Messianic Jews get Isreali citizenship

The Supreme Court of Israel has ruled that Messianic Jews have the same rights regarding automatic citizenship as Jews who do not believe in Jesus as the Messiah.

The case was brought by 12 applicants who had been denied citizenship primarily because they were Jewish believers in Jesus. Most of them had received letters saying they would not receive citizenship because they "commit missionary activity," according to an e-mail circulated by Calev Myers, founder and chief counsel of The Jerusalem Institute of Justice.

A clerk at the Ministry of Interior reportedly had told one of the applicants that because she was committing missionary activity, she was acting against the interests of the state of Israel and the Jewish people. Israeli’s Supreme Court ended the two-and-a-half-year legal battle April 16 by ruling that Messianics should receive equal treatment under the Israeli "Law of Return," which says that anyone who is born Jewish can immigrate from anywhere in the world to Israel and be granted citizenship automatically.

"This is yet another battle won in our war to establish equality in Israel for the Messianic Jewish community just like every other legitimate stream of faith within the Jewish world," Myers wrote.

Jim Sibley, a professor at Criswell College in Dallas and a former missionary to Israel, said that Jewish believers had been excluded from the Law of Return by previous court rulings, including one in the 1980s declaring that if a Jew believed in Jesus as the Messiah, he was not to be considered Jewish.

With the ruling, Sibley said, Messianic Jews may seek citizenship in Israel without religious discrimination.

"It’s really a huge ruling because the court apparently further ordered the Israeli Ministry of Interior to stop persecuting Jewish believers," Sibley said.

"Some of the very Orthodox Jewish sectors of society had taken positions in the Ministry of Interior and had been using their positions to revoke believers’ citizenship, deny visas and generally harass not only Jewish believers in Jesus but also Christian workers in Israel." (BP)