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JEWLICIOUS EXCLUSIVE REPORTING

The allure of so many Jewish college students in one place has prompted missionaries to launch a Facebook ad campaign promoting a website called WhatChutzpa.com. The website is vague, attractive, and not apparently a Christian missionary portal. But reading a few lines of any article, you quickly realize that this is not your typical Temple Bulletin.

Many people are confused about the identity of Yeshua (Jesus). Many people have a hard time understanding who he really was. Although it is not always easy, it is possible to investigate him enough to be able to make some conclusions…. You’ve most likely come to this page because you want to know what to do now that you’ve asked Jesus to be your Messiah. First off, let us say, “Welcome to God’s family!”

There are few clues about who authored the site. There is no “about us” section. No link to any other page. While initially seeming like something that Jews for J would dream up, it doesn’t have their fingerprints.

The site does have the fingerprints of Campus Crusade for Christ. As you can see in the pictures below, WhatChuzpa is merely EveryStudent.com repackaged for a Jewish audience. EveryStudent.com is one of Campus Crusades biggest successes of the last 20 years.

The EveryStudent site and an article about six reasons to believe in God:

Everystudent_small.jpg

The WhatChutzpah site’s article is identical, except without the byline:

chutzpa_small.jpg

In fact the more you browse both sites it becomes clear that they are parallel sites, one designed to lure Jews and one for non-Jews on campus.

Mark Gauthier, in his online appeal for donations on the Campus Crusade website, sites EveryStudent as a smashing success at bringing students into the group. He writes:

The reason that most of the above students found everystudent.com is because they saw an ad for it on Google or Facebook (a hugely popular college networking site)….

This [Facebook] strategy is incredibly cost-effective, costing an average of just 25 cents per person who responds and has the opportunity to find out about Jesus. That’s just 25 cents to finally show a young person the answers they’ve been looking for!

Marilyn Adamson, the co-creator of Everystudent.com, must be proud. According to Campus Crusade’s Press Release on February 14, 2007, “In 2006, more than 7 million students visited EveryStudent.com to find ‘a safe place to life, and what it might be like to know God.’”

Many of the “articles” on WhatChutzpah are variations or direct copies of Marilyn Adamson’s writings on other missionary websites. For example, her article about other religions entitled “Connecting with the Divine” on WhatChutzpah, is nearly verbatim the same article she authored on LeaderhipU, a missionary site.

Jewlicious.com reached Marilyn in Florida and asked her about the websites. She is a well meaning Christian who answered a few of our questions honestly. The site Whatchutzpa is not intended to get Jewish students involved with Campus Crusade per say, but “It is the hope that Jewish students may see Jesus as messiah.” When they accept Jesus, all their sins are forgiven, and they get everlasting salvation. WhatChutpa was created for Jewish students, “For their own personal ability to be in a relationship with god.”

WhatChutzpa is for the New York area, and was created by the same people that created Everystudent.com, she confirmed. The creators hope to track visitors to the site and made it semi-invisible, to help weed out random hits and visitors. This targeted approach will help them to communicate directly with students in the same area. In addition, the website organizers are willing to meet with people who visit the site to answer their questions about Jesus directly.

Beyond the Facebook campaign, there are reports of posters at Brooklyn College on flyer boards showing a picture of a guy doing a backflip and the words WHAT CHUTZPA.

Campus Crusade needs to answer a few big questions in the wake of this latest Crusade for Jewish souls, besides the usual, “When are you going to give us a frigging break?”

If your message about Jesus is the truth, why do you need to disguise the site to attract Jews? If Jesus is the truth, why is it permitted to trick Jewish students into visiting a site that tries to convert them to Christianity? Do your local campus chapters of Campus Crusade stand to loose their campus privileges if their national headquarters is engaged in active, covert proselytizing?

Stay tuned — we are sure we have not heard that last of Campus Crusade, their website or their Chutzpah!

—Tip of the yarmulke to Dani Klein who showed us the whatchutzpa website

About the author

Rabbi Yonah

14 Comments

  • With their offer of a free “Tanakh” (and bytheway, a ‘New Covenant’ too) …

    “Interested in knowing more about the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob? … If so, we’d like to send you a FREE copy of the Tanakh and New Covenant.”

    … I wonder if the next step is subliminal messages?

  • What chutzpah, indeed.

    Thanks for the info, Rabbi. This information should be sent to all the Hillels, Standwithus and other organized groups that have contact with Jewish students.

  • People are unbelievable. I just had a guy on Jdate IM me; he had “other” for religion and I said “You really don’t look Jewish” and he said he wasn’t but likes the women on there because they are more “motivated” and “intelligent”. So he asks me about what I’m converting from (Catholicism) and why don’t I just become Lutheran or Methodist– so I briefly tell him what it’s about, in very simple terms because obviously he’s not Jewish and is wasting my time. So he starts ARGUING with me for a few lines about how anything I want is in Christianity and says something about it all leads to Jesus and I just closed the window. I am reporting him and they can kick him off. That’s crazy that anyone has to put up with that on there. And he sends an email apologizing. I am tempted to tell him he really should be fishing elsewhere if he doesn’t know the difference between Christianity and Judaism, and that he doesn’t have much to offer Jewish women if that’s his attitude.

    Missionary types make my skin crawl. And then I come here and read this. Makes me want to get one of those I heart Hashem shirts so I can educate people as they check out my rack… Good night, that is my rant for the evening…grrr….

  • CCfC is well known for their aggressiveness, their doctrinaire approach to faith, and their media savvy. They’ve got a fairly long history of evangelical work and come out of the most conservative camps in the fundamentalist mode. Still worse, most of their outfits on Campuses are really no fun at all, and are run as little more than grown up ‘camp meetings’ with very stiff counselors. I imagine the most attractive aspect of their entire outreach may indeed be this web effort, and possibly some of their literature. (Not much at that mind you). But they’re really well known nudnicks. Big Time. Thanks for the reminder Rabbi. Shabbat shalom. ‘VJ’

  • I have some time on my hands recovering from an injury.

    A whois search produced this result:

    http://whois.domaintools.com/whatchutzpa.com

    Registrant:
    Z Glaser
    520 Third St
    Brooklyn, NY 11215
    US

    Registrar: NAMESDIRECT
    Domain Name: WHATCHUTZPA.COM
    Created on: 12-JAN-07
    Expires on: 12-JAN-08
    Last Updated on: 22-JAN-07

    Administrative, Technical Contact:
    Glaser, Z [email protected]
    520 Third St
    Brooklyn, NY 11215
    US
    203-459-4539

    The phone number appears to be a phony. A search for z Glaser in Brooklyn using http://people.yahoo.com produces this phone number for Zhava Glaser:
    (718) 832-6286 Looking for that number one finds Zhava Glaser as well as a Mitch Glaser.

    Looking for Zhava Glaser using Google, one finds Chosen People Minsitries and an autobiographical essay by Zhava here

    http://www.chosen-people.com/docs/Curious/AboutUs2/Stories/Zhava.html

    A Google search for [email protected] leads us to

    Ariel Ministries – New York! (telling Jewish people about Jesus)
    Contact: [email protected]
    We are an evangelical Christian mission to the Jewish people of the Greater New York Metropolitan Area – the largest concentration of Jewish people in the world!

  • This amounts to looking for your keys under the streetlight.

    The point is our money, of course.

    And our “motivation and intelligence”, as you say.

    Yes, we are valuable prizes. Let us value each other, therefore.

  • Hey guys! I’m Belarussian jewish guy (minsk)
    I’m looking for christian citizens of Jerusalem
    please reply [email protected]
    in Christ’s name

    me

  • They’re back, sent us a postcard today from Isaiah53.com, a website they run from this place. Matthew & Zhava Glaser still own the website, they still live at 520 3rd St, Brooklyn NY 11215 and give a phone number which is registered in CT on their domain registration of 203-459-4539.

    And as everyone here probably knows, they totally misquote Isaiah 53 to lure in unsuspecting Yidden. Beware, they can sound convincing if you’re not familiar with Tanach (bible).