Dr. Erez Soref, president of ONE FOR ISRAEL, sat down with Joel Rosenberg to talk about the state of the Jewish nation after two long years of war, and how God is moving among us. In the Rosenberg Report interview on TBN1, Joel Rosenberg began with some extraordinary statistics about the growth of spiritual interest in Israel:
“Is it really true that in 1967, there were fewer than 2,000 Jewish people on planet earth who believed that Jesus is the Messiah? And is it really true that that number has grown from 2000 about 60 years ago to a million?”
“Why are Jews all over the world but particularly also Israel, curious about who Jesus is?
“Why are they watching videos with short testimonies hundreds of millions of times?”
“How are they responding to the war?” Rosenberg asked Dr. Soref.
ONE FOR ISRAEL has made hundreds of short testimony videos of Jews and Arabs explaining how they came to believe in Yeshua. We have channels in Hebrew, English and Arabic, and these videos are being watched over and over again, with many people “binge watching” multiple videos in one sitting.
“I was serving at the Bible College and we started noticing a shift among our students,” Dr Soref said, explaining how it all started. Less than twenty years ago, graduates of the ONE FOR ISRAEL Bible college assured Erez, “We’re going to have an internet revolution… we’re going to have everybody with a smartphone and everybody’s going to get all their information from YouTube.” Dr. Soref felt God impressing upon him to build a studio as part of our campus. It turned out to be an extremely good decision.
Joel Rosenberg’s Joshua Fund invested into new media facilities at the Bible college, so we could start making short videos. “We started investing, we helped you build the the studio,” Rosenberg recalled, but added, “we did not expect this this investment as it were, this to take off the way it did,”
“I think we’re in an age where when somebody just tells their story, people listen, I mean it’s just a personal account,” Erez explained. I’ve got my own testimony, but there are dozen and dozens in Hebrew.”
Talking about how he felt after coming to faith, Erez said, “I just fell in love with Yeshua, with Jesus. I mean, He wasn’t like other religious leaders… I felt very drawn to Him. Making him a long story short, through reading the Bible and eventually I prayed to God, I just started talk to God for the one of the first times in my life.”
“I asked him to reveal to me if He truly is the Messiah, I had a spiritual experience with the Lord, and I thought I was the first and only, you know, Jewish person… to make this great discovery!” Dr. Soref recalled. “In the in the following days and weeks, I noticed that two things happened. One, I was hungry and thirsty to read the Bible, to a very strange for me. and I read a I liked reading, but not the Bible.”
“The second word the thing was that I started getting a lot of zeal and passion, thinking how come I’ve been in all those places so many times that I’ve never heard this?”
Erez pointed out that Israel is a country of nine million people, but the viewership of the evangelistic videos has reached hundreds of millions because people watch many videos at once, and go back to them over and over again.
“What is happening to these people?” asked Rosenberg.
“It doesn’t mean that everybody agrees, and all those views… it doesn’t mean that everybody embraces the Gospel,” Erez clarified. “However, many people, I would say about 2/3 of the people who are writing to us, contacting us, texting us, they want to know more,” he said.
“Well that alone is a reversal from 2,000 years of history, right?” Rosenberg responded. For most of history, Jewish people have been extremely resistant to the Gospel. “What you found is a level of curiosity among Israeli Hebrew speakers as well as Jews… I don’t think any of us really thought of,” he remarked.
The impact of the war on spiritual interest in Israel
“When the war just began, there was one sociologist from one of the colleges in Israel who came on on radio and on TV, and she predicted that, like it happened in after the 1973 Yom Kippur war, that people turned to religion, they turned to God, she predicted it’s going happen during and after this war.”
“I texted her, I don’t know if she ever got it, but I said I agree with you. We see that happening,” Erez told Joel Rosenberg, based on the observation that the people of Israel call out to God when we are in trouble.
“This has been the hardest time for Israelis and Jews worldwide since the Holocaust, and we have seen a tremendous, tremendous rise in the number of people that contact us and the number of people that write to us, that want to know more about the Lord,” he said. Moreover, there has been a rise in the number of people that come to a saving knowledge of Yeshua, of Jesus, as a result.
Both Joel and Erez agreed that Israelis have been facing deep trauma as a nation, and Erez pointed out that even as the world has turned against the Jewish state: “I think Israelis have seen during this war that the only friends that Israel have are the evangelical Christians.”
Talking about the end of the war that we all hope for, Rosenberg asked, “When things get quiet, do you expect that spiritual interest to decline or do you think that that something has gotten sparked?”
Dr. Soref said it was hard to say what will happen next, but we will continue to pray that many more will discover that Yeshua is the best kept secret in Judaism.
