Celebrating Yom Kippur in Jerusalem

JERUSALEM—The streets downtown closed as the sun set Wednesday evening and the holiest day of the Jewish calendar began. Yom Kippur, or the Jewish Day of Atonement, marks a time of national fasting and prayer. For nearly 26 hours, adherents of Judaism abstain from eating and drinking. All traffic lights on the typically busy streets of Jerusalem flashed yellow Thursday morning, indicating that vehicular traffic was prohibited. Shops were closed, and pedestrians quietly walked streets that would normally be packed with traffic.

A practicing Jew who walked in downtown Jerusalem Thursday morning and identified himself by the name Romaan said Yom Kippur is the day God examines each person’s moral stature and decides what kind of year he or she will have. “In this day we don’t eat, we don’t drink,” Romaan said. “We try to be like an angel, and maybe this will help us to look a little bit more like a good people for our God.”

Millions of Jews around the world observe Yom Kippur, including in the United States, where both the House of Representatives and Senate have postponed all legislative votes in honor of the holiday, despite the urgency of an ongoing federal government shutdown. But it isn’t only followers of Judaism who celebrate the day. Some Jewish and Gentile believers in Yeshua—or Jesus Christ—observe the tradition.

On Wednesday night, followers of Yeshua packed Netivyah, a Messianic Jewish synagogue in Jerusalem for a special Yom Kippur observance. Cameras and recording devices were prohibited. During the service, participants—some armed with military-style rifles—recited liturgies and songs from Jewish prayer books. At one point, the congregation rose and read a list of 150 sins for which they publicly confessed on behalf of themselves and the nation.

Joseph Shulum, the 80-year-old founder of Netivyah, taught the congregation in Hebrew, alongside an English interpreter. He read portions of Leviticus 16, citing the Biblical establishment of Yom Kippur and the practice of placing the sins of the nation on a goat before turning it loose in the wilderness.

“And of course, nobody has those ceremonies today—but we have Yeshua,” Shulum later told me. “God took our sins and transferred it, not to a goat, but to His Son. That’s very significant for us.”

Shulum said that on Thursday, Jewish congregations all over the world would pray a liturgy that makes references to Isaiah 53, a Messianic text that believers in Yeshua recognize as prophetically describing the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. He said Jews who do not accept Yeshua deny the Messianic roots of the text and say it’s instead referring to the suffering nation of Israel as a whole.

“They have, like, blinders on their eyes,” he said. “They see it, they read it, but they don’t receive it … it’s so clear. We’re not talking about Christian literature. We’re talking about the Jewish prayer book that the whole Jewish world uses on that Day of Atonement.”

—Read more from Travis K. Kircher’s reporting trip to Israel here.