After conducting a wedding on Saturday and preaching both services on Sunday (yes, our church still has two services on Sunday), I decided to go for a ride earlier today. I headed west from Monrovia to Calabasas, over to Malibu, down the Pacific Coast Highway to Santa Monica, north on the 405 to Wilshire Blvd, and downtown Los Angeles before going home.
Heading east on Wilshire Boulevard, I decided to stop across the street from Sinai Temple, a synagogue a couple of miles west of the Beverly Hilton Hotel. The memories flooded back into my consciousness as I remembered the blessed opportunity God gave me almost 30 years ago to present the unsearchable riches of Christ to about 100 Jewish Holocaust survivors in that synagogue one Saturday night. Let me tell you about it.
I first met Ben Friedman, the founder of the Committee of Concerned Christians,[1] at the old Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood, where the Academy Awards were initially held back in the day. I was with another Baptist pastor, the two of us dining with Ben and discussing his concern that something like the Jewish Holocaust might very well happen again, despite the slogan “never again.”
Ben had grown up in an Orthodox Jewish home in one of the New York City boroughs. He left his orthodoxy behind when he moved to Houston, Texas, to make his fortune as a developer before moving to the Los Angeles area for his retirement years. I surmised that his exposure to various Christian denominations while living in Houston gave him a perspective unique to those raised in Jewish orthodoxy. Ben’s awareness of the historical anti-Semitism of most Christian denominations, coupled with the tragic disconnect from the history of the Holocaust and World War II, alarmed him to the point of doing something about it. Ben spoke to an extremely wealthy Jewish backer, founded the Committee of Concerned Christians, and began speaking to denominational leaders and congregational ministers to challenge them to keep the history of the Holocaust and past anti-Semitism before their people.
Ben Friedman was a very hard worker. He developed an impressive list of Christian leaders to support his efforts, the most prominent being the late Richard Halverson, the chaplain of the United States Senate. When he asked me if I would be willing to be listed on his letterhead with the others, I declined but told him I was glad to help in any way that I could.
From time to time, Ben and I would lunch at the Bob’s Big Boy in Burbank. But he was on a diet so strict that it was hardly worth it for him. Over time Ben and his wife Phyllis became good friends of my wife Pam and me.
My second fondest memory with Ben was when the four of us went to Thousand Oaks one Sunday evening after church to see “The Sound Of Music” performed. After the play, we stopped off on the way home at Jerry’s Famous Delicatessen on Ventura Boulevard (sadly, now shuttered because of the Covid lockdown).
My fondest memory with Ben was when he called me up and asked me if I would like to speak to a group of Holocaust survivors at a synagogue on Wilshire Boulevard, and I agreed. He gave me the address and told me to meet him there Saturday evening after the Jewish Sabbath had ended. Let me now tell you about one of the most thrilling experiences of my ministry.
I’m terrible with dates, but since Richard Halverson was still the United States Senate chaplain, I guess that I spoke at Sinai Temple in 1994 or 1995. I was as nervous as a cat on a hot tin roof, and I arrived, parked my car, and walked through the entrance and my first ever experience in a Jewish synagogue. I had been invited to speak, but I had no idea what I was going to say for the life of me.
Once inside, I greeted Ben and asked him if it would be okay for me to spend my time answering the audience's questions. He said that would be great and reminded me that the 100+ people there mainly were Holocaust survivors who had been born and raised in Hungary, many of them with the last name Gabor. I had heard of Eva and Zsa Zsa Gabor but learned that night for the first time that Gabor is as common as Smith in England or Johnson in Minnesota among Hungarian Jewish people.
I greeted the friendly faces, introduced myself by name, rehearsed to them that I had been born in Texas and had grown up on Indian reservations throughout the United States, my father having worked in the Bureau of Indian Affairs. I then told them how I became a Christian. That done, I told them that I would be willing to answer any question they cared to ask me.
For the next 90 minutes, I answered dozens of questions. The questions initially focused on whether all gentiles are Christians. Then they explored the differences between Christian denominations. Eventually, we got around to the Jewishness of Jesus Christ, the Jewishness of the apostles, the anti-Semitic history of all Christian denominations except for the Baptists, the significance of baptism, who I believed Jesus of Nazareth was, and the importance of His crucifixion at the hand of the Romans.
The questions they posed allowed me to present my understanding of the Fall in the Garden of Eden, the promise God made to Abraham, the typology of the Tabernacle in the wilderness, any human cannot keep the Law of Moses, and the numerous Old Testament predictions that the Lord Jesus Christ fulfilled. As the interactions unfolded, I felt myself marveling at their curiosity, hospitality, and willingness to ask follow-on questions when the things I said challenged their beliefs.
I could not have prepared a message that dealt more fully with the Gospel claims of Jesus Christ than was made possible by their many probing questions. When my time was up, Ben announced that there was time for one more question. A delightful elderly woman in the front row raised her hand and asked me, “Are you telling us that we need Jesus as our Savior?”
I realized that the last question of the evening was the most important question of them all and that my answer was crucial. I said, “If my mother needs Jesus as her Savior, everyone needs Jesus as their Savior.” They looked at me for a moment, then the woman who asked me the question nodded her head in approval. I thanked them for their gracious hospitality, and Ben and I went outside. I thanked him for the invitation and drove home as if I was dreaming.
I will not know until I get to heaven whether that opportunity ever bore fruit. I know God’s Word does not return unto him void. And I know my audience of Jewish Holocaust survivors, each of them with tattoos on their left wrist, listened carefully. I pray and dare to hope some of those men and women will greet me when I arrive at my appointed time.
[1] https://jewishjournal.com/old_stories/294/
