Israel: facing opposition
After opposition shut down a meeting centre for Messianic Jews in southern Israel last May, ultra-Orthodox Jews began harassing it again after it re-opened in January.
Morning Star News
The ultra-Orthodox Jews protested the presence of the centre and threatened some of the Messianic Jews (Jewish followers of Jesus). The centre, where Messianic Jews meet for conversation, coffee and tea, had been temporarily closed last year due to protests by ultra-Orthodox Jews after which they damaged Messianic Jewish leaders’ homes, breaking windows and traumatising two children inside one home.
Death threat
One of the rabbis wrote in a local newspaper: ‘We went to that house in order to silence them by force, but that woman would not stop talking! She should know about that other verse of Psalm 23, about the valley of the shadow of death. Let her go through it, together with her husband.’
Bible Society bookshop
In Tel Aviv, a Bible Society bookshop is under threat of being shut down. The owner of the bookshop’s building alleges that the Bible Society is violating its commercial licence by selling Christian literature other than Bibles and therefore should not have protected tenant status. The shop has been in the same location for 55 years.
When two representatives of the Bible Society in Israel went to court to give testimony, the judge did not appear due to illness, and the case was postponed to an as -yet-unknown date.