Ministry Updates from Jason and Janice Rose

Passover and Easter are nearly upon us... and so is the Islamic month-long holiday of Ramadan .  You might not know that Ramadan is on a lunar calendar that doesn't adjust for errors like the Jewish calendar. Our rabbis add an extra month every two or three years. This means that by comparison to modern calendars, Ramadan moves around quite a bit from year to year.  When I moved to Israel in 2002, the holiday was in November and this year it is April 1 to May 1st.  The holiday itself isn't normally a cause for concern, unless you're Jewish living in Israel. The reason is that certain radical Islamic leaders use this important holiday as a platform to spread their hatred and anti-semitism. This isn't to say that most or even many muslims fall into this category. I truly believe that the average Israeli Arab Muslim is a peace-loving kind hearted citizen with good intentions. However, just like in other countries, there are always elements in society with nefarious behavio...

  What did our teams do? Our two Refugee Relief teams were sent to Berlin with a mission to help the thousands of refugees escaping the war. We also sent a small team to Poland to assess the needs there and help for a week. They extended their stay by another week and determined that there is tremendous need there. However, we will concentrate mostly on the Berlin Relief teams in this update, since we have great first hand information to share. Our teams in Berlin were sent to the Central Train Station. As the refugees entered the train station either by train or bus, they knew to search for the ORANGE vests of the volunteer translators. In the beginning there weren't many orange vests in the station (yellow vests were English speakers and were typically German locals), but over the course of time, more orange vests came to volunteer. Many refugees made a straight line to our volunteers searching for help to get to their next location, if they had one.  Our teams, quickly lear...