably," writes the blogger, the Iranian government rejected this offer. Accusations that Jewish doctors only go quickly to scenes of catastrophe in order to harvest human organs there, are doing the rounds in the internet.

The climax of modern anti-semitic inventiveness became obvious when a survey done by the Hebrew University in 2006 established that in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict  - unlike all other worldwide military conflicts - there had been no rapes of Palestinian women. Instead of asking whether the Jewish people may perhaps in some way, impose higher ethical standards on their own behavior, this phenomenon was accounted for with "Israeli racism", which forbids "the Jews" to waste their precious semen on subhuman women. Palestinian women who were interviewed about this were even offended that Jewish soldiers overlooked them on the basis of racial prejudice. It seems clear that, even today, there are in certain circles things which a Jew simply cannot do right. For this reason it's perhaps better not to report at all what "the Jews" are up to, if one is bears them just a little bit of good will.

 

 

© Johannes Gerloff, Christian Media Association KEP in Germany

translation by Nicola Vollkommer

www.israelnetz.com

Israeli Innovation....watch this!!
 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHStBGk_D8Y