# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1899_S90
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

90 Proceedings of the 24th General, or

do not work on Saturday, and in their synagogue either no sermon is given
at all or only rarely, this offers a quite favorable opportunity to draw
them to attend a Jewish mission hall where sermons for Jews are held in
their own language, and simply by this means many a soul from Israel has
already been brought out of the darkness of the Talmud into the light of
the Gospel.

"This the Commission for the Jewish Mission appointed by the Reverend
Synod has likewise recognized, and has rented a hall for the Jewish
mission. In view of the high rents here in New York and the meager income
of the Jewish Mission, it was possible to rent only a small, unimpressive
room, reached by a crooked flight of stairs, in a so-called tenement house,
while three large Jewish-mission halls, furnished with great pomp, belonging
to sects and fanatics, stand in the Jewish quarter in the immediate
neighborhood of our mission. Nevertheless, by God's gracious help, your
missionary to the Jews has succeeded in bringing many Israelites, under the
sound of the pure Gospel, into our outwardly unimpressive hall, so that in
the course of a year it became too small and had to be enlarged by taking
out a wall. Among the visitors are twelve adults, seven men and five women,
who have now regularly attended the Saturday-afternoon services for a
full year, even through rain and snowstorms.

"For a long time your missionary has longed to be able to bring the
salvation that is in Christ Jesus, their Messiah, to the Jewish youth as
well, and would have most liked to start a Lutheran day school with Jewish
children. But the exceedingly high rent, and the hiring and paying of a
teacher once the school had come to flourish — expenses our treasury could
not have covered — prevented it. Yet your missionary cannot thank the Lord
of the Church enough that He allowed our Jewish Mission to succeed in
calling into being a two-day school, namely a Saturday and Sunday school,
and that He made the hearts of these fanatical and blinded Jews willing to
send their children to this school, where they are instructed in the Word
of God and in our Lutheran catechism. Your missionary also cannot thank
God enough that he was given the wonderful opportunity to celebrate a
Christmas festival and gift-giving with 65 Jewish children, who, together
with the adults present — to whom a sermon had beforehand been preached on
the text Isaiah 9:6–7 — filled the mission hall to the very last seat. —
Since it was impossible for your missionary to run the Sunday school alone,
God so arranged it that the needed help was granted him in the person of
Miss Morch, from the Rev. Pastor Beyer's congregation at Brooklyn. With the
greatest willingness this lady renders the missionary the necessary