# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1902_S93
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Tenth Delegate Synod of Missouri, Ohio, and Other States, 1902. 93

we have continuously seen and experienced in the last three years of the
Jewish mission. Indeed, this word of God has shaped the three-year
history of our mission. The Jewish mission has, since its founding, gone
through no such time of tribulation as the one about which we must now
report. Just three years ago a storm broke over it that threatened to
destroy everything. While our missionary was attending the General
Synod and giving addresses in various congregations on behalf of the
mission, fanatical Jews, who had long been embittered against our
mission, set in circulation the senseless rumor that our missionary had
branded a cross, as an emblem of Christianity, onto the arms of Jewish
children who attended the Christian instruction at his mission. A Jewish
physician, Dr. Bruder, claimed that Jewish parents had come to him with
their children and had implored him, with weeping and wailing, to remove
the notorious cross-marks from the arms of their darlings, lest they
suffer eternal harm to their souls on that account. The missionary Moses
Friedmann — so the rumor had it — who had his mission at No. 70 Pitt
Street, was the one who had committed this dreadful tattooing. This
rumor was printed in the Jewish newspapers in emphatic type [letter-
spaced for emphasis] and let loose upon the Jewish population with
terrible warnings. The English and German newspapers of New York took
up the story in their columns, even ran pictures of children whose arms
were tattooed with a cross, and spread this absurd lie across the whole
country. The Jewish mob, in whose midst our mission hall stood, was
inflamed with rage. During the missionary's absence at the Delegate
Synod, several young women from our congregations had taken over the
instruction at the mission; but the mob, which gathered before the hall
on Saturdays and Sundays during the hours of instruction, pelted them
with rotten eggs and other stinking filth, so that the mission had to be
closed until the missionary's return. The missionary was summoned home
by telegram, and when, after his return, he reopened the mission, a
terrible uproar of the populace ensued; many thousands filled the
streets near our hall. The missionary to the Jews, who wished to hold a
service, was ordered to leave the hall. "The Meshumad" (apostate) "was
to come out," they cried, "so that the raging crowd might take its
revenge on him." Since the missionary did not comply with this
questionable demand, the hall was bombarded with stones and every window
smashed. With difficulty the police, who had meanwhile been notified,
managed to disperse the mob. The missionary's life remained in constant
danger here, even though the commission sought to check the wretched
rumor and also forced the newspapers to retract it. The wretched hut on
Pitt Street, which until then had become a true place of blessing for our
mission,