R.I.P. Moishe Rosen, Founder of Jews for Jesus

By Sharon Dewey Hetke

Moishe Rosen, founder of Jews for Jesus, wrote in a letter to his friends: “If you are reading this, it means that I have gone on to my reward. As I write this, I can only think of what the Scriptures say and that is, ‘Eye has not seen, ear has not heard, neither have they entered into the heart of man the things that God has prepared for those who love him.’ (1 Corinthians 2:9) Well, I have a big curiosity and by now, I know.”

Rosen died in San Francisco of prostate cancer at age 78.  Known for his ‘big curiousity’ as well as his eccentricity, Rosen stepped outside conventional approaches to mission accompanied by his courage, zeal and a fair share of controversy. 

Born in 1932, Rosen was raised in an Orthodox Jewish home, but his religion was more assumed than taken to heart. "My Jewishness is something that I took for granted. I grew up in Denver, Colorado, in a neighborhood where most of the people were Jewish. If you walked into the grocery store, or the shoemaker, or the barber, you expected to hear Yiddish." Rosen married Ceil Starr while they were still teenagers. When his wife converted to Christianity through the witness of a friend, Rosen began to study the New Testament in order to convince her of the error of her new way. However, he was soon converted as well.

Rosen attended Northeastern Bible College and became a Baptist minister; however, his path soon diverged from that of traditional ministry. Rosen was gripped with a passion to spread the Gospel amongst Jews, and first focussed on youth ministry to the hippie movement, many of whom were Jewish.

His wry humour and self-deprecating manner allowed him to be immensely effective in this ministry, headquartered in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. Rosen would joke, "I'm overweight, overbearing, and over 40. What am I doing leading a youth movement?" No doubt the youth he worked with saw in Rosen an authenticity and appeal that eluded many of his contemporaries in ministry.

Well accepted amongst North American evangelicals, Rosen was still a controversial figure for many other groups. He levelled intense criticism at the Messianic Judaism movement (which insists upon a continuance of many traditional practices of Judaism in addition to the acceptance of Jesus as Messiah). He criticized those who would call themselves ‘Messianic rabbis’: "The use of this term is like a diploma-mill doctorate, an undeserved honor, which they arrogate to themselves. It is designed to mislead people."

Rosen was harshly criticized by traditional Jewish leaders, --one described the concept of Jews for Jesus as about as sensible as kosher pork. Jews for Judaism was named in parody of Rosen’s group and existed mainly as a “counter-missionary movement.”

But Rosen always maintained he was still a Jew. "I never made the decision that I wanted to leave the Jewish community," he told the New Yorker Magazine in 1986. "We want to stay in and dissent — and we've been ostracized. We wouldn't separate the two religions. We want a climate where all ideas can be accepted or rejected without previous indoctrination."

Some mainline Christian groups looked on Rosen’s work with disfavour as well, questioning the validity of the mission itself.

But Rosen’s methods were also called into question: he could be extremely abrasive and aggressive, both in confrontation with unbelievers and also with those he trained as evangelists. And in the shadow of the Holocaust, no doubt many were simply less than eager to embrace an aggressive approach to the evangelization of Jews. 

But to any who would deny the need to preach Jesus to the Jews Rosen punted back, "If the Jews didn't need Jesus, why didn't he come by way of Ireland?" 

J.I. Packer described him as "the portly near-genius who envisioned and shaped the mission from the start" and who believed Jews for Jesus was “centrally about God's grace, and God must have all the glory for it."

Rosen said, “You can say I'm a nuisance, a Christian, out of step with the Jewish community, but you can't say I'm not a Jew."  Nor could anyone question his passion for sharing the Gospel, no matter the cost.