Our story
We are full-time missionaries with Chosen People Ministries who met in seminary and are engaged to be married. Though from different backgrounds – Gentile Christian, Jewish and formerly atheist – we bonded over our love of Jesus and mutual desire to share Messiah with others.
With individual missions experience spanning three continents, to Muslims and other people groups, we now work together to serve the Jewish communities of Greater New York, the largest Jewish population outside Israel.
Why go to the Jewish people of New York?
Jews are the most unreached people group in America. Most (nearly two million) live in Greater New York. There are only a few dozen full-time missionaries bringing them the gospel.
THE STORY OF JEWS IN NEW YORK
The story of the Jewish people in New York is a sweeping tale of successive migrations that transformed a small Dutch trading post into the world’s most diverse Jewish metropolis in the world. This story begins in 1654 in New Amsterdam with the arrival of the first Jewish refugees from Brazil, who, despite resistance from Governor Peter Stuyvesant, were allowed to remain and establish Congregation Shearith Israel, the first Jewish congregation in North America. This foundational community expanded in the mid-1800s with a second wave of affluent Jews from the German states who quickly gained middle-class status by focusing on trade and merchandising. These German-Jewish immigrants established Reform Judaism in New York City. The 1880s brought the Great Migration, when almost two million Yiddish-speaking Jews fled persecution in the Russian Empire. This influx crowded the tenements of the Lower East Side, turning it into the world’s hub of Jewish life, characterized by a vibrant Yiddish press and advocacy for labor rights. The Jewish population of New York City peaked at two million in the 1950s before a wave of suburbanization, but new arrivals (mainly Holocaust survivors, Syrian, and Soviet Jews) continued. Today, the Greater New York area, home to 1.3 million Jews, is defined by rapidly growing Orthodox and Hasidic communities alongside a large, culturally secular and socially integrated Jewish population.
Many Jews associate Jesus with Jewish persecution. But according to the Bible, Jesus is the symbol – not cause – of Jewish suffering. You can lovingly help Jews identify Jesus as the Messiah by first helping them to identify with Jesus…
Jesus, a Jew, was “despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief; and as one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not” (Isaiah 53:3). No nation is more associated with suffering than the Jewish people. Throughout history, they have been despised and rejected, acquainted with grief and sorrow.
Jesus, a Jew, was perceived to be “smitten by God” (Isaiah 53:4). Historically, the Jewish nation was also viewed as cursed and abandoned by God.
Jesus, a Jew, “had done no violence, Nor was there any deceit in His mouth,” yet he “was oppressed, and he was afflicted” (Isaiah 53:7). The Jewish nation was never perfect, but throughout history, they have also been scapegoated, blamed for things they had nothing to do with, and punished ruthlessly.
If ever there were a time to bring good news to the Jewish people, it’s now.
FACT CHECK
✅ Jews comprise only 2.4% of the population in America.
✅ They are targeted by hate crimes more than all other religious minorities combined.
✅ These crimes grow in number and intensity each year.
8 decades after the Holocaust, documented attacks against Jews are surging worldwide. In America alone, the number of anti-Jewish incidents last year (approximately 1,938) was more than twice the total number reported against all other religious groups combined (approximately 845), according to FBI data.