B’nai Yeshua, a new house of worship, will hold its first Sabbath today in the heart of Jewish Miami Beach.
That might not be unusual except for whom the group worships: Jesus Christ. B’nai Yeshua is a “messianic Jewish” synagogue, worshiping Jewish style but preaching Jesus as the Messiah.
And its rabbinic neighbors are treating it like an infection.
“They stood in front of my synagogue, handing out fliers and inviting people to their services,” said Rabbi Eliot Pearlson of nearby Temple Menorah. “That’s real chutzpah. An effrontery and an insult.”
Moshe Koniuchowsky, spiritual leader at B’nai Yeshua, isn’t deterred.
“God has put us in the heart of the third-largest Jewish population within the United States,” he said on Friday, just before all-day celebrations today at B’nai Yeshua’s new home, 7801 Carlyle Ave.
The dedication ceremony will start at 11 a.m., with a guest speech by Bob Cohen of Jacksonville, president of the Messianic Jewish Alliance of America. After a 2 p.m. covered-dish luncheon, the congregation will sponsor a 7 p.m. concert with messianic singer John Rose of Philadelphia.
Some 200 are expected to attend from four or five area messianic congregational leaders, Koniuchowsky said.
Koniuchowsky, who renamed himself Moshe from Marshall, founded his congregation in Hollywood as Messiah is God Fellowship. He decided to move its 40 members to Miami Beach in November, after an invitation by a Brazilian pastor in the Assemblies of God denomination.
The two congregations are housed in an Orthodox synagogue that folded when its rabbi emigrated to Israel several years ago. Pearlson learned of B’nai Yeshua six weeks ago, when an upset member of his Conservative temple brought him a flier she found under her condominium door. He wrote a counter-flier and asked her to pass it out to the Jewish residents at the condo.
The rabbi followed up with letters to four rabbis within a three-mile radius. The rabbis are discussing what to do; but he said the response probably will include “educating the elderly, and the youth _ the obvious targets.”
The other measure, Pearlson said, will be confrontation _ which might well include picketing and facing down street evangelists. “I intend to do whatever is necessary to ensure that the true Jewish community is properly informed of the misrepresentation of this church,” he said.
Another Jewish group, Torah Life and Living of North Miami Beach, picketed a messianic play, Rabboni, on Miami Beach in 1994. But the group’s leaders said on Friday they will ignore the B’nai Yeshua dedication today.
The difference is that the play’s promoters did more mass-media advertising, said Aaron Schwartzbaum, executive director of the group.
“It’s a free country; they have the right to exist,” he said of B’nai Yeshua. “But Jews should check in here before they buy that baloney. We are the live Jews. They are the pretenders.”
