Thursday, November 10.1983 — THE BULLETIN — 5
By DVORA WAYSMAN Now they call him Rabbi. Then he was called Pastor or Reverend — an ordained Baptist minister. Now he has a long red beard and tzitzit hang outside his dark suit. Then be was clean-shaven, dressed like an English man of the cloth. Now he is Hghting to regain lost Jewish souls. Then he was an evangelist missionary, sharing a platform with Oral Roberts, Billy Graham, bishops and archbishops, trying to win souls for Jesus,
Dvora Waysman is a regulai* correspondent for World , Zionist Press Service.
This is the true but unbelievable story of Rabbi Shmuel Golding, now in Israel. Although few people know his story, his name is 4)ecoming well-known because of the posters plastered on notice boards throughout Israel, proclaiming:
CHRISTIAN MISSIONARIES ARE DISTRIBUTING AND TEACHING THEIR NEW TESTAMENT > ALL OVER OUR HOLY LAND.
He should know. He was for many years a Christian missionary himself.
Shmuel Golding was born in the little town of Demidovo in the Ukraine in 1938, the second son of Jewish parents whose forebears included a line of esteemed rabbis dating back to one who was a friend of the Baal Shem Tov.
Refusenik Profile
Mila Livshitz
FOR THJL PAST seven years, a Moscow piano teacher, Mila Livshitz. 34, has been refused permission to emigrate to Israel, on the ground that her husband, Vyacheslav, 41, had access to classified information during his work as an engineer. H^ ftas consisle^ntly denied this! After the couple first applied for an exit permit in 19.75, Livshitz was dismissed from his engineering post and is now an unskilled factory worker. In March, 1979, Boris Shumilin, Soviet Deputy Interior Minister, promised a positive reply to Mrs. Livshitz' application, but none has yet been received. The
Livshitzes have two sons: Garry, four and Dan, one.
The Helsinki Agreement which the Soviet government signed allows for freedom of emigration. Write, wire or phone — protest to Western leaders to intercede and to the Soviets to set them free.
THIS WEEK WRITE OFFICIAL:
The Ambassador, Embassy of the USSR, 285 Charlotte Street, Ottawa, Ontario.
At Babi Yar, outside Kiev, four-year-old Shmuel and his brother saw their parents, relatives and most of the community, marched tathe forest and shot. The children were miraculously saved by a Righteous Gentile before it was their turn to die, but Shmuel and his brother were separated, and to this day he does not know if his brother is still alive.
When he was seven, Shmuel was sent to a paternal uncle in Istanbul who, unhke his father, was not proud of his Judaism. He isent the child to English to be educated, in church schools and a military academy. He became a Christian by conviction and married the daughter of a clergyman high in church circles.
At 22 he himself was ordained as a Baptist minister. His first English church was in the northern industrial city of Manchester, and he became a renowned preacher often speaking on radio and television. Later, he went to France to work among young people, and then to war-torn Vietnam, where he was commended by the prime minister of France for his pastoral work. A further church contract took him to India where his evangelical fervor won many converts to Christianity.
But in India, certain traumatic events took place. Shmuel Golding (his name was different then) was studying for a doctorate in divinity, and for the first time began studying the Hebrew Bible in its original form. He began to discover mistranslations and contradictions in the churches teachings that brought about a crisis of faith. In further studies into church history, he learned of the adoption of heathen feasts and customs; changing of dogma at whim or conyenience; intolerance and perversion of truth.
Suddenly his love for the Tprah of hoUness and for the Jewish people from whom he had sprung, grew like a flame in his heart. In all conscience, he knew he must leave the church, although the decision almost destroyed him. His wife, also a missionary, divorced him and took their little daughter. He lost all his material assets, but was left with a new yearning-to discover his roots.
Rediscovery of roots
He returned to Istanbul, but was unhappy among his father's assimilated family, most of whom had intrmarried with Turks and Greeks. By chance, he met his father's oldest uncle, shunned by the rest of the family. This man was a Torah Jew, and Shmuel made his home a haven. The old rhan led him through the Tahach( Hebrew Bible) with all its conimentaries, atid Shmuers last do\ibts were cleared away. He was convinced Judaism was the true religion. Shmuel stayed seven years with his great-uncle until his death.
Working in Paris, Shmuel began trying to reclaim Jewish adherents of the Jews for Jesus movement. One girl, Dvora Ruth, who listened to his words, returned to Judaism and married him. Today they have four children: Nachman, six, Nissim, four, Guela, three, and baby Shachrit, eight months. The daughter from his first marriage was also reunited with her father after many years in a Swiss convent, and she has now converted to Judaism. Today, Efrat — now 23 — lives with her father and his new family and acts as his secretary.
WZPS Photo
RABBI SHMUEL GOLDING, formerly an ordained Baptist Minister, in his Jerusalem office where he counsels against denial of the Jewish faith.
There is a dramatic chapter in Rabbi Golding*s life in Turkey, before he came to Israel. He lectured in an Istanbul college and began compiHng a history of Turkish Jewry, beginning with Abraham who lived in Haran, where a small Jewish community still exists. Unfortunately such religious activity was illegal in Turkey and he had to work underground, persuading Jews to make *aliya' to Israel. He was finally arrested, but escaped with his wife and baby son. The authorities impounded all his assets and he arrived in Israel virtually penniless.
Today, Shmuel Golding is an Orthodox Rabbi, dividing his time between his home in Beersheva and his office at 14 King George Street, Jerusalem. He spends four days a week at his office giving help and advice to Jews who have embraced missionary teachings; counselling those who are about to convert; and advising concerned parents who have lost their children to sects, cults and missionary teachings.
He fights fire with fire, quoting extensively from the New Testament to prove how missionary interpretations are false and misleading, with phrases taken out of context and words deliberately mis-translated (such as <i/ma— Hebrew for a young woman being changed to "virgin**—for which the Hebrew word is quite different).
He has printed leaflets detailing more than 100 examples of contradictions and mis-translations in the New Testament. He respects Christians for their beliefs, but is heckled, abused and threatened regularly by missionaries and. sometimes even by Jews who have embraced their teachings.
Rabbi Golding claims a 70 percent ^success rate* in winning Jews back from the missionaries. Because of his own incredible story. Rabbi Golding maintains that one must never despair of a Jewish soul, no matter how much a Jew has assimilated or denied his faith. He believes one of his own ancestors—perhaps the Rabbi of Demidovo — laid a spiritual claim to the welfare of his soul and brought him back to Judaism, his country and his people.
From To preach hatred (2)
Freedom of speech is not absolute. We have laws governing slander against individuals; why, it is asked, can we not have effective laws governing slander against religious, racial and ethnic groups?
In part, we do. The Charter of Rights protects identifiable groups from discrimination on the basis of race, religion, color or ethnic origin, and the Criminal Code defends everyone against wilful property damage, assault, murder and other acts which may spring from one man's hatred for another. But the notion of group libel contained in section 281.2(2) of the Criminal Code, which makes it an offence to "wilfully promote hatred** against an identifiable group except in private conversation, is the legal equivalent of an unguided missile.
There is no onus on the prosecution to prove Hkelihood of injury to reputation, as there is in individual libel; the case rests solely on the intention to promote hatred. (The: Canadian Jewish Congress proposes that the word "wilfully** be removed, a change which would eliminate even the notion of intention.) There is no need to-prove injurff-as a resultj>f hatred, or even to prove that hatred resulted from the accused*s efforts to encourage it. -
Section 282.2(2) exists, quite simply^ to penalize people for expressing hatred — and that's a role the law isn*t qualified to play. The point was argued deftly in 1969 by Harry Arthurs, then associate dean of Osgoode Hall Law School. "I believe,** he wrote, "that the -use of criminal legislation to control activity which is deemed to be hurtful and anti-social rests upon a miscalculation about the efficacy of criminal law.
To take but three examples: we were not able to diminish drunkenness by prohibiting the sale of liquor, we have not been able to curb the use of narcotics by a vigorous campaign of policing; and we have not managed to stifle various manifestations of siexuaHty by censorship or the threat of criminal sanctions. We err when we concentrate our attention
€IutC§l0i>i»atidM«itl
upon those who disseminate, rather than those who consume.'* If there are lies being spread, we must counter the lies; if there are myths being broadcast, we must expose them as myths. The way to attack racists is to denounce their positions. The way to attack the fiction that no Jews were sent to the gas chambers in Nazi Germany is to present the documented evidence, the recorded testimony of those who escaped the chambers and those who saw the camps at war*s end.
"There is no place," says Sharon Wolfe of the Congress's steering committee, "to stand up and preach hatred in this country," and certainly the preaching should be fought. But hatred is the ugly shadow of freedom of speech; can it be subdivided, without putting the freedom itself at risk? If we
legislate against pamphlets which slur racial, religious and ethnic groups, where do we draw the line? Do we offer similar. sanctions against slurs on the basis of sex. of physical and mental handicaps? When does a protest against immigration policies, affirmative action programs or housing programs cross the line to public promotion of hatred? The freedom to speak is the freedom to spread ideas which some find offensive; without that element, the concept of freedom becomes meaningless.
A society is in trouble when its first defence against hatemongers is to lock them up. if wecan'tdeal with such people outside the courtrooms, cannot rebut them and discredit their views, ho law will help us.
Editorial Oct. 27 S3
From The debate that will not die
... For the old left, the Rosenberg's innocence was an article of faith. Some of them put a special gloss on the word "innocence:" anything done for the cause, even if technically against the law, had a moral guiltlessness. And all had good and obvioU;! reason to resist the presumption that the party was a recruiting ground for spies.
The anticommunist liberals meanwhile had problems of their own. During the stretch drive for commutation of the death sj^ntence, the American Committee for Cultural Freedom expressed the temper of liberalism thus: "(The) pre-eminent fact of the Rosenbergs* guilt must be openly acknowledged before any appeal for clemency can be regarded as having been made in good faith."
This requirement kept liberals at a safe distance from the communists, but it also kept them on the sidelines when the^ countdown to execution began, as the sometime-liberal sociologist Nathan Glazer acknowledges in the October issue of
Commentary.
The death penalty seemed wrong to many who believed in the Rosenbergs' guilt, he says, "but it became the basis for an international movement dominated by communists, which in demanding the exonefation of the Rosenbergs, was also demanding the condemnation of the United States, and it was difficult to divorce one from the other."
At this late date,. divorce ought to be possible. The Rosenbergs were guihy of somehow breaking faith with their country; says Martin Peretz. president of The New Republic. "Some things are true even though J. Edgar Hoover believed them."
But their own belief in their moral innocence cannot be doubted, and in any event thecoui*age with which they met their deaths does not count for nothing. Under the circumstances of 1953 a confession was out of the questio.'^. The unfortunate thing is that in 1983 so is a reconciliation.