I and my wife Michelle were born in Algeria and we came to Israel in 1975. Michelle converted to Judaism in France and became Jewish in her soul. At that time I became zealous for my religion and anti-Christian. My mother had educated us according to the belief that Christianity is the source of anti-Semitism in the world. Our reasons for coming to Israel were basically Zionist. We came and lived in a kibbutz for about 15 years. In 1980 I was still praying every morning the Jewish way with my shawl and phylacteries but I started to have a spiritual search and wanted to know the truth. Somehow I felt that my religion was not satisfying the yearning of my soul. The problem was that I didn’t know where to find the truth. The Bible was not very much recommended by the rabbis as the book to read in case you wanted to know God better. So I started to search for truth in Buddhism.
After some disappointment I got involved into Hinduism and transcendental meditation for 3 years. Meanwhile I was not being a good husband and a very good father because my evening time was devoted to T.M. I started to receive some powers from the darkness I was in and it seemed to me as a confirmation that I was on the right way. However I got stuck with an exercise that I could not perform successfully. It was supposed to take me to a higher stage of “meditation” and I guess this was the time when God interfered.
The Lord brought different Christian believers to the kibbutz but I remember arguing with them and telling them how ignorant they were because they didn’t believe in reincarnation or some other eastern beliefs. On my birthday of 1983 my wife bought me a book called “the art of meditation”. She had not opened it but thought that I would find it interesting. The book had been written by a guru but as I started to read it I found out, with some surprise, that it was teaching how to meditate on verses of the Bible, New Testament included. I thought that this must be a new T.M. technique and I read it through. I guess it must have been the only T.M. book of that kind written by a guru in the whole world and it had to fall on me!
Anyway I was touched by Jesus’ powerful words. Jesus knew how to speak to the Jews and I guess this was why flocks of them followed him. Well, it definitely hit me like a soft fist but I had a great difficulty to even pronounce His name or pray in this name because of the repeated warnings from the rabbis and the kind of education I received. Yet I knew that the seed had been planted in my heart and I didn’t know what to do with it. One evening as I was listening to my professional radio set, I was looking for some remote station in the short waves range as I used to do frequently. That time I fell on a station that I thought was very far but in fact it was broadcasting from South Lebanon and was a Christian station called the Voice of Hope. A preacher was speaking on the book of Isaiah, showing how Jesus was prophesied to be the Messiah of both Jews and Gentiles. I was very perplexed by what I heard because the rabbis never told us about this matter.
I wrote to the radio station and I received 12 audio tapes on the book of Isaiah which I listened to with great thirst as I was working in bananas plantations. There, I had a revelation of my Messiah’s identity. I thought I must be the only believer in Israel and it took me two years until I found other brothers and sisters. During these two years my wife had become very opposed to my new faith and in 1985 our relations were so bad that we were considering divorce. Encouraged by believers I started to pray daily for my wife’s salvation. It took about two to three weeks until she started to read the Bible with hunger as she was decided to get to the bottom of the matter. She was touched by God and opened her heart to the Lord. I was thankful to God who answered my prayers and saved my marriage. Then I decided to pray daily for my children who after a while they received Jesus too.
Now, we had another child whom we had decided to take charge of in the kibbutz on a word that I clearly received by God. He had been warned by his divorced parents not to listen to what we would say about God and the Bible for they had heard that we were believers. I decided to pray for him on a daily basis and after about one year of faithful prayers he said to me that something was stirring inside of him and that he felt attracted by Jesus. He became a believer very soon after this.
Encouraged by God’s answers to my prayers I decided to intercede for my mother’s salvation. After a few months of prayers I shared my faith with her and she rebuked me, telling me that Jesus was not for the Jews. But I continued to pray for her and after a while I asked her to really consider the fact that Jesus is the Messiah of the Jews. She got a little angry and said to me: “I will only believe it if you show it to me in my father’s Bible”. Now I knew that my grandfather had been very religious and had spent much of his lifetime in the synagogue. When he died he left all his belongings to his sons but my mother was the only one that he had a chance to bless on his death bed and she was given only one thing: his Bible. I boldly asked my mother to bring her father’s Bible. It was a full one, Old and New Testament! To this day I don’t know if my grandfather was a secret believer but it was easy for me to show my mother, in her father’s Bible, that Jesus is the Messiah of the Jews and she received the Lord.
If the Lord did it for me and for my family he can do it for every one. I used to be very anti-Christian, so was my family. But this was just the beginning of His plans for me and I was far from imagining at that time, that He would call me to the ministry in a very special way and continue to show me His signs, His wonders and His faithfulness.
Claude & Michelle are presently pastors of Morning Star Fellowship in Tiberias.
