They Thought For Themselves

Paralyzed..."Learn to Live with It!" by David Yaniv

I was born in Tel Aviv in 1936 to parents who immigrated from Germany. My parents kept up tradition, celebrating Yom Kippur, Rosh Hashanah, and other holidays, but they were never really religious.

After the Second World War, when my father found out that two of his sisters and one brother and their families had been killed in Nazi Germany, he took every Bible and everything in our home that was even remotely religious and threw it out. “Where was God?” he would ask. “How could God allow such a thing to happen?” From then on, I was raised in an atheistic home. My father even resisted my having a bar mitzvah. Although he finally allowed it, he refused to set foot in the synagogue.

In 1960 I married a South African girl named Sheila, whom I met when she and her mother came to Israel as tourists. At the time, I was a guide and a bus driver. Her mother, who took two tours with me, one day said, “My baby is waiting for me in Haifa. I want you to meet her.” I thought it was funny that this elderly woman would have a baby. But when I reached Haifa and I saw her “baby,” I realized she was a match maker. Sheila and I went to South Africa on our honeymoon to visit her family—and stayed twelve and one-half years.

I’m a refrigeration and air-conditioning engineer by trade. I did quite well in business in South Africa for a time. Then I undertook a project to air condition a large building. The quantity surveyor I hired to estimate the cost of the job made a mistake and I lost all my money.

My lawyer told me it was useless to sue the surveyor because he wasn’t insured. And even though I was bankrupt, I had to finish the job because I had signed a contract.

No Place for a Good Jewish Boy by Jonathan Bernis

I was raised in a traditional Jewish home. I refer to myself as a former “holiday Jew.” We went to synagogue on the high holidays and had family gatherings on the important holidays like Passover, Rosh Hashanah, and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.

I was forced against my will to go to both Hebrew school and religious school. So while my friends were out playing on Tuesdays and Thursdays after school, I was studying Hebrew in the synagogue to prepare for the most important experience a Jewish young man can go through—the Bar Mitzvah, becoming a son of the commandment.  And so at age 13, I was Bar Mitzvah and entered into adulthood. At that time my parents felt they had fulfilled their responsibility, and they gave me the choice whether to continue on with synagogue life or not. I had had enough of Hebrew school and religious school, and so I departed from the synagogue except for the high holidays.

The Survivor by Rose Price

I am a survivor of Hitler’s Holocaust. My family, which lived in a little city in Poland, was warm and caring. We looked out for one another. My relatives lived within walking distance of each other, so if it rained and you ducked into the nearest house, you were always in the home of a cousin or an aunt or uncle.

My upbringing was very Orthodox. My mother instilled in me that Judaism was life. I never knew a difference between a high holiday or a low holiday. A holiday was a holiday. Every Shabbat (Sabbath) was even celebrated as a holiday.

My mother and my grandmother would start getting ready for the Shabbat on Wednesday, baking challa (bread). On Friday they prepared the fish and the chicken soup and made the noodles. In the afternoon we would take a cholent—a one-pot dish with meat, vegetables, and potatoes—to the baker to cook.
We would take special baths and dress in our finest clothes. The table was all set in beautiful white linen and whatever silver we had.

A New Song by Alyosha Ryabinov

I was born to Jewish parents in Kiev in 1958. My parents tried to hide our Jewishness. There was nothing Jewish in our home and we never attended synagogue. Yet, even as a child, I wanted to be Jewish because my mother and father were. I couldn’t rationalize it, but it just felt right inside.

As I grew up, the only religion I was exposed to was atheism. Atheism was taught in the former Soviet Union as the truth. In college they even offered a course on it in which they ridiculed people who believed in God. When my professor claimed that science had proven one hundred times over that there is no God, I wanted to ask for even one proof out of a hundred. I didn’t feel atheism was based on any scientific proof. But I didn’t have the courage to voice my inner thoughts.

Yiddishkeit by Sharon Allen

My life in 1982 was dedicated to the well-being of my family and to my activities at Chabad of Irvine Jewish Center. One can find Chabad centers in even the most remote communities of the world. I have always had a deep admiration for Chabad and that is why my husband and I supported the Chabad movement here in Southern California.

But wait, I’m getting ahead of myself. I want to go back to the beginning—my beginning.

I was born in 1945 at Beth Israel Hospital in New York City. My Hebrew name is Sura Rifka. I was raised in an observant Jewish home. From the moment my mom lit the Shabbos (Sabbath) candles on Friday evening until one hour after sundown on Saturday night, there were certain rules and regulations that we followed. They did not make us feel constricted or oppressed. It was our way of showing our love, our respect, and our devotion to God.

We followed the rabbinical injunctions, such as not using electricity on the Shabbos. We would leave one light on in the hall which was turned on before Shabbos started and was left on through the night and the next day until one hour after sundown Saturday night when Shabbos was over. We were not permitted to work on Shabbos and that included my homework, since on Shabbos one is not allowed to write on, cut, or tear paper. We knew that the Shabbos was special because of what we did or did not do, and it was distinct from the other days of the week.

Of course, my mother kept a kosher kitchen where only kosher foods were permitted. Separate sets of dishes and utensils designated for milchig (dairy) or fleishig (meat) products were strictly enforced. My brother and I knew from the time we could reach up into the drawers and cabinets never to confuse those items deemed milchig and fleishig. Separate sets of dishes were also needed for Passover. Those dishes were brought out of the “hard-to-reach” top cabinet once a year to be used only on Pesach.

We observed all the Jewish holidays. My brother and I attended Hebrew School. We grew up knowing who we were within the Jewish Community.

There Must Be Something More! by Sid Roth

“Because I work, eat, sleep and that’s the way it goes. There must be something more.” These are the words of a song that I wrote shortly after graduating from college.

It seems as though I blinked my eyes and I was married. I blinked my eyes again and I had a daughter. I blinked my eyes again and I had a job as a stockbroker with the largest brokerage firm in the world, Merril, Lynch. But there was something missing. Deep inside I felt a yearning—there had to be something more!

I didn’t find it in religion. Both of my parents were Jewish. I attended an Orthodox synagogue and was bar mitzvah. I was proud of being a Jew. But I found the religion boring and many of the religious people hypocritical. God was just not relevant in my life.

So I looked to money for happiness. My goal was to become a millionaire by age 30. But I blinked my eyes again and I was 29 with no hope of being a millionaire by 30.

I left my wife, my daughter, my job, and went searching for something more. I had been married young. Perhaps the single life would give me satisfaction. After one year, I knew this was not my answer.

Tradition or Truth? by Dr. Michael Brown

“You don’t even know Hebrew! How can you tell me what the Bible says?”

“It’s true, Rabbi. I don’t know Hebrew—but I will learn. In the meantime, I can use the dictionary in the back of Strong’s Concordance.”

“Meantime, shmeantime. If you don’t know Hebrew, it doesn’t mean a thing.”

I will never forget those words spoken to me in 1972. I was a brand new believer in Jesus, just 17 years old. My life had been dramatically changed—and I mean dramatically. Only months before, I was shooting heroin, using massive quantities of LSD and speed, and living in total, reckless abandon. My nickname, “Drug Bear,” was well deserved, and I was sinful, proud, and rotten to the core. All this was in spite of a typical, Long Island, Conservative Jewish upbringing by very happily married parents. In fact, my father was a highly respected lawyer working as the Senior Law Assistant to the New York State Supreme Court judges.

My drug abuse was not due to some inner turmoil or spiritual quest. I used drugs because they made me feel good! You see, I was a fairly talented, teenage rock drummer, and the whole Woodstock, cast-off-restraint, get high, do-your-own-thing mentality appealed to me. I wanted to be like the rock stars! Soon, life became one big party.

It Was Not for Me by Randy and Tricia Horne

Tricia: Why did Jesus have to die for my sins? Raised as a Catholic, this concept was still foreign to me. Everyone knows if you’re a good person, you’ll go to heaven when you die. So why did Jesus have to die? It seemed odd. It didn’t fit the character of God—or did it? Without much knowledge of the Hebrew Scriptures, Jesus’ death in exchange for our salvation didn’t make much sense to me. But God was about to use a young Jewish man named Randy to draw me into a relationship with Him.

At the time I met Randy, I had been in a period of seeking God for answers. The two questions that bothered me most were: Why did I have terrible back pain? and Why didn’t God answer my prayers to heal it? I would go to Mass, pray, pick up the missilette and skip over all the traditional prayers just to get to God’s Word. I knew the Scriptures were the real thing, what church should be all about. But I would kneel, stand, genuflect, bless myself, and do other religious things out of respect.

What did Randy have to do with all this? Little did I know that my mother (a quiet believer) had been listening regularly to a radio program called “Messianic Vision.” One day Sid Roth, the host of the program, said on the air, “The Jewish person that God has put in your life is no accident.” My mother thought, That’s nice. But I don’t know any Jewish people that well. Within a matter of a few weeks, I told her I had met a nice Jewish guy. Immediately, she made the connection, but she told me nothing about it at the time.

Bat Shalom: Daughter of Zion by Batya Segal

 
At the beginning of this century rumors began to circulate that a Jewish State was about to be reborn in the land of our forefathers. Excitement swelled in the Jewish community in Yemen as they felt the days of the Messiah were soon to come. Many Jewish people started to make their way back to Zion. Leaving everything behind except their most essential belongings, they set out on the long perilous journey across the desert, some carrying their children on their shoulders. They had little food or drink. Many suffered from exhaustion and many died—but they died full of hope and faith, knowing they were returning to the land of their forefathers.

In the late 1930s, my father left Yemen for Israel (then called Palestine), traveling by boat from Yemen to Egypt and from there by train. Most of the family had died either in Yemen or on the way to Israel. Upon arrival in Israel my father joined his one surviving brother. About this same time, my mother and her family settled in Jerusalem.

During the 1948 War of Independence, my father joined the Jewish forces fighting for the survival of the newly born Jewish State of Israel. He served in Ramat Rachel, a kibbutz just south of Jerusalem.

After the rebirth of Israel, the new government committed itself to bringing back the Jewish people from all over the world. In 1950, an airlift called Operation Magic Carpet brought home to Israel a large part of the Yemenite Jewish community within a short period of time. Most of them had never even seen an airplane before. The rabbi explained from Isaiah 40:31 that God would lead them “on wings like eagles,” which dispersed any fears they may have had of flying, for they knew prophetically they were being taken home to be prepared for the days of redemption.

The Amazing Jewish Book and the God-Shaped Hole in My Soul by Manny Brotman

And ye shall seek Me, and find Me, when ye shall search for Me with all your heart (Jeremiah 29:13, emphasis added).

One does not have to live too many years before he discovers that within himself there exists a certain emptiness, a void or vacuum that the things of this world can never fill. Neither money nor sex, travel, fame, drugs, titles, possessions or any other human accomplishment can fill this emptiness.

I call this vacuum, “the God-shaped hole in my soul.” I eventually discovered that this particular void is reserved only for the Creator of the Universe, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, Himself—to live in each of us personally.

Here, then, is the story of my personal search through religion, academics, sports, business, and the media; my discovery of the Bible—the amazing Jewish book; my coming to understand how to have a personal relationship with God; and my experiencing His abundant life.