SID: Hello, Sid Roth your investigative reporter here with Sandy Teplinsky. Sandy, you experienced at a young age, as a young Jewish girl, a lot of anti-Semitism. Here in America, you think of a little, but you don’t think of a lot.

SANDY: Not typically. I grew up in a neighborhood that was overtly anti-Semitic. We lived not far from former Nazi headquarters in the city of Chicago of all places. And so just as a kid, I grew up having to defend myself physically. I would be beat up on playgrounds and learned to fight back very quickly, and maybe in some instances a little bit too effectively. But underlying all of that was a driving knowledge to know the God that I was fighting for, so to speak.

SID: Now what type of synagogue did you go to?

SANDY: It was very religious. You could call it orthodox.

SID: Did you like the synagogue?

SANDY: I did. I found great comfort there. I can’t remember a time not believing in God. And I, as a result of that, soon grew disillusioned by the time I, right about that midst of time because I wanted so much, with all of my heart, to love the Lord with all of my heart as our scriptures command, as our cornerstone prayer in Judaism commands us to love God with all of our heart, mind, soul, and strength. And I saw no one, not even the devout rabbi, who did. And so I embarked on a search to be able to find out how I could love this God.

SID: You know that is so amazing! Before we started the show I told you this, we’re both Jewish, we both come from traditional Jewish backgrounds, but for me, I couldn’t wait to get out of the synagogue and God wasn’t even in my thoughts. And as far as personally knowing him like Moses did and David did, I didn’t even give a thought to that. So would you say you were obsessed with knowing God?

SANDY: I was a little bit obsessed. In fact Sid, I became very upset I could not know God the same way Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob did. Nor did I see anybody who did and I remember asking questions of my parents and the rabbis and nobody had an answer for me. It was simply “God doesn’t relate to people like that anymore.” But something in me wouldn’t settle for that.

SID: Ok, you get to college and now you find a different style of anti-Semitism. It’s not having to fight with your fists fortunately. It’s a little more sophisticated. Tell me about it.

SANDY: Well it was called evangelism in my mind. The people that were out selling their spiritual wares, so to speak, back in the 70’s when I went to college, saw me as ripe pickings I think. And the Christian campus evangelists, who were out there, to my perception, assaulted me with their tracts and with their Gospel witness.

SID: Why didn’t you do what most Jewish people do and they say “I’m Jewish; I’m not interested.  Good riddance”?

SANDY: I did. I did.

SID: So that should have been it.

SANDY: Well that should have been it except that I was so perturbed over this continual harassment of Jesus in my life. Now remember I grew up post-Holocaust era and one thing we didn’t talk about is that I was just simply barraged with instructions from the synagogue “You must never let Christians take your faith away, you must never let Christians harm the Jews again. Never again;” and so I viewed this as an opportunity to fight fire with fire; to disprove the Gospel; to disprove this ridiculous allegation of a virgin birth. And so I went and bought myself a New Testament, read it for the first time, I was all set to write out the arguments against it, I was in school by the way studying to be an attorney, and to my shock, I found that the words that I read in the New Testament, when I read it for myself, and thought for myself, were filled with a power and a love like I had never experienced in any of my other religious studies or pursuits as I dabbled in different Eastern religions. And so I read the New Testament on my own, from cover to cover, I researched back into the Old Testament prophecies, which I knew enough of from my many years of Hebrew training, and it became very clear to me that this Jesus, or Yeshua in Hebrew as we now call Him, is indeed the promised Messiah of Israel.

SID: Yes, but if a rabbi heard about this, he’d say “Sandy you’re no longer a Jew.” Now that’s important for you to be Jewish isn’t it?

SANDY: Well you know Sid, I’ve come to the place where it is important to me to be Jewish, it’s very important. But what’s more important to me is not what people call me. I mean the Bible says that if we’re more concerned with what other people think of us, then we’re not a Jew. A Jew is one who is concerned with the praises and exaltation of God.

SID: Do you know God?

SANDY: Yes I do.

SID: Do you remember that young girl that had a heart to know God and couldn’t find anyone in the synagogue that really had intimacy with God? She has it now and what she has found out, you must know. Your very life is dependent on it. We’ll be right back after this word.

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