Ministry in New York City
The reality is that the work
of reaching two million
Jewish people in this city
needs to get done.
4 The Chosen People | APRIL 2019
This conference was very informative and helpful for me
in my ministry, as we now have contact with religious
Jewish people we never would have met if we did not take
the time to better understand the culture and find ways to
better communicate the love of the Messiah with them.
We also recently placed Facebook ads in Yiddish (the language
spoken by most ultra-Orthodox Jewish people) that are
designed to inspire religious Jewish seekers to view a tenminute
version of the Jesus film in Yiddish. The advertisement
was quite successful. We believe this is a difficult but precious
group to reach for the Lord, and many are open and searching.
In addition to the Orthodox population, there is a large
Russian-speaking Jewish population. Hundreds of thousands
of Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union now live
in New York City. By God’s grace, Chosen People Ministries
has a Russian ministry that operates out of the Brooklyn
Messianic Center. Klaudia Z. has led this work now for more
than twenty years. Once a month, she holds meetings for
pastors of Russian congregations in Brooklyn. She wrote:
A couple of days ago, one of the attendees of the Bible
study brought a Jewish man to our group. We shared the
gospel with him, and he prayed to receive Jesus as his
Messiah and Lord! Afterward, he wanted to understand
more about his decision. It was a touching moment,
especially when it had become clear to him that Jesus
was the Messiah he had been searching for all his life!
What a tremendous blessing to be able to hear the gospel in
your native tongue even when so far from home. God’s
provision is abundant!
The opportunity to evangelize the vast numbers of Jewish people
in New York City demands we do our best to train workers for
the harvest field. The Charles L. Feinberg Center for Messianic
Jewish Studies exists by God’s grace. The program, a partnership
between Chosen People Ministries and Talbot School of
Theology of Biola University, was established in 2007. The
seminary now occupies the second and third floors of the
Brooklyn Messianic Center, and the basement holds a library of
more than ten thousand volumes. The building serves as a place
of education and as a base for ministry.
One of the students in the program had a remarkable ministry
experience in Brooklyn, just down the street from our
ministry center. As he was setting up a book table outside of
the subway station, he encountered a man whose bicycle had
just been stolen. He had this to share:
I started asking him questions and discovered he was an
Israeli. I began to share with him a bit of my testimony,
and God put it in my heart to offer to pay for his trip
home. His eyes lit up, “Thank you so much! But why
would you do that?” I told him that Jesus called us to
love our neighbor, and I believed in that wholeheartedly.
What a joy it was to share the love of Messiah with this
young Jewish man.
“I’m in a New York State of Mind”
These famous lyrics, penned by New Yorker Billy Joel, seem
so appropriate when it comes to bringing the gospel to the
Jewish people. There is hardly a more accurate statement.
For many decades of our 125-year ministry, Chosen People
Ministries’ International Headquarters has been in New York
City. In fact, from our very inception in 1894 (when we were
called the Brownsville Mission to the Jews), Your Mission to
the Jewish People has had a New York state of mind.
Rabbi Leopold Cohn, founder of Chosen People Ministries,
began handing out gospel tracts on the streets of Brownsville
in 1894, just two years after coming to faith in Jesus. With an
ever-growing burden to reach his Jewish kinsmen with the
good news, Cohn expanded his outreach to include the
Williamsburg section of Brooklyn and changed the name of
the ministry to the Williamsburg Mission to the Jews. In 1924,
the name changed to the American Board of Missions to the
Jews as we advanced into the epicenter of New York life—
Manhattan.
The ministry grew during
these past 125 years beyond
both state and international
borders, with missionaries
now serving in seventeen
countries around the world.
Yet, because New York still
maintains its large and vibrant
Jewish community, it is a
critical focus of our ministry.
The concentration of Jewish
people in New York City and
the surrounding counties is
impressive. Almost 8.5
percent of adults in the region
identify themselves as Jewish
by religion. The total number
of Jewish people in the five
boroughs of the city, including
those who claim Jewish
ancestry with no religious
affiliation, edges just above
two million people. Thirty-six percent of the New York Jewish
community resides in Brooklyn and thirty-seven percent of
those claim to be Orthodox—an astounding number!
Effective Jewish outreach must include this growing group of
Jewish people. Our Charles Feinberg Messianic Center, in the
heart of Orthodox Jewish Brooklyn, is ideally placed for this
ministry. It is becoming increasingly important to hold
conferences at the Center that are specifically geared towards
training others how to reach the ultra-religious in Brooklyn.
Robert Walter, the Brooklyn branch leader and one of the
coordinators of our conferences for Orthodox outreach,
shared this: