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Jewish people have been experiencing a spurious tolerance by some fundamentalist groups in Europe and, unfortunately also in US. Although some churches still claim being supportive of Jewish communities, we still experience in our country some kind of religion intolerance. This is a malady that has to be detained in our society; otherwise, conflicts of all kinds will keep on happening, causing suffering, anguish and silent distress to Jews in America. Couple months ago, when my husband and I in favor of a good friend, we decided to attended to a so called "Bible Class" in an evangelical church in Virginia. The person who claimed to be a pastor (although he was not ordained) was defending Hitler's position in the Second World War and affirming emphatically that God has abandoned the Jews long time ago. We bought a good fight during the class. I told him to shut his mouth up, my husband called him "pig" (I apologize to the swine) and, as we expected, he was invited to leave the church immediately.

My husband is an American Jew, and I was raised a Roman Catholic in the north of Brazil. Today we are part of a Methodist church in Virginia, yet we go to synagogues, and when it's time, we do celebrate Jewish holidays and Christian holidays. I guess that's how millions of interfaith couples deal with their religion difference today. Last Christmas we had a beautiful white tree at home, with lots of blue starts of David all around.

We have seen many evangelical churches declaring their support to Israel. However, underneath this "support" there is a "hope" of conversion by Jews into Christians. As far as I can see, this is a subtle anti-Semitist. Instead of trying to convert Jews, we should be thankful to them for giving us the amazing faith in an invisible God.

The Jews represent a flaming and passionate faith in God in our society. If you look at the demographics you will find out that the lowest crime rate in our society are among the Jewish communities. No other ancient civilization and religion has influenced the modern world like the Judaism. When you say that only Christians are to be saved you are again being separatist and prejudicial. In the book of Joel, written thousands of years before the Gospels, he states that Salvation comes from God.

Open-mindedness in our society and temples are the only way to prevail over prejudice, granting peace to the world. We should not accept hate speech, even when it seems to be "innocent" anti-Semites know what they are doing.

Learn more about this author, Grace Araujo Kolman..
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