Témoignages

This is the story of my return to the Catholic Church. I will attempt to explain how my walk with the Lord these past years has led me to this important and difficult decision, yet one that I make in peace and joy. It is addressed to my Evangelical Christian and Messianic Jewish friends in Israel, and particularly to those who do not believe that one can be a "true believer" and a Catholic at the same time. It is also written as a personal testimony for my many good friends around the world who may be interested in my walk of faith. To them I dedicate this essay and pray that it will help us to grow in unity in loving and worshiping the King of Kings.

I am an Orthodox Jew by adoption. That is to say, I am a convert to Judaism, according to the halacha. I live in the company of other Orthodox Jews, with my husband and four children, in a religious community in Israel. I also love Jesus and the Gospel message, which I am still learning, and this means that I live my faith life mostly inwardly.

My name is Miryam Leah. I am 35 years old – Jewish, Italian, from an ultra-orthodox hassidic family (lubavitch – my father is the shaliach, the “sent one” of the Rebbe), and now for 8 years, Catholic and Dominican sister.

Aaron Jean-Marie Lustiger, cardinal and archbishop, died on August 5th, 2007, aged 80. At the funeral of Jean-Marie Lustiger, at Notre Dame de Paris on August 10th, his second cousin Jonas Moses-Lustiger read a psalm in Hebrew and placed on the coffin a jar of earth that had been gathered on the Mount of Olives. Then another cousin, Arno Lustiger, bent over the coffin to recite Kaddish. Only when those things were done was the body of Cardinal Lustiger carried inside the cathedral, where Catholic panoply took over.

Here is a translation of Magdi Allam’s account of his conversion to Catholicism. The formerly Muslim journalist was baptized by Benedict XVI at Saturday's Easter Vigil Mass 2008 in St. Peter's Basilica.

Having been raised in a Conservative Jewish home in suburban Toronto, I was a regular attendee at synagogue on Sabbaths and High Holidays. My father is a Holocaust survivor from Poland and my mother’s family escaped the pogroms in Russia. Both settled here in Canada and raised my sister and myself in a Jewish and Yiddish speaking environment where all of our friends were Jewish and Israel was our raison d’être. Christianity was the religion of the outsiders, the faith of anti-semites and Jew-haters, the creed of the Crusaders, Inquisitors, Persecutors, and Nazis. Yet my mother would remind me continually that "Jesus was a Jew"...

As right wing political atheists of a Jewish ancestry, we didn't fit in with anyone around us: not with Catholics, not with the sprinkling of Protestants, certainly not with Orthodox religious Jews in full regalia, nor Reform Jews, nor Zionist atheist Jews, nor left-wing non-Zionist Jews. Later, as a Catholic, I realized that my desire to belong to an identifiable group forever and ever had a psychological as well as a theological reason.

The Exodus, God's deliverance of Israel out of Egyptian slavery through Moses, prefigured God's redemption of all humanity from the slavery of sin through a new and greater Savior, Jesus the Messiah. The liturgical life of the Israelites in the desert on their way to the Promised Land prefigured the liturgical and sacramental life of the Church as it heads towards its heavenly Promised Land.

Jacob Weksler was raised a Catholic and became a priest. He later learned he was Jewish and came to Israel, where he found ultra-Orthodox relatives, a mixed welcome at a kibbutz ulpan and a confrontation with the Law of Return.

Finding My Jewish Past and My Catholic Present - Growing up in New York City in a very strict Catholic home I began questioning the doctrines of our faith at a very young age. Little did I know that this very same quest brought me to a moment in my life in which I would have all these questions answered for me by G-d, Himself!

"Hebrew Catholic Vocation" by Aharon Yosef