Rabbi Yoseph Moishe Koniuchowsky

Yeshua warned blatantly about and against those taking upon themselves the religious titles of both “father” and “rabbi”, because both usurp the place of God as our one true Father and our one true Teacher (rabbi meaning teacher but deriving from the Hebrew term “great”). Just as we have Roman Catholic clergy wrongfully calling themselves “father”, today in the Messianic Movement we have many kooks calling themselves “Rabbi” (some of whom are not even ethnically Jewish and most of whom never trained as rabbis, never studied rabbinics or talmudic Judaism, and in the majority of cases can’t even speak Hebrew).

I know nothing of this individual calling himself Rabbi Yoseph Moishe Koniuchowsky, but MORIEL has been asked to comment on his diatribe.

I know rabbis, including real orthodox rabbis, who have been saved. I know Chassidic Jews who have been saved. Most of the rabbis and orthodox Jews I know who have been saved see talmudic Judaism as a false Judaism which perverts the Torah fulfilled in Yeshua, and view it as something they were saved out of, much as ex-Mormons and ex-Roman Catholics I know who have been saved see Roman Catholicism and Mormonism as a cult and false distortions of the New Covenant. Jews accepting Yeshua remain Jews by race and covenant and should not do otherwise (1 Cor. 7:17). But they do not remain under the Law (although many may observe many of its tenets voluntarily). Neither do they remain in the apostate Judaism of the rabbis.

These are the natural branches of the church, “the called out ones”, composed of the faithful remnant of Born Again believers of Israel whose root is the covenants with Israel into which the faithful remnant of Born Again believers from among the Gentiles are ingrafted. This is “ONE NEW MAN”, where despite differences of culture, race, sex, social status etc. we are all spiritually equal in the Messiah of Israel, yet still retaining their ethnic and cultural identities (Acts 15:8-21) as well as their social and sexual identities, etc. (The English term “church” is simply from the old German translation of ‚   “ecclesia”, that word being “kirche”).

• That replacement theology is an utterly false doctrine void of any biblical foundation is obvious; the New Covenant was made with Israel and the Jews , not with the church (Jer. 31:31). The church is simply the New Covenant spiritual continuation of Old Testament Israel into which believing non-Jews are ingrafted, the same as national Israel and diasporic Jewry is the physical continuation of Old Testament Israel.
• That God has a prophetic destiny for national Israel and The Jews to bring them to belief in Yeshua in the Great Tribulation is also clear from scripture. But God is in the business of saving unbelieving Jews and Gentiles today – grafting Gentiles into the Jewish Olive Tree and re-grafting Jews into their own Olive Tree.
• That Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and much of Protestantism are demonic counterfeits of biblical Christianity is absolutely true, the same as Talmudic Judaism is a demonic counterfeit of biblical Judaism which is fulfilled in the Messiah Yeshua (Rev. 2:9).
• Contrary to his diatribe, it was Jewish believers who were first called Christians in Antioch (Acts 11:26), the term simply being the Greek translation of “messianics”, from the Greek word for anointing.
• Contrary to his diatribe, our Sabbath is in a person – Yeshua, not in a day and He is our Passover, atonement, etc. (1 Cor. 5); the Hebrew holy days point to and are fulfilled in Him. It is important that all believers understand the theology of these holy days and how they are fulfilled in Yeshua, but observance is a matter of individual culture, choice and conscience (Col. 2:16-19, Rom. 14: 4-5).
• The Elohim of the Old Covenant and YHWH are One and the Same God.
• Many interpret “Ephraim” as figurative or typological of Gentile Christians. We cannot, however, base doctrine on a type – this is gnosticism. Mormonism, British Israelism and other such false belief systems do this with “Ephraim”. What is more the notion that these tribes disappeared is ludicrous. The faithful people of these tribes went south to Judah before the Assyrian captivity and retained their tribal identities within Jewry (2 Chron. 15:9, Luke 2:36, James 1:1). Others intermarried into the Assyrians and became the Samaritans.

This foolish belief (called Armstrongism) in the 10 tribes being lost directly contradicts the biblical and historical record and is totally without biblical or anthropological foundation. It is a belief of Mormons, the World Wide Church of God, and of George Jeffries, the founder of ELIM (today, an apostate hyper-Pentecostal cult espousing money preachers, Toronto deception, etc., that in NZ was headed by Ian Bilby, the serial adulterer) and is today propagated by J. McConnell, the Elim preacher in Belfast , Northern Ireland. This groundless deception held by Mr. Koniuchowsky is the abberational belief of cults like Mormons, Elim, and the World Wide Church of God. It is sad to see this cultic nonsense be imported in Messianic Judaism.

The Bible rather teaches that the salvation in Yeshua that comes through Israel includes people of every nation, tribe, and tongue (Rev. 7:9).

Moriel has endorsed the caveats issued about the extreme axis of the Messianic Movement voiced by Arnold Fruchtenbaum, Moishe Rosen and others. We ourselves have warned repeatedly that the extreme axis of the messianic movement lifts up Jewishness (or rather their definition of it) over “Yeshua-ness” and its leadership is saturated by charlatans of every description hawking bogus theologies as wrong and unbiblical on one extreme as replacement theology is on the other.