Canadian Anglicans Will Stop Praying To Convert The Jews
Church service Image by PixelCatchers/iStock
By Aiden Pink August 6, 2019
The Anglican Church of Canada voted last month to remove a call to convert the Jews from one of its prayer books, the Canadian Jewish News reported.
The Church’s General Synod voted 99% in favor of replacing the entry in the Book of Common Prayer with a new invocation called “For Reconciliation with the Jews.”
A similar resolution had failed in 2016.
The Right Rev. Bruce Myers, the Anglican Bishop of Quebec, cited the 2018 Pittsburgh synagogue shooting in his address to the Synod, saying that anti-Semitism “is not a thing of the past, nor is it restricted to other parts of the world.”
The old prayer asked God to make Jews “open their hearts that they may see and confess the Lord Jesus to be thy Son and their true Messiah.”
The new prayer, written with the cooperation of the Canadian Rabbinic Caucus, instead asks in part, “Have mercy upon us and forgive us for violence and wickedness against our brother Jacob; the arrogance of our hearts and minds hath deceived us, and shame hath covered our face.”
“I think it’s just such a wonderful thing, and a really wonderful feeling for us, that a prayer that certainly made the Jewish community quite uncomfortable might soon be replaced with one that’s so beautiful and so positive,” Rabbi Adam Stein of Congregation Beth Israel in Vancouver told the Anglican Journal.
Aiden Pink is the deputy news editor of the Forward. Contact him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter @aidenpink
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
