Who Jews for Jesus actually are

Jews for Jesus was founded in San Francisco in 1973 by Moishe Rosen, and by its own description its purpose is "to make the messiahship of Jesus an unavoidable issue" for Jewish people. ¹ It's a Christian missionary organization: a 501(c)(3) with roughly 280 full-time staff and branch offices in more than a dozen cities, made up mostly of Jewish people who believe Jesus is the messiah, plus non-Jewish members the group calls "committed allies." ¹

The theology is Christian, not Jewish. Members hold to the Trinity, the virgin birth, and salvation through Jesus, while using Hebrew scripture to argue Jesus fulfills messianic prophecy. Traditional Jewish interpretive texts are treated as non-binding. ³ That combination is why no stream of organized Judaism, Reform through Orthodox, counts Jews for Jesus or its members as Jewish in a religious sense. Israel's Supreme Court made the same call in a 1993 ruling, finding that Jews for Jesus members "are not actually Jews, as belief in Jesus as the Messiah is not a Jewish value," and calling that "the clear separation between Judaism and Christianity." ³ Jewish communal groups have gone further: New York's Jewish Community Relations Council once accused the organization of "fraudulently and misleadingly" using Jewish symbols to recruit, a claim a federal judge in 1991 ruled was the JCRC's protected speech to make, not a basis for a lawsuit. ⁴

That history is the context for Cafe Basimta, the Jerusalem cafe that's drawn six straight Saturdays of Haredi protest for staying open on Shabbat. Basimta is an official Jews for Jesus project, and its operator, Yoel Ben David, is a member of that community. Most of the crowd protesting or counter-protesting outside didn't know that until it came out partway through the standoff. When it did, some of the secular Israelis who'd shown up to defend the cafe's right to stay open got visibly uneasy, and Hapoel Jerusalem pulled an advertising offer it had extended to the business. ²