Earlier this year, the following video calling for a “worldwide Jewish Mashiach (Messiah) prayer” on Feb 21 was doing the rounds.
It was being disseminated by Jew and non-Jew alike. Even Chabad shared it.
For those who don’t know, the Jewish Chabad movement are very much into the idea of bringing “Mashiach” now. While some believe it will be the (deceased) Lubavitcher Rebbe who will return – which goes against the Jewish idea of the Messiah needing to be a living person – I can say Chabad, like all other Jews, do not believe it will be Jesus.
Why am I mentioning this? I’ll get to that in a bit.
When I first saw the video, something seemed off with it. After some investigating, it turns out it rips scenes from this 2012 video of a “Jewish prayer for Messiah” event.
Here are some examples of the “borrowing” from the 2012 video:
This, in itself, may not mean anything. But my friend, who brought this to my attention, had his wife ask one of the Rabbis appearing in the video, the great Rav Arush, what the event was about. He was shocked to learn he was included in the video, as if he was promoting this event which he knew nothing about.
It turns out the footage of Rav Arush speaking was ripped from his YouTube channel.
So something was definitely fishy with this Messiah event. The question was what?
I have my suspicions, and it relates to the yarmulke-wearing Michael Levinson at the beginning of the video.
He is not a Jewish guy called Michael Levinson at all. I recognized him as a Christian man called Michael Ganoe, who lives here in Israel, after having moved from the US. He is somewhat well known here as the “Hershey’s for Heroes” guy, who delivers chocolates to IDF soldiers.
In the US, he was at one point a Salvation Army bell ringer.
He’s clearly into Jesus, which is fine. He is Christian after all. The question is, while in Israel, does he try to proselytize to Jews?
According to this rather scathing report on him from 2016, Ganoe “has been disseminating anti-Islamic and Evangelical Christian sentiments on a regular basis to soldiers on IDF bases, apparently with the army’s sanction.” The report does not provide proof of any “Evangelical Christian sentiments”, and in investigating him, I could not find proof of him missionizing to Jews.
But his appearance in this latest event video encouraging Jews to pray for Messiah, while pretending to be a religious Jew, definitely raises alarm bells. I can imagine when we pray for Messiah, who Ganoe thinks will arrive; One of the likes to this comment on his Facebook wall
is Ganoe himself.
In other words, it seems this Christian guy who lives in Israel, impersonated a Jew in a dodgy video in order to encourage Jews to pray for Messiah – while secretly hoping the prayers would not bring the Jewish Messiah, but rather Jesus.
I am outraged.
If that wasn’t bad enough, Michael Ganoe continues to live here in Israel while inciting against the Israeli government and spreading anti-vaccination conspiracy theories. That will be for a future post.








