Thursday, January 13,1994 — THE BULLETIN
NEW YORK (JTA) —Lanie Poisson is one of an estimated 1.2 million people in America who were born Jews but who celebrated Christmas.
That is roughly one-fifth — 20 percent — of the American Jewish population.
About half of these have converted to or actively identify with a faith other than Judaism, which in America is almost always Christianity.
The other 600,000 describe themselves as Jews by ethnicity or culture, but not by religion, according to data from the 1990 National Jewish Population Survey.
And "those Jews who say they're not Jewish by religion tacitly adopt Christian culture," said Samuel Klausner, a professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania and an expert on Jews who identify with other faiths.
"These people are, by and large, lost to the Jewish community," he said.
In practice, they do not behave much differently than Jews who have formally converted to Christianity.
Although they will describe themselves as "secular" or having some Jewish attachments, they are rarely, if over, found in synagogues and are thoroughly assimilated into American liberal Protestant culture.
They have Christmas trees in their living rooms, wreaths on their doors, go to church on Christmas, have few Jewish friends and give to Christian, rather than Jewish, philanthropies, Klausner said.
Further, the Christian community does not think of them as Jews, he said.
"Within a generation or so," Klausner said, "they become fully members of the Christian community."
Lanie Poisson was born liana Fox. Now 35, she is deeply involved in a fundamentalist Christian church.
Born to Holocaust Survivors, she did not find a spiritual home in Judaism.
Poisson said that in her home in an all-Jewish neighborhood of Queens, New York, her parents' Jewish connection focused on politics and Israel.
The family would go to synagogue twice a year, on the High Holy Days, and would have a Passover Seder. On Chanuka, the family would light a menorah and exchange presents. When she and her sister were asked whether they wanted to go to Hebrew school, they declined.
As a teenager, Poisson began asking existential, spiritual questions of religious Jews in her extended family, and of non-Jews she knew through school. She did not find any satisfying answers but put aside her search for a few years.
A decade ago, an acquaintance who was part of a fundamentalist Christian church challenged her to read the Bible.
The keeks go by slowly for Jonathan Pollard, sentenced to life imprisonment, without the possibility of parole, for passing American defence information to Israel.
Pollard has been
incarcerated for:
Organizations worldwide recognize that Pollard's punishment in no way fits his aime. A collective voice of outrage at his excessive sentence ~ letters, telegrams, faxes and phone calls - can make a difference.
Voice your pi^test by writing to: President Bill Clinton The White House Washington, D.C 20SCK)
The President's Comment Line 1-202-456-1111
The President's Fax: 1-202-456-2461
She read the Jewish and Christian Bibles and went back to rabbis with questions about messianic prophecy.
"I found that I didn't get answers to my questions because they weren't knowledgeable about it, and my faith grew more in seeing how the Scriptures fit together," she said.
"I always wanted to make a difference in the world, and never associated it with anything spiritual before 1 began to read," she said.
Four months later, she was baptized.
A couple of years later she married the man who had first introd uced her to the church, and today their lives, and those of their children, revolve around the church.
Poisson's story illustrates the search of many converts.
'These are Jewish people yearning for something meaningful spiritually in their religious lives, and the Judaism they knew was empty," said Rabbi Tovia Singer, director of Jews for Judaism of Greater New York.
Prof. Klausner said part of the responsibility for the conversions and Jews' identification with Christianity lies with churches.
"They are in collusion with this. They have become very lax about their own requirements for membership. They don't ask you if you're baptized anymore, so Jews are just sitting in churches," he said.
But Klausner does not fault missionaries from evangelical and "Hebrew-Christian" churches.
"Evangelizing is an opportunity for people who already have the tendencies to move out," he said.
The people who convert were searching before the missionaries provided them with the opportunity, he said.
While Jews who become Christians often say they feel liberated from "the whole picture of Judaism," they usually are making a transition from less commitment and involvement to a more stringent system, said Klausner.
The reason Jews seek out Christianity, he said, is the breakdown of Jewish religious authority, without which there is "no way of ordering meaning, so people seek meaning by going to another, more structured system."
"They're going from chaos into the grip of an authority structure, so the freedom is really the discovery that there is order in the world," he said.
"By the second and third generation of Jews who identify more with Christianity than with Judaism, people move into fundamentalist churches where they have to make a declaration" of commitment, he said.
According to Singer, many converts from Judaism to Christianity become "born-again" Christians.
"Our studies have found that 67 percent of 'Hebrew-Christians' went to Hebrew school. It's that little bit of information that turns Jews off," Singer said.
"Many say the first time they felt they had a personal relationship with G-d was with Yeshua," or Jesus, he said.
Judaism's "spiritual elements are often not taught and transmitted," he said.
"Liberal denominations sometimes throw out our most precious fruit, our personal relationship with G-d," said Singer.
In contrast, "ministers tell them that every word of the Bible is G-d's and that's exactly what they want to hear," the rabbi said.
"It's ineffective to transmit this nebulous Judaism," he said, "and it's been the evangelical community that's reached out to them."
The flow of Jews into Christianity will increase as intermarriage does, warns Klausner.
According to demographer Egon Mayer, of the Center for Judaic Studies at the City University of New York, about 60 percent of the people who say they were born Jewish and are now a different religion, are themselves the. children of an interfaith marriage.
Few children of Jews who identify themselves as having no religion or as Christian, will be connected to Judaism, said Klausner and Mayer.
According to Klausner, these children usually marry a Christian who is more serious about religion than their parents were.
WORLD MEDIA REVIEW
Excerpts from the
Id of
EFENSE SECRETARY LES ASPIN'S declarations that Jonathan Pollard included inteillgence information in his letters from prison has become front-page news. It's obvious that Pollard's freedom may no longer be imminent, as certain Clinton administration officials — like Reagan and Bush administration officials before them — appear to be closing ranks in an effort to keep the onetime spy behind bars.
============ But Pollard's attorney, Theodore
VIEWPOINT Olson, was quoted as saying that neither By ELLIOT he nor Pollard had ever been told that GOLDENBERG Pollard's prison letters violated national ' security.
Neither was I told this. As the recipient of some of the information Aspin may be talking about — and author of The Spy Who Knew Too Much which details the extensive: government cover-up to keep the truth about what Pollard learned secret — I believe the American public has the righi to know what is in those letters.
The fact that those letters had to be cleared by Navy Intelligence (Pollard's mail out of Marion Prison was always read, and, at times, censored) would seem to be prima facie evidence that they did noi violate U.S. national security, as Mr. Aspin claims, and are therefore part of the public domain. As a journalist, it was within my First Amendment rights -- and within the First Amendment rights of my publisher — to publish their contents.
A former civilian Navy Intelligence analyst who passed on classified U.S. military information to the Israelis, Pollard was arrested in 1985, and charged with the crime of espionage. Although he plea bargained for what he hoped would be a relatively light sentence, in 1987 Pollard was given ajife term in prison — a sentence never before handed to an American who spied for an ally.
In another article also appearing recently on the front page of the New York Times, writer David Johnston noted that Clinton's advisors are now recommending, however, that the president reject a petition for clemency. . . .
Elliot GoEdenberg is an award-winning investigative reporter for the Jewish Journal and author of The Spy Who Knew Too Much: The Government Plot to Silence Jonathan Pollard (Shapoisky Publishers).
Clinton's advisors may be taking the advice of Joseph E. diGenova, a former United States attorney who prosecuted the government's case against Pollard, who says that a precise asessment of what damage Pollard actually caused to the United States remains classified.
I'm not surprised. 1 believe that what diGenova continues to allege is really the same old "sources and methods" smoke-screen, anyway. . . .
But I do not believe that a-o indirect compromising of U.S. sources and methods is why Mr. diGenova and his friends want Mr. Pollard to remain behind bars — and, most importantly, barred from talking to the media.
The greatest barrier preventing Pollard's freedom may, instead, be a web of conspiracy that existed (and perhaps still exists) within the bowels of our government to make sure that what the controversial spy accidentally stumbled upon, then tried to sabotage — regarding a U.S. policy to strengthen Arab despots, often at the expense of Israel — would, "for the good of the country," never be revealed.
For instance, why was the U.S. secretly arming Saddam Hussein even after the war between Iraq and Iran had ended? The answer, it seems apparent, is a legitimate fear of fundamentalist Muslim revolutions which, at some point, could seriously threaten our oil supplies. This would especially be true if such a revolution occurred in Saudi Arabia.
Ironically, on the same day the first Pollard article appeared, there was another story that had to do with the dropping of criminal charges against Sen. David Duren-berger (R-Minn.) for allegedly submitting false expense
MEDIA REVIEW Page BO