Oami-

THE CALL
OF

ISRAEL

PLEA FOR

THE KINSMEN OF CHRIST



draper

FOR THE CONVER-
SION OF ISRAEL

God of goodness,
Father of mercies, I be-

seech Thee by the im-
maculate Heart of Mary,
and through the- inter-
cession of the Patriarchs

and Holy Apostles to

cast a look of compassion

upon the Children of
Israel, that they may be
brought to the knowl-

edge of their only

Savior Jesus Christ, and

that they may partake of
the precious fruits of

the Redemption. Father

forgive them, for they

know not what they do.

1;

4
NtlfU (§batat:

Patrick Waters, Ph.D. ^

Smprimatttr:

William Cakdinal O’Connell

Archbishop of Boston

Front Page Design

The Morgan Dovit, Star of the House of David,

from which Jesus the Messiah came : The Cross upon

which the Messiah died for the Children of Israel.

H



'THE CALL OF ISRAEL
I {Reprinted from ‘The Sign/^ Union City, N. J.) ‘

Hearken! Once more the Divine call

of the Messiah has gone forth: ^^Go to

ithe lost sheep of the house of Israel/’

tell them that “the Kingdom of God is

at hand.” This time the call comes to

us through the Messiah’s Vicar, Pope

IPius XI, in his 1934 intention
—

“the

‘^Conversion of the Jews.” Will this call

be in vain? Are our ears stopped, our

“eyes held, our hearts hardened to the

plea that we bring His own unto Him?

Here is our opportunity, for there

are more Jews in our continental United

States than in any other country in this

EWorld, the number given in our Govern-

jment Report being 4,228,029. This

3



4 THE CALL OF ISRAEL

means that more than twenty-seven per

cent of the 15,630,000 Jews in the world

reside within our American borders.

Here is our responsibility, for the call

commands that Catholics in America

bring, relatively, a greater number of

the lost sheep into the Fold of the Good

Shepherd than the Catholics of any
|

other nation. J
-jl!

Converts From Judaism 1

Are we who have the Temple, Priest-
|i

hood and Sacrifice that superseded the
i|

Jewish Temple, Priesthood and Sacri-
|

fice to be outdone in bringing Jews to
f

their Messiah by those outside the Tem-

ple who are utterly devoid of a Priest-

hood or a Sacrifice? Not if we hearken 1 1

to the call of Pope Pius XI. Protestant
|!

churches in the United States claim to i|l

have over twenty thousand converted ;

Jews within their various denominations

and it is estimated that about eighty

thousand or more have joined the Chris-
j

tian Science Church. Besides that, an

untold number are to be found in the

spiritualist camp as well as among

Theosophists, Rosicrucians and other

cults that deny the God of Abraham,

Isaac and Jacob. How many are there
|

in the Catholic Church, the Messiah-
|

made Kingdom, to which they logically

belong? Surely not more than one per ^

cent of the number in the sects and ,

cults. Either lack of zeal or improper

method of approach or both must be the



THE CALL OP ISRAEL 5

cause of Catholic failure to make head-

way among Jews. Undoubtedly the

Catholic Church has the principles,

practices and historic background for a

soul-stirring appeal to the children of

Israel to come in and enjoy the religious

inheritance that awaits them and which

was foretold long centuries ago in the

inspired words of Moses, the patriarchs

I’
and prophets.

I

Disunion

When, in the history of modern

^ times, has the order to to the lost

sheep of the house of IsraeV^ held out a

! better opportunity for Catholics than

today? Never! Many discerning lead-
ers among Jews are bemoaning the lack

' of unity in the Judaic world, though

i they fail to realize that it is due to their

^ departure or open denial of the faith

< of their fathers, a faith that no one

r among them teaches with any authority

or can define to the satisfaction of any

considerable group of Jews. Rabbi

David Max Eichon of the Sinai Tem-
ple, Springfield, Mass., said recently

that present day Judaism
unable to unite on any single issue.”

And I heard Rabbi Landman of New
York (Editor of The American He-
brew) say at the Harvard University

Seininar of the Calvert Associates in a

genial manner, though seriously, that
^^there is only one thing that two Jews can
agree upon. And that is how much the third
Jew should give for charity.”



6 THE CALL OF ISRAEL

The Rabbi was speaking of religious as
well as secular unity. The apparent*
unity one witnesses at large mass meet-

ings or in written protests issued from '

time to time is Hebraic rather than
^

Jewish, that is, racial rather than re-

ligious, and it manifests itself only in

times of persecution like that which

Hitlerism is inflicting upon the Jews to-
*

day. ^

Pope Innocent III Protects Jews

^The Jews have a right to our protection.

They are the living witnesses of the Christian
Faith. Christians should not exterminate or

oppress them, because they have not lost the

knowledge of the law”

said Pope Innocent III in the thirteenth *

century when he came to the defense of

the Jews though, as he said, they fail to i

‘‘acknowledge Christ through the hardness of

their hearts.”

Unfortunately those thirteenth century
^

words that I have italicized can only be k

said of a diminishing number of the i

Jews of our twentieth century times,

:

for they are losing more and more

“knowledge of the Law. Smaller and smaller <

is the number of Jews becoming who utter

the pathetic act of faith of Maimonides

:

“/ believe with a perfect faith in the com- '

ing of the Messiah, and though he tarry I

will wait for his coming. This heart-rending i

appeal of the Orthodox Jews for the coming I

of the One who had already trod the high- >|
ways of Judea and Galilee over nineteen cen- i

turies ago, when He made His bloody journey .

back to His heavenly home, is giving way,

unfortunately, to denying belief in a personal

Messiah and substituting therefor
^

a belief in i

an abstraction termed ‘the Messianic age.’
”

1



THE CALL OP ISRAEL 7

The Messiah

In addition to the misconception em-

bodied in the Maimonides^ prayer of the

diaspora, that assumes the Messiah is

yet to come, and, on the other hand, the

denial that there is a Messiah to pray

for, there are in our country a large

number of the kinsmen of our Lord

who are indifferent to both Orthodox

and Reform Judaism, many of them be-

ing without any knowledge of the mean-

i
ing of a predicted Messiah. The fear

expressed by Theodor Herzl, the father

>of Modern Zionism, that wage-earning

Jews were departing from their religion

to enter the Army of Socialism is a fact
“

today seen in the Jewish trade unions

of the United States which have nearly
'

all officially endorsed Socialism and

propagate its teachings. Besides, Jews

^ educated in our non-religious institu-

tions of learning are imbued with the

motion that pantheism and rationalism

I alone can stand the test of right-reason

land science. They are utterly ignorant
iof Catholic principles, history, or prac-

tices, partly because no effort equal to

the opportunity has been made by

Catholics to bring the knowledge of the

profundity of Catholic teachings to

: them.

Synagogue Affiliation

Regular synagogue membership is

very small in the United States. The

last Report of Religious Bodies, issued



8 THE CALL. OP ISRAEL

by the Department of Commerce, an-

nounced that the Church Membership"

of Jewish congregations totals 4,081,202.^

That is because the Director of the'

Statistical Department of the American u

Jewish Committee reported the whole:

^^Jewish’^ population of 1926—panthe- :
ists, agnostics, atheists, and Commu-

nists included—to be affiliated with

synagogues. In my Campaigners For
Christ Handbook I have credited syna-

i

gogues with a membership of seventeen
'

per cent of the Jewish population, tak- -

ing the synagogue membership figures

in the 1916 Report of Religious Bodies

as a basis of reckoning. Yet I believe I

that an exact tabulation would prove I

that not more than seven per cent of

the Hebrews in the United States are .

members of synagogues, that is less d

than three hundred thousand are mem-

bers of Jewish congregations and not i

more than one-third of that number i

are synagogue-attending Jews. Ameri- »

can born Jews who have synagogue e

affiliations join Reform rather than i

Orthodox congregations. They resent t

the Orthodox, they have a hostile feel- ^

ing towards their hirsute, dietary, and I

suppliant customs and practices such as

rarely enters the hearts of Christians.

Commenting on Orthodox Judaism in i

The RefieXj Dr. S. M. Malamed says

that
. I

^^all the oppression of all the anti-Semitic ^

governments combined cannot equal the op- ,

pression of rabbinic Judaism in the destruc-



THE CALL OF ISRAEL 9

tion of the Jewish soul and mind. Rabbinic

Judaism is choking the Jews to death intel-

lectually and spiritually.’^

Dr. Solomon Goldman in his book, A
Rabbi Takes Stock, says that

^‘the end of almost a century of religious con-

flict in Jewry finds neither Orthodoxy nor

Reform with any victory to record: both so

impoverished in spiritual and intellectual re-

sources that neither can hope to meet the

new challenges of our own day.”

And Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, who seems

to speak the loudest for Judaism as he

knows it, says in The Agony of Israel:
“Religion! Are we not becoming its destroy-

ers rather than its guardians? There is some-

thing which calls itself religion current in

certain smug circles of Jewish life here and

in other lands. For the most part it is

i nothing more than a poor pulseless imitation

or simulation of a decorously unvital mys-
‘ ticism. And save for this there is little, if

( any, so-called religion in the household of

1 Israel, Orthodoxy being almost as dead as

I Reform.”

Claiming Jesus

Along with this departure from the

J Judaism of old there has developed an

attempt to claim Jesus as the greatest

Jew that ever lived

“minus the theology of Jesus,”

which is being termed Paulineism.

Rabbi Ernest R. Trattner in his As a

Jew Sees Jesus contends that

I

“the silence of the Jews on Jesus through the

I < ages has been not so much a conspiracy on
their part as a feeling of strangeness with the

I

Christ set in the trappings of the Christian

religion. With the tearing away of the myths
that grew up about Jesus, intelligent Jews are

beginning to recognize the Jew Jesus, in pro-
k.



10 THE CALL OP ISRAEL

portion as the Christians are turning away ,
from their conception of Jesus the Son of

God, and consequently immortal.’’

Unsound though this denial of -

^^the Emanuel, God with us”

may be, it carries with it an opportu-
^

nity never afforded to Catholics in the

ages that have passed. It enables Jews

to be approached with Catholic claims i

that the bitterness in the hearts of

Orthodox Jews towards Jesus made al- •

most impossible.

Jews Talented

Jews are intellectual, therefore when

they sincerely claim Jesus as their own,

as a growing number of them are doing

even among non-synagogue Hebrews,
,

we may hope to lead them to a proper

concept of the claim. Much opposition ii

to Jews is due to their being greatly

talented and often using those talents ^

in a non-religious if not an anti-religious

way. Their talents along with their
’’

great ambition and their natural pro-

jectiveness causes the number of them o

who enter the professions, who lead in a

commerce, finance and radicalism, to

be exceedingly far above the percentage

of the total population Jews represent.

These talents elevated and this admi-

rable projective quality tempered i

through what awaits ’ them in the e

Catholic Church intellectually, estheti- -

cally, mystically, and sacramentally
'

would lead them to glorious achieve-

.

ments that they are unable to attain so )



THE CALL OP ISRAEL 11

long as they stand against the Law as
Moses, the patriarchs, and prophets in-

tended it to be understood and its ful-

filment to be realized.

How To Approach Jews

So long as Jews can be approached

with things Catholic so long is there an

opportunity to win them and so long

is there a responsibility on the part of

Catholics to respond to the call to con-

vert them. First, they must be sympa-

thetically induced to study the Old

Testament in the light of Catholic

teachings. Secondly, they must be

shown that the acceptance of the proph-

ecies and their fulfilment as understood

by the Catholic Church is not a denial

of the faith of their fathers. On the
contrary, it means upholding belief in

the basic teachings embodied in the

Judaism of their fathers of old and the

realization of the Divine promises set

forth in the Old Testament which were

intended first for the children of Israel,

the kinsmen of the Messiah.

I have endeavored to make plain in

the thirty-six pages of my Campaigners
For Christ Handbook which are devoted

to the Jews:

A—That the Jewish belief in the Messiah
is realized in Jesus, the Christ, who

came in the time, place, and manner

foretold in the Old Testament.

B—That the Priesthood instituted by the
Messiah, according to the Order of

Melchisedic, has by Divine ordinance



12 THE CALL. OP ISRAEL

taken the place of the Jewish Priest-

hood of Aaron—^which is no more.
C—That the unbloody Sacrifice of the 'j

Mass, predicted by Malachy, has

superseded the bloody Sacrifice for-

merly offered to God by the High
Priests in the Temple in Jerusalem.

D—That the Catholic Church, born in
the Synagogue, is the Messianic King-

dom, the old Theocracy restored but

universalized.
I

Thirdly, there must be brought to the
|

mind of Jews the historically established
!

fact that the abolition of their Priest-
||

hood of Aaron, which functioned by |l

Divine Sanction, the destruction of

their Temple and the consequent failure
^

to reinstitute their old sacrifice, which t

the Orthodox Jews of today pray for,
|

are all a part of the Divine plan out-

lined in the Old Testament. They must

be brought to the realization that the

persecutions that they have had to face

and are still enduring are exhortations,

so to speak, of their God of Abraham,

Isaac and Jacob to induce them to ac-

cept the new Priesthood and the Sacri-

fice of the Mass instituted at the Pass-

over service in the Upper Chamber in

Jerusalem. When Jews come to the

recognition of themselves as they are,

when they cease rejecting their Mes-

sianic King, their afflictions will end,
;

their eyes will be opened, their ears
j

unstopped, their hands strengthened, as

Isaiah tells them (chapter 35): |i

“The redeemed of the Lord shall return,

and shall come into Zion with praise,

.1



THE CALL OF ISRAEL 13

and everlasting joy shall he upon their

heads: they shall obtain joy and glad-

ness, and sorrow and mourning shall flee

away!^

Let US win the Jews by our prayers

and good works.

Whenever we meet any of the children

of Israel who fail to recognize Jesus as

the Messianic Son of David let there

go forth from our hearts the loving ap-

peal of Christ upon the Cross—^‘Father
forgive them for they know not what

they do/^

Meet Jews with the realization of our

indebtedness to them. They gave us

Moses, Abraham, David, Isaiah, Jere-

miah, Job, Daniel, the Mother and sons

f of the Machabees, John the Baptist and

other patriarchs, prophets, and spiritual

^ heroes whom our Church loves to honor.
Bear ever in mind when contacting

them that they gave us the Old Testa-

iment and all the writers of the New
1 Testament, two of the world^s most sub-

^ lime collections of writings which our

Church holds to have been inspired by

^Almighty God.

Remember always that from the Jews

came Jesus the Christ (Messiah) in

whose veins flowed the blood of Israelis

kings: that they gave us the holiest of

all holy women, Mary the Virgin
^Mother of Jesus; Joseph the foster

father of our Lord; the twelve Apostles,

eleven of whom suffered and died for
Christ; that from them came the first

8000 members of our Church.



14 THE CALL OP ISRAEL

Remember that we are morally obli- -

gated to bring the children of Israel
^

into their inheritance. Therefore invite -

them to come to Mass, to Vespers, to

Missions and on Retreats. Give them
^

Catholic literature. Help them to un- :

derstand that Catholic Christianity is

Judaism realized, extended, elevated,

and glorified.

These are the things that should be -

stressed, these are the things that should
.

be done by those who hearken to the ‘

call of Pope Pius XI for the conversion !

of the Jews. These things should be
|

stressed because the Son of David is

exhorting His kinsmen through persecu-

tion to become part of His Mystical i

Body—^the Catholic Church—^that He '
established for all peoples including the

|

stray members of His Israelitic family.

Come—Bring Joy
The Jews of today have their annual I

‘

feast called Purim which is celebrated 1

in commemoration of their deliverance, .

through Esther, from the plot laid by ^

Haman to destroy them. • The Jews of [

today celebrate the Passover annually
'

in remembrance of their emancipation i

from Egyptian bondage. If Catholics '

would only respond to the call of Christ i\

through His Vicar, if Catholics through-
j

out the land would join with the Con-
-

fraternity of Prayer for the Conversion

of Israel, if Catholics would carry the

message of salvation to the Jews with i
...



THE CALL OF ISRAEL 16

whom they associate, the Children of
Israel would have the sublime privilege

of adding another feast to their Purim

and Passover festivities. It would be

a feast of emancipation such as they

have never before enjoyed, the feast

their Messiah instituted at the Passover

gathering with His Jewish disciples and

His Jewish Virgin Mother in the Upper

Room where He turned the unleavened

bread and the juice of the vine into His

Body and Blood for their spiritual up-

building and their abidance in His eter-

nal home.

Come let us bring joy to the kinsmen

of our Lord; let us bring joy to our

Holy Father; let us bring joy to the

Sacred Heart of Jesus, the Messiah, by

responding to the intention of Pope Pius

XI
—

^^the conversion of the Jews.^’

Please help this call for the lost

sheep of the house of Israel by saying

the prayer printed on page 2 and by

making a financial contribution to-

wards the circulation of this pamphlet.



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CAMPAIGNERS

FOR CHRIST

HANDBOOK

By

DAVID GOLDSTEIN

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acquainted with in order to correctly visualize

the status of the various elements among the

lost sheep of the House of Israel who desig-

nate themselves as Jews. Its divisions on

Einstein, Spinoza, the Rabbi Wise Family,

the Inquisition, the Prophesies and their Ful-

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