Timeline of notable Jewish Christians of the past five centuries

Jim Sibley, Southern Baptist coordinator of Jewish ministries, and Arnold Fruchtenbaum, director of the evangelistic outreach Ariel Ministries, estimate a total of 100,000, but the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York says more than 100,000 have converted over the past 20 years alone. Susan Pearlman of Jews for Jesus says 60,000 to 75,000, but Jews for Judaism says 300,000, a very high figure. (Jewish groups tend to make higher estimates, perhaps because their definition of "Christian" is looser.) By comparison, the American Jewish Identity Survey estimated that 5.3 million adults identify themselves as Jewish, of which about 420,000 are Orthodox. Felix Posen of the Posen Foundation, which underwrote the study, concluded that its findings show that "Jews who do not identify with the main religious streams of Judaism [should no longer] be dismissed as if their numbers were insignificant." It's also time to stop dismissing Jewish converts to Christianity as having acted because of personal or family problems, a desire for excitement, or self-serving ambition. Clearly there have been times when material and professional advantages could follow voluntary conversion. That's clearly not the case in the United States today, and over the centuries the personal disadvantages often involved in conversion-leaving family, friends, and established livelihood, while undergoing harassment by Jewish community leaders-were generally far greater than any personal advantages obtained. In most cases only those convinced that they were leaving a partial truth for a greater truth were willing to exile themselves from the communities they knew. This timeline includes capsule biographical information on a few of the many notable Jewish Christians-Jewish by ethnicity, Christian by theology-of the past 500 years. This list is limited to those who personally chose Christianity, made a mark in their professions or publications, and were thereafter hailed as traitors by some and heroes by others. Bits and pieces of the information below are available in books and at websites, but either no overall listing has been published up to now, or it is buried in some place inaccessible by WORLD's research and inquiries over the past three months.

1506 Alfonso de Zamora, a former rabbi, is baptized. Working with Paul Nunez Coronel and Alfonso d'Alcala, two other Jewish Christians, he uses his knowledge of Hebrew, Aramaic, Chaldean, and other languages to help develop a six-volume multilingual work known as the Polyglot Bible. He also writes a Hebrew grammar, a Hebrew dictionary, a dictionary of the Old Testament, and a treatise on Hebrew spelling.

1507 Johannes Pfefferkorn, converted two years before in Cologne, Germany, writes Der Judenspiegel, which condemns the persecution of Jews but also calls the Talmud and many Jewish customs anti-biblical.

1522 Antonius Margaritha, son of a German chief rabbi, converts to Christianity and soon writes Der ganz Judisch glaub (The Entire Jewish Faith), a critical examination of Jewish customs and community structures.

1540 Johann Harzuge prints in Cracow, Poland, a New Testament with a Hebrew translation. In the next several years Paul Halicz, Paul Emulio, and Michael Adam also produce Hebrew and Yiddish translations of the New Testament.

1546 Johannes and Stephan Isaac, father and son, convert to Lutheranism but have trouble afterwards deciding between it and Roman Catholicism. Both become Catholics, with Johannes becoming a professor of Hebrew at the University of Cologne and Stephan a priest, but in 1582-1583 Stephan delivers sermons opposing the worship of icons and saints and soon afterwards becomes a Protestant once again.

1548 John Immanuel Tremellius, converted to Christianity around 1530, becomes Professor of Hebrew at Cambridge. A strong Calvinist, he is later Professor of Theology at Heidelberg, where he produces a Latin Old Testament that is published in Frankfurt in the 1570s and London in 1580. With Theodore Beza's Latin New Testament attached to it, the Tremellius Bible is the Protestant contender against the Vulgate issued by Pope Sixtus V in a Reformation vs. Counter Reformation battle of Latin bibles.

1600 Christian Gerson, a German pawnbroker, reads out of "curiosity" a New Testament one of his customers was pawning. Seeing that the New Testament relies heavily on the Hebrew Bible, he repeatedly reads his new book "in secret so that my wife should not notice ... my heart was troubled and anxious for weeks, food or drink had no taste for me." Gerson feels he must convert and does so, but at a heavy cost: "My wife, with whom I had lived in marriage, with love and fidelity, and with whom I had two sons, I left at her request ... all my Jewish neighbors and acquaintances ... have become implacable enemies."

1621 Paul Christian (Malachi ben Samuel), a Polish rabbi, converts several years after being impressed by a Yiddish translation of the New Testament. He is particularly surprised that marginal references to the Hebrew Scriptures are not distorted, as he had been told they would be. He writes, "My heart became full of doubt. No man can believe the pain and ache that assailed my heart. I had no rest day or night.... What should I do? To whom should I speak of these things?" He finally feels he has no choice but to cross over.

1625 Giovanni Baptista Jonas converts to Christianity in Poland and eventually becomes a Vatican librarian who writes a Hebrew translation of the Gospels and a Hebrew-Chaldee lexicon.

1656 Esdras Edzard, who grew up studying Hebrew and the Talmud, and then studied in Leipzig, Wittenberg, and Basel, earns a doctorate and begins working among the Jews of Hamburg. He provides free instruction in Hebrew, helps the poor, and explains to all the gospel. From 1671 to 1708 Edzard leads 148 Jews to baptism in his church. He emphasizes post-baptismal teaching and counseling, and almost all of those baptized stick with Christianity.

1666 Friedrich Albrecht Christiani is stunned to find himself believing in Christ. The Hamburg resident, educated in the Talmud, says, "I was so zealous for my Jewishness that had someone told me then of my prospective conversion, it would have appeared as strange to me as it seems incredible to others." But finding himself unable to refute Esdras Edzard's arguments, he decides to go with what his mind, rather than tradition, tells him, and takes the last name "Christiani."

1669 Friedrich Ragstadt von Weille converts, saying that an infusion of Jewish Christian believers will revitalize Christian churches.

1673 Christophorus Paulus Maier (formerly Solomon ben Maier of Frankfurt) turns to Christ after being disappointed by false messiah Shabbatai Zvi. Paolo Medici also converts after he comes to believe that the long list of false messiahs "accepted and credited" by Jews shows they are missing the truth. When Giulio Morosini converts, he says that his faith does not depend on Jewish messianic failure, but is strengthened by it.

1676 Jacob Melammed converts with his family because "Shabbatai Zvi, for whom we had waited for a whole year with fasts and mortifications, was all lies."

1692 In another Shabbatai Zvi aftershock, Theodore John of Prague converts because "vain waiting for a messiah" makes no sense to him "when really He is come long ago." Phillip Ernst Christfelss (formerly Mordechai ben Shemaya) also converts to the "true Messiah, Jesus."

1707 Franciscus Lotharius Phillipus (Wolf Levi of Lublin), Simcha Hasid, and 11 other Polish Jews convert to Protestantism after their messianic hopes are dashed; Phillipus writes that others become Roman Catholics, but all have "recognized the true Messiah and Savior."

1709 John Xeres counteracts the slur that converts are not well-educated in Judaism by emphasizing his Talmudic studies. Others on the list of learned Jewish converts include Ludwig Compiegne de Veil, Friedrich Albrecht Augusti, Paul Weidner, Julius Conrad Otto, Johann Adam Gottfried, and more.

1722 Rabbi Judah Monis, after becoming the first Jew to receive a college degree in America (M.A., Harvard, 1720), publicly embraces Christianity and is baptized. In 1735, aided by a loan from Harvard, he publishes a Hebrew grammar, the first to be published in America.

1749 Raphael Josef, newly baptized, credits his first step toward conversion to buying what he thought was a Jewish book and finding that it is a copy of the New Testament in Yiddish. He decides to read it with the goal of refuting Christianity, but it fills him with doubts about Judaism.

1758 John Felix (Seelig Bunzlau), a revered German rabbi, announces in the synagogue that he is converting, and makes a dramatic exit by coach.

1769 Abraham Jacobs publishes an autobiography in which he writes how he obtained a New Testament from a Lutheran pastor who came to study Hebrew with his father, a Frankfurt rabbi. Jacobs reads several pages a night, after his parents have gone to bed, and begins visiting the pastor's house. His father discovers him one night reading the New Testament and hits him. When Jacobs says he wants to convert, he is thrown out of the house, and eventually has to head to England.

1781 William Herschel, using a telescope he constructed, discovers the planet Uranus. Herschel also fixes the positions of 2,500 nebulas, of which only 103 had previously been known. He infers the existence of binary stars, and then identifies 209 such pairs of stars that revolve around a common center. He discovers the infrared rays of the sun, defines and explains the composition of the Milky Way, and makes many other discoveries.

1782 Joseph von Sonnenfels, a distinguished jurist in Vienna, lays out the principles for the Edict of Toleration regarding Jews that Austrian emperor Joseph II announces.

1808 Joseph Samuel Christian Frederick Frey, a former Hebrew teacher and cantor, organizes the London Society for Promoting Christianity Among the Jews. He later comes to the United States and continues missionary efforts.

1810 August Neander (born David Mendel) becomes Professor of Church History at the University of Berlin, where the influential Friedrich Schleiermacher also teaches. One observer comments on the "sad and singular sight" of "Schleiermacher, a Christian by birth, inculcating in one lecture room with all the power of his mighty genius, those doctrines which led to the denial of the evangelical attributes of Jesus." Meanwhile, in another room "Neander, by birth a Jew, preached and taught salvation through faith in Christ the Son of God alone." Neander writes many scholarly books, including the multivolume General History of the Christian Religion and Church. Before his death in 1850 he goes blind, but dictates notes for the last section of his church history on the last day of his life.

1812 Joseph Wolff is baptized in Prague and resolves to become a missionary/explorer. He learns Arabic, Persian, Sanskrit, and other languages of west and south Asia and becomes a missionary to Jews in Persia, Turkistan, India, Arabia, and other lands. According to Lewis Way's Travels and Adventures of Dr. Wolff, he is one "to whom a floor of bricks is a featherbed and a box is a bolster; who travels without a guide, speaks without an interpreter, can live without food and pay without money, forgiving all the insults he meets with and forgetting all the flattery he receives. Such a man (and such and more is Wolff) must excite no ordinary degree of attention in a country and among people whose monotony of manner and habits has remained undisturbed for centuries."

1822 Isaac da Costa, his wife Hannah, and his friend Abraham Capadose are baptized in Holland. Da Costa becomes Holland's leading poet and Capadose a leading physician; da Costa's short book, Accusations Again the Spirit of the Century, attacks the rationalistic materialism that is coming to dominate Holland and demands that Christ again become the center of national life. Da Costa writes often of Christ and also his Jewish heritage: "In the midst of the contempt and dislike of the world for the name of Jew I have ever gloried in it." The Jewish Encyclopedia comments about him, "His character, no less than his genius, was respected by his contemporaries. To the end of his life he felt only reverence and love for his former co-religionists."

1823 Sixteen-year-old Haim Herschell in Poland becomes anxious at Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement) services when he joins in saying, "We have now no temple, no high priest, no altar, and no sacrifices." He eventually moves to London and founds the British Society for the Propagation of the Gospel Among the Jews and teaches numerous Bible classes for both Jews and non-Jews. When he dies in 1864, 300 policemen for whom he had held a weekly class are in the funeral procession.

1825 Former rabbi Michael Solomon Alexander converts to Christianity in 1825 after concluding that rabbis had concealed the truth about Jesus; seven years later he becomes Professor of Hebrew and Rabbinical Literature at King's College, London. His name comes first on the long list of those who signed a "protest of Jewish Christians in England" against the accusation that Jews used Christian blood in Passover rites. When the British Parliament endows the position of Bishop of Jerusalem, the appointment goes to Alexander; in Jerusalem, he opens both an institution for the training of Jewish Christian missionaries and a hospital for poor, sick Jews.

1826 Felix Mendelssohn, grandson of the great Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn but baptized as a child, writes his overture to A Midsummer Night's Dream. He brings new public attention to Bach's music, composes the Elijah and St. Paul oratorios, and arouses the resentment of anti-Semites by helping Jewish musicians. He composes the music to "Hark the Herald Angels Sing" and harmonizes "Now Thank We All Our God," among other hymns.

1827 Theodore Ratisbonne of France amazes his friends by being baptized into the Roman Catholic Church. Until then he has opposed both his family's Jewish traditions and Christianity as well. But one day he speaks to God: "If You really exist, let me know the truth, and I swear to consecrate my life to it." Through philosophical study he gradually comes to believe that God does exist. He sets out to improve Christian-Jewish relations and in 1842 establishes the Congregation of Our Lady of Sion, a group with the goal of witnessing "in the Church and in the world that God continues to be faithful to his love for the Jewish people." The organization, with sub-groups in many countries now, has for 160 years worked "to keep alive in the church the consciousness that, in some mysterious way, Christianity is linked to Judaism from its origin to its final destiny."

1841 Ludwig Jacoby, an immigrant to St. Louis from Germany, begins the first Methodist church west of the Mississippi, surviving pistol-firing, rock-throwing ruffians. He later returns to Germany to become a seminary professor and editor of several religious papers, but then makes it back to St. Louis and dies there in 1874. His last word is, "Hallelujah."

1842 Maria Alphonse Ratisbonne-lawyer, banker, and younger brother of Theodore-is baptized in Rome. He becomes a Jesuit priest but then leaves that order so as to develop charitable works in Jerusalem. He builds there a convent, school, church, and two orphanages for girls, and then adds an orphanage and school of mechanical arts for boys.

1843 Israel Saphir, a merchant of Budapest, is baptized, along with his wife, two sons, and three daughters. The younger son, Aaron Adolph Saphir, goes on to become a celebrated Presbyterian pastor at three British churches from 1861 to 1888. He always remembers how up to age 12 he hoped for something more than the religion he was taught could give: "I was brought up in my childhood in the synagogue and taught that there was one God, infinite, incomprehensible, high above us and omnipresent. Much stress was laid on the unity and unicity of God. But this bare, vague, and abstract monotheism leaves the mind in darkness, while the heart is chilly and desolate." This puzzles Aaron, because in the Bible "I was met by no abstract idea of unicity but by a loving God, who appeared unto Abraham and spoke to him, who led Israel through the wilderness and dwelt among them. After, when I thought of the kindly, concrete, friendly and human way in which the Lord God then appeared unto His people and dwelt with them, I wondered why He was not now with us, loved and followed. One day I was looking at some books in my father's library and the title of one arrested my eye. It was Immanuel, God with Us. The thought went through my mind like a flash of lightning; it thrilled my soul. Oh, I exclaimed, if it were true that God should appear in human form, what a blessing that would be."

1844 Joachim Heinrich Raphael Biesenthal begins 37 years of missionary work to German Jews. He uses the knowledge gained in Talmudic academies and while earning a doctorate at the University of Berlin to write commentaries on many New Testament books as well as a History of the Christian Church that shows the Jewishness of the early church.

1847 Carl Paul Caspari begins teaching at the University of Christiana in Norway. He writes commentaries on many Old Testament books and, at a time when Christianity is under attack, stands for orthodoxy and becomes known over the following 45 years as "the teacher of all Scandinavia." He also writes an Arabic grammar that becomes a standard work.

1848 Friedrich Julius Stahl battles socialist and anti-clerical influences in Germany (the Communist Manifesto comes out in 1848) by defending the Lutheran Church into which he moved from Judaism. He becomes the head of the Conservative Party in Prussia and, as a Berlin professor, opposes Hegelian philosophy, calling atheistic scientists to repentance.

1849 Paulus Selig Cassel becomes a conservative Berlin journalist and soon editor of the influential Erfurt Zeitung. Realizing that political differences often have religious roots, he starts exploring the connection of Christianity and conservatism. In the course of his research he studies the New Testament and becomes a believer in Christ. He is a popular writer and lecturer, as a biographer notes: "He liked to arouse curiosity by announcing [lectures] under peculiar titles; but he always endeavored, no matter what his subject might be, to lead his heroes from it to Christ. [He] gave to many, both Jews and Christians, the first impulse towards serious thought, which brought them in the end to the knowledge of the Savior." Elected to the Prussian parliament, Cassel later serves as a pastor, and develops a vision of how to be most effective that differs from the conventional. He writes that evangelizing visits to Jews are of little use: "Public lectures were much more to be depended on; and these must not obtrude their missionary character, but must be of a kind to interest Jews and Christians alike.... Tracts must be written on subjects connected with all departments of life, in order to bring the Jew by various paths to face the one great question." Cassel in the 1870s and 1880s defends Jews against anti-Semitic attacks, and even the Jewish Chronicle, normally critical of converts, reports that "a genius like Cassel is always an honor to his former brethren in the faith."

1852 Lewis Henry Salin, an immigrant to Kentucky who secretly read the New Testament in Germany before leaving there, hears a Baptist minister's call to go forward at the end of a service and profess Christ. "All my relatives, from my father to the remotest cousins, like a panorama passed through my mind," he later writes. "I imagined I could hear them curse my very soul, while a frown of hot displeasure was resting upon each countenance.... The solemn and weighty words of our Savior, with greater force than ever, came rushing to my mind. 'He that loveth father or mother ... more than Me is not worthy of Me.'... With great difficulty I went forward and united my destiny with the Baptists." For the next 45 years he is a merchant and minister.

1855 Isidor Lowenthal, born in Germany and just graduated from Princeton Theological Seminary, goes to Afghanistan under the auspices of the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions. He translates the New Testament into Pushtu, has the volume printed, and compiles a Pushtu dictionary. He speaks with many Muslim leaders and advises British officials following the 1857 Sepoy Rebellion, but is shot and killed by his own chowkeydar (watchman).

1859 Lawyer Gustav Ferdinand Hertz (born David Gustav Hertz) becomes a municipal official in Hamburg, Germany, and holds various positions over the next 45 years. He works for reform of the justice and prison systems.

1863 Henry Aaron Stern, after bringing the gospel to Jews living in Baghdad, Persia, Yemen, and then Abyssinia (now Ethiopia), is taken hostage by the Abyssinian king. "I was stripped and on the ground insensible," he later writes, "almost lifeless, with blood oozing out of scores of gashes, and I was dragged into camp." For 31/2 years he remains a tortured captive; he later writes, "Our nerves were horribly shattered, and our minds, too, would have been unhinged had not religion with her solacing influence, soothed the asperities and hardships of our existence." British troops rescue him and he returns to England for a lecture tour and publication of his memoir, The Captive Missionary. He then becomes head of the London mission of the London Society for Promoting Christianity Among the Jews.

1863 Daniel Landsmann, a Jerusalem tailor and Talmudic scholar baptized this year, also is almost killed-but by his own people, angered that someone well educated in Jewish tradition should become a Christian. His beliefs begin to change when he finds upon the street a page in Hebrew torn from a book. He loves what he reads, and when he later finds out that it is the Sermon on the Mount, he thinks differently about Jesus than he did before. When he tells all that he believes Jesus is the Messiah, his wife leaves him, one fanatical group puts spikes in his hands, and another tries to bury him alive. He finally moves to New York City and, with a wealth of Talmudic knowledge and a humble spirit, moves many to consider Christ.

1866 Theodore Jonas Meyer, Presbyterian missionary in Italy, nurses those dying in a cholera epidemic until he also falls prey to the disease. Barely surviving, he becomes a peacemaker between Catholics and Protestants in Italy and later writes about what his own background taught him about justification by faith: "I was brought up in the fear of God by my parents, who were pious rabbinical Jews.... I sought to appease Him, and to earn His mercy, by work and prayer.... But with all this I still felt uneasy, and always believed that I had not done enough."

1868 Benjamin Disraeli becomes Britain's prime minister. Disraeli, both the Conservative Party leader and the author of popular novels such as Sybil, emphasizes Christianity's dependence on Judaism: "In all church discussions we are apt to forget the second Testament is avowedly only a supplement. Jesus came to complete the 'law and the prophets.' Christianity is completed Judaism, or it is nothing. Christianity is incomprehensible without Judaism, as Judaism is incomplete without Christianity." He hopes that Jews "will accept the whole of their religion instead of only the half of it, as they gradually grow more familiar with the true history and character of the New Testament."

1870 Isaac Salkinson of Vienna translates Milton's Paradise Lost into Hebrew. Over the next 15 years, while working as a missionary to Jews, he translates into Hebrew Othello, Romeo and Juliet, and then the Greek New Testament.

1877 Joseph Schereschewsky, a former Lithuanian rabbinical student, is consecrated as the Episcopal Church's Bishop of Shanghai. In 1879 he lays the cornerstone for St. John's College, the first Protestant college in China. Known as one of the most learned Orientalists in the world, he also translates the Bible into both Mandarin and colloquial Chinese and stays at his translation tasks even though partially paralyzed and unable to speak.

1883 Alfred Edersheim finishes seven years of writing The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah, which becomes a standard work. Born in Austria, he serves as a Presbyterian minister in Scotland and a lecturer/preacher at Oxford, with his most productive time spent (as he writes in the preface to his masterwork) "in a remote country parish, entirely isolated from all social intercourse." He notes that "if any point seemed not clear to my own mind, or required protracted investigation, I could give days of undisturbed work to what to others might seem perhaps secondary, but was all-important to me."

1885 Talmudic scholar and lawyer Joseph Rabinowitz is baptized and, through writings and sermons, begins influencing Russian Jews to become "Sons of the New Covenant." He draws up a list of 12 articles of faith, patterned after Maimonides's 13 principles, but proclaiming Jesus as the Messiah. He writes parables such as this one: "Two foolish people were traveling in a four-wheeled wagon. Noticing that the wagon was moving heavily, they examined it and found that a wheel was missing. One of the foolish people sprang out and ran forward along the road, saying to every one he met, 'We have lost a wheel. Have you seen one?' At last a wise man said to him, 'You are looking in the wrong direction. You should seek your wheel behind the wagon, not in front of it.' This is the mistake that Jews have been making all of these centuries. The four wheels of Hebrew history are Abraham, Moses, David, and Jesus. Jews have been looking into the future when they should have been looking into the past."

1886 Edmund Husserl is baptized at age 27 in Vienna's principal Lutheran church, but fears that a deeper commitment to following Christ will alienate his students from him. A half-century later he declares, "From the days of my youth I have struggled against all forms of vanity, and now I have almost overcome them-professional vanity, too, the respect and admiration of pupils, without which no young teacher can work." In the 1930s, barred by Hitler's edict from universities, (along with other Jewish professors), he finds refuge in a Catholic convent. His last words in 1938, to a nurse, are, "I have seen something wonderful. Write it down quickly." The nurse returns with a notebook, but Husserl is dead.

1891 Samuel Weyler graduates from Yale Divinity School. An immigrant from Russia, he has made a living as a peddler in Georgia, the Carolinas, Mississippi, and Missouri, everywhere trying to improve his English by listening to good speakers, including those in churches-and in that way he learns about Christ and chooses to follow Him. He becomes a minister in Colorado, Wyoming, and California.

1892 Leopold Cohn, a Hungarian rabbi, comes to believe that Jesus is the Messiah. An outraged Jewish community forces him to flee, so he studies at divinity school in Scotland, emigrates to the United States with his family, and opens a storefront classroom/church in a heavily Jewish section of Brooklyn. On weekday evenings Cohn provides free English lessons, using the New Testament as a text; on weekends he preaches. Later he opens a medical clinic and a kosher food kitchen, and delivers free coal to the Jewish poor, telling each person he helps, "Receive this in the name of Jesus." He also opens a sewing school at which over 200 girls and their parents hear about Christ, with many coming to believe.

1892 Surgeon Louis Meyer, an immigrant to Cincinnati from Germany, is baptized. He receives a degree from Reformed Theological Seminary in Pittsburgh and studies the effects of evangelism upon Jews, contending that even those who reject Christianity benefit: They have learned to think for themselves instead of merely accepting "the teachings of the rabbis." He becomes a pastor and one of the editors of The Fundamentals, the 90 essays produced between 1910 and 1915 to explain the difference between Christianity and modernism.

1893 David Baron founds in England the Jewish mission known as The Hebrew Christian Testimony to Israel. Born in Poland, he studies the Talmud and is told that Jesus was a liar and charlatan, but after emigrating to England he reads the New Testament for himself. He becomes a missionary to his own people and also to British church leaders, whom he often finds to be ignorant of the Old Testament and thus presenting a shallow gospel. He and his friend Charles Alan Schonberger, born in Hungary, found the Hebrew Christian Testimony to Israel.

1894 Two emigrants from Poland to England, both named Ginsburg, advance Christianity. Christian David Ginsburg publishes scholarly work including (in 1894) The Massoretic-Critical Text of the Hebrew Bible, and Solomon Ginsburg faces down potential assassins and kidnappers as a long-time Baptist missionary to Brazil.

1904 Max Wertheimer, after serving for 10 years as a rabbi in Dayton, Ohio, and then dabbling in Christian Science when distraught following the death of his wife, publicly confesses Christ in Dayton's Central Baptist Church. He then goes to Southern Baptist seminary in Louisville and becomes a pastor. He recalls, "I had tried to get some tangible comfort out of the Talmud, Mishnah, and rabbinical doctrines, but found none that satisfied my soul's hunger and longings." In studying the New Testament, though, he sees that the Christian doctrines he had derided as illogical and un-Jewish are sensible and truly Jewish.

1906 Ludwig and Jenny Loeb are married and convert to Catholicism. Ludwig Loeb becomes a mining engineer and emigrates to the Dutch East Indies where five of the eight Loeb children are born. They return to Holland, and of the six older children three become monks and three become nuns. The Loeb parents have both died by the time World War II begins, and those six children all die at Nazi hands.

1909 Amos Dushaw, after studying at Union Theological Seminary, writes Proselytes of the Ghetto, a novel that depicts the difficulty for Jews of embracing Christianity. He writes two other novels: When Mr. Thompson Got to Heaven and The Rivals: A Tragedy of the New York Ghetto.

1909 Isaac Lichtenstein dies, leaving writings explaining how he read a copy of the New Testament after 40 years of work as a rabbi in Hungary and was impressed by "the greatness, power, and glory of this book, formerly a sealed book to me. All seemed so new to me and yet it did me good like the sight of an old friend.... I had thought the New Testament to be impure, a source of pride, of selfishness, of hatred, and of the worst kind of violence, but as I opened it I felt myself peculiarly and wonderfully taken possession of. A sudden glory, a light flashed through my soul. I looked for thorns and found roses; I discovered pearls instead of pebbles; instead of hatred, love; instead of vengeance, forgiveness; instead of bondage, freedom." A letter to his son, a doctor, reports that "From every line in the New Testament, from every word, the Jewish spirit streamed forth light, life, power, endurance, faith, hope, love, charity, limitless and indestructible faith in God." Others, hating the idea of a long-term rabbi turning "renegade," attack Lichtenstein. His reply: "I have been an honored rabbi for the space of 40 years, and now, in my old age, I am treated by my friends as one possessed by an evil spirit, and by my enemies as an outcast. I am become a butt of mockers, who point the finger at me. But while I live I will stand on my watchtower, though I may stand there all alone. I will listen to the words of God."

1911 Esther Yachnin, a 15-year-old New York City girl, converts to Christianity and sets off a furious debate. Jewish groups lobby for a law making the proselytizing of minors without parental consent a crime. That legislative effort is not successful.

1913 Arthur Kuldell convenes a gathering of Jewish Christians in Pittsburgh who establish the Hebrew Christian Alliance of America. Kuldell explains, "The Alliance is not a lodge. It is not a society organized for the purpose of aiding its members to the exclusion of others. It is not here to defame and slander the Jew behind his back. It is an organization that breathes the spirit of Messiah. It is actuated by the tenderest love for Israel."

1916 Joseph Landsman, a Polish-born Talmud scholar who emigrated to England, stresses the importance of Jewish Christians helping other Jews to become Christians: "Jewish believers ought to be one with the Gentile believers. But we have still another duty to perform, and that is to ... be better able to remove the stumbling block from before our own nation.... Has God opened our eyes and brought us out of bondage into liberty, out of darkness into His marvelous light, in order that we should leave our nation in its spiritual darkness, without knowledge of Messiah? ... If we do not care, who should?"

1920 Arthur B. Klyber, U.S. Navy seaman, is baptized. He goes on to found Remnant of Israel, a missionary group, and also Catholics United for Life, which points out Hitler's opposition to abortion for Aryans but support of it for Jews, Gypsies, Poles, and other "inferior" groups. Born in 1900, he serves as a priest for 65 years before retiring to a nursing home at the age of 96.

1921 Jacob Gartenhaus becomes director of the Jewish Department of the Southern Baptist Convention's Home Mission Board. Gartenhaus, from Austria, has attended Moody Bible Institute and the Southern Baptist seminar in Louisville, Ky. The SBC abolishes its Jewish Department in 1949, but Gartenhaus perseveres with his work. Talmudic scholar Max Reich combats anti-Jewish propaganda, writing that "the so-called 'Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion' was one of the basest forgeries ever fathered on the Jewish people. Jewish believers [in Christ] will stand by their slandered nation at this time.... Jewish believers utterly detest the ... unscrupulous Jew-haters, who remain anonymous, bent on stirring up racial strife and religious bigotry."

1922 Niels Bohr wins the Nobel Prize for Physics for his theoretical work on atomic structure. Born of a Christian father and a Jewish mother, he affirms Christianity but also becomes known for semi-enigmatic sentences such as, "Every sentence I utter must be understood not as an affirmation but as a question." In 1939 he visits the United States and spreads the news that German scientists are working on splitting the atom. The United States responds with the Manhattan Project, from which the atomic bomb emerges. In 1942 he escapes from German-occupied Denmark via a fishing boat to Sweden, and leaves there by traveling in the empty bomb rack of a British military plane. He makes it to the United States and works on the atomic bomb at Los Alamos.

1923 Benjamin Sitenhof, who comes to believe in Christ by reading a Polish New Testament, builds a refugee center in Danzig (then a "free city" and gateway to the west from Eastern Europe). Supported by the Irish Presbyterian Mission, the center includes a home for the destitute along with a bookshop and auditorium.

1926 Morris Zeidman becomes Superintendent of the Scott Institute in Toronto, which offers food and evangelism to both poor Jews and gentiles, and sponsors group homes for needy children.

1927 Henri Bergson wins the Nobel Prize for Literature. The French philosopher is initially influenced by mechanistic writers like Spencer, Mill, and Darwin, but breaks away in books like An Introduction to Metaphysics (which develops a theory of knowledge in which intuition is key) and Creative Evolution (which concludes that Darwinian mechanisms cannot explain life's expansiveness and creativity). During the 1920s Bergson becomes a Christian, and in his final book, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, describes Judeo-Christian understanding as the culmination of human social evolution. In 1937 he explains that his reflections led him to Christianity, "in which I see the complete fulfillment of Judaism," but he was reluctant to convert because he was foreseeing "the formidable wave of anti-Semitism which is to sweep over the world. I wanted to remain among those who tomorrow will be persecuted."

1930 Hans Herzl, son of Theodore Herzl (founder of modern Zionism), commits suicide after growing up at an Orthodox Jewish boarding school, converting to Christianity, undergoing tremendous abuse, and then returning to liberal Judaism. The Baltimore Jewish Times honestly reports that "when Herzl's son became a convert to Christianity-not for material gain, but because he believed that if the idea of Jewish nationalism is thought to its final conclusion one can be a Christian Jew-he was read out of Jewry. The death of ... Herzl reminds us that in many instances we are ruthless fanatics." His death comes on the same day as the funeral of his sister, Pauline, a drug addict.

1930 Another funeral that year is of Haham Ephraim ben Joseph Eliakim, a rabbi in Tiberias, Palestine, who after studying biblical prophecies believes that Jesus is the Messiah. Eliakim undergoes tremendous harassment from his former colleagues. He is buried in Jerusalem alongside a Christian Arab, with one reporter noting that "Jew and Arab were laid one beside the other, and Jews and Arabs were standing with bowed heads by the two open graves, touched and softened the one toward the others."

1933 Leon Levison, founder and head of the International Hebrew Christian Alliance, rallies Jewish Christians to oppose Hitler. Levison states that there are 2.35 million Jews in Germany: 600,000 still identifying with Judaism and "one and three-quarter million Christians of Jewish descent who go back to the second, third and fourth generation." Both groups, he notes, "are treated as Jews and are subject to vicious discrimination." Jewish Christians also face discrimination from their own people: "If they apply to Jewish Relief agencies, they are told they must abandon their belief in Jesus."

1934 Arnold Frank, ordained in 1884 as a Presbyterian minister, serves his 50th year as a missionary to Jews in Hamburg, Germany. During that time he establishes not only a thriving church but a clinic, hospital, home for the elderly, and a retreat center. Following the ascent of the Nazis he advises Jews to leave and points out that Jewish Christians in Germany are considered Jews by Nazis, traitors by Jews, and dangers by gentile Christians. He is arrested by the Gestapo in 1938 but eventually allowed to leave for London.

1935 Jacob Peltz, in Christian Modernism and Reform Judaism in League Against Jewish Evangelization, and Elias Newman, in Why I Became a Lutheran, both criticize the new liberal Christian emphasis on ecumenical dialogue between Jews and Christians, at the expense of evangelism.

1938 Morris Zeidman of the Hebrew Christian Alliance of America appeals for help for the Jews and Jewish Christians of Poland, Germany, and Austria, where "sorrow is turning into despair. They can see no hope, not a gleam of light or kindness anywhere.... We must help, if we have to sacrifice a meal a day. Surely those of us who eat three meals a day can afford to spare the price of one meal for our persecuted brethren in Central Europe."

1943 Eugenio Israel Zolli, Chief Rabbi of Rome, helps to save about 4,000 Roman Jews as the Nazis enter Rome. Posing as a structural engineer, he enters the Vatican and asks Pope Pius XII to protect Rome's Jews. The pope makes churches, monasteries, convents, and the Vatican itself sanctuaries for them. Zolli publicly converts to Christ in 1945, saying, " I promised God in 1942 that I should become a Christian if I survived the war. No one in the world ever tried to convert me. My conversion was a slow evolution, altogether internal.... I am beginning to understand that for many years I was a natural Christian. If I had noticed that fact 30 years ago, what has happened now would have happened then." Asked why he has given up the synagogue for the church, Zolli replies, "I have not given it up. Christianity is the completion of the synagogue, for the synagogue was a promise, and Christianity is the fulfillment of that promise." Asked if he therefore believes that the Messiah-Christ-has come, he says, "Yes, positively. I have believed it many years. And now I am so firmly convinced of the truth of it that I can face the whole world and defend my faith with the certainty and solidity of the mountains." That is what he has to do, as Jewish leaders call him a heretic, excommunicate him, proclaim a fast of several days in atonement for his "treason," and mourn him as one dead. Zolli responds, "When my wife and I embraced the church we lost everything we had in the world. We shall now have to look for work: and God will help us to find some." God does, as Zolli becomes a writer and teacher.

1943 David Bronstein writes Peniel Portrait, a memoir of his work as director of the Peniel Center in Chicago. The Center's compassionate conservatism includes sponsorship of after-school programs, athletic competitions, summer camps, Boy Scout and Girl Scout troops, parties for mothers, English and citizenship classes, and discussions of religious topics.

1944 Nathan Stone publishes Names of God in the Old Testament, a study showing that the attributes of God in the Old Testament belong as well to Christ as He is depicted in the New Testament. Stone becomes director of the Jewish missions program at Moody Bible Institute.

1948 Baptist minister Charles Halff of San Antonio founds an organization named, with Texas bluntness, the Christian Jew Foundation, and sponsors a radio show, The Christian Jew Hour, that includes Hebrew Christian gospel music and a sermon. He writes that when he became a Christian his father filed an insanity charge against him and had him jailed, and later offered him $85,000 to recant. The radio program, now called Messianic Perspectives, is still on the air.

1951 Karl Stern, an emigrant from Nazi Germany to Canada, a noted neuropsychiatrist, and a convert to Christianity after years of study and contemplation, publishes his autobiography, The Pillar of Fire. He writes that he realizes how Christians were elected by God to fulfill the vision of the prophets by spreading belief in Abraham's God throughout the world. He then sees the ups and downs of the Jewish people as part of a larger religious panorama. One of his McGill University post-war Jewish students, Bernard Nathanson, recalls him as "a great teacher; a riveting, even eloquent lecturer in a language not his own, and a brilliant contrarian spewing out original and daring ideas as reliably as Old Faithful. I conceived an epic case of hero-worship.... There was something indefinably serene and certain about him." When Nathanson reads The Pillar of Fire, he realizes that Stern "possessed a secret I had been searching for all my life, the secret of the peace of Christ."

1952 Joy Gresham Davidman meets C.S. Lewis at Oxford. She comes to Christianity from a Jewish background after years in Marxism; he comes to love from an academic background after decades as a bachelor. They marry in a registry office in 1956 and again at her bedside in 1957, this time with a clergyman presiding; she is suffering from cancer, and after a period of remission dies in 1960.

1953 Dr. Boris Kornfeld, imprisoned in a Soviet concentration camp for political subversives, talks with a devout Christian and comes to believe in Christ. He tries to help starving prisoners by refusing to sign papers that will send them to their deaths, and he reports to the camp commandant an orderly who is stealing food from prisoners. One day he talks at length about Christ with a patient who has just been operated on for cancer. That night the orderly has his revenge and Dr. Kornfeld is murdered, but the patient ponders his words, becomes a Christian, and eventually writes about Kornfeld and conditions in the Gulag. The patient's name: Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

1961 Morris Cerullo spends his early childhood in an Orthodox Jewish orphanage, but converts and organizes Morris Cerullo World Evangelism, headquartered in San Diego.

1963 Robert Novak teams up with Rowland Evans to write a column on Washington politics, "Inside Report." It becomes one of the longest-running syndicated columns in the United States, and is known for its scoops and feisty analysis. Novak continues the column after Evans's death in 1993, becomes a television regular as well, and converts to Roman Catholicism.

1965 Louis Goldberg, a California-born engineer, becomes professor of Jewish evangelization at Moody Bible Institute. Over the years he argues that new groups such as Jews for Jesus should be accepted by evangelists.

1969 Dr. Bernard Nathanson, former student of Karl Stern, runs in New York City the largest abortion clinic in the world, and co-founds the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Law. After being involved directly or indirectly in over 75,000 abortions (including one of his own child) and seeing his political goals achieved with the Supreme Court's Roe vs. Wade decision that legalizes abortion nationwide, he comes to understand that he has been killing human beings. In the late 1970s he becomes a leading pro-life advocate and produces an effective video, The Silent Scream. Contact with Christian pro-life workers gets him thinking about the source of their dedication: "They prayed, they supported and encouraged each other, they sang hymns of joy.... They prayed for the unborn babies, for the confused and pregnant women, and for the doctors and nurses in the clinic.... And I wondered: How can these people give of themselves for a constituency that is (and always will be) mute, invisible, and unable to thank them?" Nathanson in the 1990s becomes a Christian.

1973 Moishe Rosen founds Jews for Jesus, saying that most workers in Jewish evangelism "sought the goodwill of the Jewish community and tried to avoid friction at all costs. Yet as soon as the missionaries' efforts began to be effective, the Jewish leaders reacted with a show of displeasure and accused them of insensitive or offensive methods." The real problem, he says, is "the offense of the cross, not insensitive methods. There was no way-however tactful, loving, and sensitive-to tell Jewish people that they needed Jesus without risking the displeasure of the Jewish community leaders. Having committed myself to the idea that disapproval and rejection were a normal part of Jewish evangelism, I taught my helpers that we all must bear the cross and risk rejection. Once we oriented ourselves to handle rejection, we began to win many Jews to the Lord."

1974 Howard Phillips, former Nixon administration chairman of the U.S. Office of Economic Opportunity, leaves the Republican Party and founds the Conservative Caucus. While looking into arguments against socialized medicine he runs across biblical perspectives on public policy, and that leads to his theological conversion. He says, "I began to spend more time studying the Scripture, both Old and New Testament, and began to come to grips with the constantly mentioned subject of blood sacrifice as the basis for atonement for sin where God was concerned. The ultimate blood sacrifice for sin, obviously, is Jesus Christ. I committed my life to Him as Lord and Savior and subsequently realized that there could be no disconnection between the Christian worldview, based on blood sacrifice and redemption, the scriptural testimony to this event, and one's commitment to impacting the culture for Christ, inside and outside of the political and activist arenas." Phillips founds the U.S. Taxpayers Party in 1992 and becomes its presidential candidate.

1976 Michigan policeman Norman Buskin comes to believe in Christ while working as security at a Billy Graham rally: "I told my partner what had happened, and he loaned me a Bible. I drove home in tears and with one thought on my mind: Jesus! Jesus was the Jewish Messiah and I was determined to investigate what that should mean to me." Buskin begins reading the Gospels: "'Here it comes,' I thought, 'swell stories about popes, assorted saints and Roman burial sites.' I was amazed to find that all the main characters in this book were Jewish." He becomes a policeman in Davie, Fla., where four other Jewish policemen also embrace Christ.

1976 Dr. David Block, a professor of Applied Mathematics and Astronomy in South Africa, becomes a believer in Christ. He writes, "I'd listen in shul as the rabbis expounded how God was a personal God and how God would speak to Moses, to Abraham, to Isaac and to Jacob, and wonder how I fit into all of it. And by the time I entered university I became concerned over the fact that I had no assurance that God was indeed a personal God.... Where was the personality and the vibrancy of a God who could speak to David Block? If God is truly God, I reasoned, then why had he suddenly changed his character?" A Christian colleague tells Block that a minister will be able to answer his questions; he reports, "My parents had taught me to seek answers where they may be found, and so I consented to meet with this Christian minister. [He] read to me from the New Testament book of Romans where Paul says that Y'shua (Jesus) is a stumbling block to Jewish people, but that those who would believe in Y'shua would never be ashamed. Suddenly it all became very clear to me: Y'shua had fulfilled the messianic prophecies in the Hebrew Scriptures, such as where the Messiah would be born and how he was to die.... I knew that Jesus was the Messiah and is the Messiah. And I surrendered my heart and my soul to Him that day." He concludes, "It might seem strange to some that a scientist and a Jew could come to faith in Jesus. But faith is never a leap into the dark. It is always based on evidence. That was how my whole search for God began. I looked through my telescope at Saturn and said to myself, Isn't there a great God out there? The logical next step was to want to meet this Designer face-to-face."

1980 Louis Sheldon forms the Traditional Values Coalition, a group now with 45,000 affiliated churches that defends biblical principles in regard to abortion, homosexuality, and other controversial issues. He becomes a Christian as a teenager in the 1950s, after his older brother and sister (who had already converted) urge him to attend an evangelical service at Fourth Presbyterian Church in Washington, D.C. He goes on to attend Princeton Theological Seminary and becomes a pastor in North Dakota and eventually in California. He quotes George Washington's farewell address ("Of all the dispositions and habits that lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports") and notes that "we're not going to have political prosperity separated from religious principles. And we can't have national morality separated from religious principles."

1980 Lon Solomon becomes senior pastor at McLean Bible Church just outside Washington, D.C. Solomon's early drug and alcohol abuse stopped when he accepted Christ, and he goes on to Capital Bible Seminary, Johns Hopkins University, and then teaching Hebrew and Old Testament at Capital. Through preaching and his national So What? radio broadcast, he emphasizes reaching non-Christians and says, "I was born Jewish. I never listened to Christian radio. I was raised in the public-school system. I believed in evolution, relativism, and existentialism. Until I became a believer at 21, I had no intention of visiting a church.... So as a pastor I asked, How can my church reach 'me'"?

1982 Aerospace engineer Andrew Mark Baron, raised in Conservative Judaism, comes to faith in Christ. He writes that in college "I believed God existed because of the phenomenal order to the universe, yet I felt human beings were far too miniscule for His notice." Reading the New Testament helps him to see that God "constructed us with souls that can be fed only by His own hand. Believing God cares is not intellectual suicide; believing that He doesn't care is spiritual starvation."

1984 Joel C. Rosenberg, after growing up in a Jewish household, starts an evangelistic Bible study group in his high school. He marries in 1990, joins McLean Bible Church (pastored by Lon Solomon), and becomes Rush Limbaugh's research director in 1994. Rosenberg, who has also been an advisor to Steve Forbes, Bill Bennett, and Israeli leaders Benjamin Netanyahu and Natan Sharansky, now writes a column on politics for WORLD.

1986 Mortimer Adler, author of numerous books on philosophical topics, becomes a Christian at age 84. A long-time professor at the University of Chicago, he pushes for a "great books" and "great ideas" curriculum and writes semi-popular works such as How to Read a Book (1940), The Common Sense of Politics (1971), and Six Great Ideas (1981). He writes an autobiography in 1977, Philosopher at Large, but writes another 15 years later (A Second Look in the Rearview Mirror: Further Autobiographical Reflections of a Philosopher at Large) that explains his conversion to Christianity. "We have a logical, consistent faith," he says. "In fact, I believe Christianity is the only logical, consistent faith in the world." But that doesn't mean that Christianity is without mystery. Adler asks, "What's the point of revelation if we could figure it out ourselves? If it were wholly comprehensible then it would be just another philosophy."

1993 Jay Sekulow, chief counsel for the American Center for Law and Justice, successfully argues the Lambs Chapel case before the U.S. Supreme Court; the Court states that religious groups cannot be discriminated against in the use of public facilities made available to other groups. Sekulow appears before the Supreme Court numerous times in defense of religious freedom, and writes about his own religious liberation as he tried to understand the description of the "suffering servant" in chapter 53 of Isaiah: "I kept looking for a traditional Jewish explanation that would satisfy, but found none. The only plausible explanation seemed to be Jesus. My Christian friends were suggesting other passages for me to read, such as Daniel 9. As I read, my suspicion that Jesus might really be the Messiah was confirmed.... I'd always thought my cultural Judaism was sufficient, but in the course of studying about the Messiah who would die as a sin bearer, I realized that I needed a Messiah to do that for me."

1995 Rob Schenk begins bringing teams of ministers and religious leaders to the nation's capital city to present congressmen and other government officials with tablets on which the Ten Commandments are etched. He and his twin brother, Paul Chaim Schenck, become Christians as teenagers during the 1970s and in 1992 lead Operation Rescue's attempt to shut down Buffalo's abortion businesses. Rob Schenck is arrested during the 1992 Democratic National Convention in New York City for thrusting the corpse of an unborn child in front of Bill Clinton. Paul Schenck is arrested and imprisoned for violating an ordinance designed to protect abortion businesses, but the U.S. Supreme Court overturns that decision on free-speech grounds. In 2001 Rob Schenck is head of the Washington evangelical group Faith and Action, and Paul Schenck is a rector at Reformed Episcopal Church in Catonsville, Md.

1997 Lawrence Kudlow expresses faith in Christ after emerging from a battle with cocaine addiction. A fervent 1980s supply-sider as undersecretary of Ronald Reagan's Office of Management and Budget, in 1994 The New York Times published a full-page article, "A Wall Street Star's Agonizing Confession," about Kudlow's life and addiction to cocaine. He resigns from his $1-million-a-year job as chief economist at the Wall Street firm of Bear Stearns and later says, "As I hit bottom, I lost jobs, lost all income, lost friends, and very nearly lost my wife. I was willing to surrender and take it on faith that I had to change my life." He remembers one thing from the prep school he attended: "We had to say the Lord's Prayer in homeroom. Every morning at your desk you put your head down and say the Lord's Prayer. I was there grade seven through 12, so it's something you remember. When I was going into this dark abyss with alcohol and cocaine, after some terrible binge, I can remember lying in bed desperate and I started saying the Lord's Prayer. What made me do that? Just-I was desperate, I was trying to ask for help. You know, who was going to get me out of this? I started searching for God." Then, "All of a sudden it clicked, that Jesus Christ does not want me to touch alcohol or drugs because I wreck my body and I wreck His body and I wreck my life. Jesus died for me, too." Kudlow is now chief economist for CNBC and a frequent writer of articles that make the dismal science of economics understandable to magazine readers.

1998 Edith Stein is canonized by the Roman Catholic Church. St. Edith, born in 1891 as the youngest child of 11 in an Orthodox Jewish family, and educated as an assistant to philosopher Edmund Husserl, converts after reading the autobiography of Saint Teresa of Avila in 1921. The author of Finite and Eternal Being (an attempt to synthesize Aquinas and modern thought) and other highly regarded books, she becomes a Carmelite nun in 1933. Nazis arrest her in 1942, along with her sister Rosa, and murder both in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. "Come Rosa," Edith says as the Nazis are hauling them away from the convent. "We're going for our people."

2001 Edith Stein is canonized by the Roman Catholic Church. St. Edith, born in 1891 as the youngest child of 11 in an Orthodox Jewish family, and educated as an assistant to philosopher Edmund Husserl, converts after reading the autobiography of Saint Teresa of Avila in 1921. The author of Finite and Eternal Being (an attempt to synthesize Aquinas and modern thought) and other highly regarded books, she becomes a Carmelite nun in 1933. Nazis arrest her in 1942, along with her sister Rosa, and murder both in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. "Come Rosa," Edith says as the Nazis are hauling them away from the convent. "We're going for our people."

2001 Richard Wurmbrand, founder of The Voice of the Martyrs, dies at age 91. After becoming a Christian in Romania in 1936 and then a pastor, Wurmbrand and his wife are arrested several times by the Nazi government. He evangelizes Russian soldiers who are prisoners of war and does the same with Russian occupation forces after August, 1944. Communist leaders imprison Wurmbrand in 1948, subject him to physical and mental torture, threaten his family, and finally imprison his wife as well. She is released in 1953 and he in 1956, but he is re-arrested in 1959 and sentenced to 25 years for preaching Scriptures that are contrary to Communist doctrine. Political pressure from Western countries leads to his release in 1964. The Wurmbrand family leaves Romania in 1965 and begins informing the world about persecution of Christians in that country and elsewhere. By the mid-1980s The Voice of the Martyrs has offices in 30 countries and is working in 80 nations w