Amidst the darkness of the Holocaust, the light of Christ was shining. A statement quite likely to cause offence – especially among Jewish people – until it is understood that I am talking about Jewish disciples of Jesus who shared the horrors of the genocide with their fellow Jews.
Unique & untold story
Until now, little has been known of the fate of the estimated 225,000 European Jews thought to have committed their lives to Christ by the outbreak of the war. But a new book by Australian author Kelvin Crombie has unearthed the profoundly moving and heart-breaking stories experienced by many of these believers, known at the time as ‘Jewish (or Hebrew) Christians’, or by the Nazis as ‘non-Aryan Christians’. As one of them testified, this is “the story of Jewish Christians who perished at the hands of people who considered themselves a Christian nation!”
As part of his as yet incomplete research into the fate of these brave souls, shunned both by the Nazis and their fellow Jews, Crombie’s ‘Bazyli and Anna Jocz’ (pronounced Yotch) focuses on this especially significant family in the context of the overall picture of the Dante’s Hell that cast its evil shadow over Europe, and Poland in particular. Hats off to Kelvin for his meticulous, painstaking efforts to track down details of this great untold story.
Holocaust Hell
It is obvious from this initial evidence that the vast majority of Messianic Jews, including a number of missionaries, shared the suffering of their fellow Jews. The Nazis cared not a jot what people believed; it was their racial identity that marked them out for mass slaughter.
Poland was home to millions of Jews in the 1930s, and was the focus of much activity by a number of gospel societies, including the Church’s Ministry among the Jewish people (CMJ), who were all reporting lively congregations in Warsaw and other cities. The book is most helpfully set against the background of the wider progress of the war, while also explaining some of the key contributory factors towards the emergence of Nazism in all its raging fury. Prominent at the same time as fanatical nationalism was rearing its head were the forces of rationalism, the teachings of Charles Darwin and the influence of both the occult and liberal Christianity, all of which conspired to the devaluing both of the Jewish people and true followers of Jesus.
The Nazis cared not a jot what people believed; it was their racial identity that marked them out for mass slaughter.
Many German Jews had ‘converted’ to Christianity simply in order to fit in better with society, yet this failed to protect them from the butchers. But those who truly followed Messiah Jesus were rejected both by the Nazis and their fellow Jews. There were two chief reasons for this: first, because the early Christians (who were mainly Jewish) refused to join the revolt against Roman occupation which led to ancient Israel’s ultimate defeat and desecration in 135 AD2; and second, because persecution ever since has been seen, in Jewish eyes at least, as being driven by ‘Christian’ countries, often with support from the Church.
The Jocz family
Meanwhile the Jocz family have extended their evangelistic witness to four generations, partly through Jakob - Bazyli and Anna’s eldest - managing to escape the Holocaust because he was addressing a conference in England when war broke out. He later served as parish priest at St John’s, Downshire Hill, in Hampstead, north London, while continuing to work for CMJ.
Anna was a very brave woman who, because she didn’t look Jewish, got away with being a Polish Gentile while hiding her ailing husband in a wood shed. When he eventually came out for a brief respite, he was spotted by the Gestapo and summarily shot, with Anna sustaining terrible injuries that left her paralysed from the waist down for the rest of her life.
Roots of the Messianic movement
Ironically, it was after she was injured in a fall as a young girl that her father took her to see a Jewish doctor who believed in Jesus, which sparked off the family’s commitment to their Messiah. Bazyli and Anna thus sowed the seeds of what later became known as the Messianic Jewish movement that has since spread to North America, Israel and throughout the globe.
Among the many others contributing to this harvest were the evangelists of the Mildmay Mission to the Jews (now Messianic Testimony), only one of whose seven workers survived – though even he had lost his wife and had been “hunted and driven to the extreme limits of human endurance”.
Bazyli and Anna thus sowed the seeds of what later became known as the Messianic Jewish movement that has since spread to North America, Israel and throughout the globe.
Rising from the ashes
Most of the war-time Polish believers paid the ultimate price for their faith. And in the end a staggering six million Jews perished at the hands of the Nazis, with the traumatised survivors experiencing little better than a living death.
A heart-rending account is told of a couple and their young daughter, when facing execution, bowing their heads in prayer as they were machine-gunned into an open grave. In another place, after the brutes had shot the parents, their children were heard singing hymns of praise as they were driven away in a lorry!
As modern Israel rose from the ashes of the Holocaust in fulfilment of Ezekiel’s vision of the valley of dry bones (Ezek 37), so the Messianic movement of Jewish followers of Jesus emerged triumphant from the blood-stained soil of Poland.
Endnotes
1 The Marquess of Reading has written a foreword to the book and former Wimbledon tennis champion Margaret Court hosted its launch in Perth, Western Australia.
2 Probably due to Romans 13:1 and other New Testament teaching.
'Bazyli & Anna Jocz: Jewish Christian victims of the Holocaust’ is published by Heritage Resources Pty Ltd, Perth, Australia, in conjunction with the Conrad Schick Library and Archive, Christ Church, Jerusalem. Priced at £14, it is available from CMJ
