We are in the middle of the Passover Holiday now. Last week I did not send a prayer list because last Thursday was such a busy day getting ready for the Passover. The getting ready is actually a part of the Mitzvah (commandment) and this is also true in the New Testament in the passage about "the Messiah being our Passover" in 1 Corinthians chapter 5: 7-9. We have to get our homes ready by cleaning out the leaven and we have to also get our hearts ready by cleaning out the malice that we have stored in some forgotten corners of our hearts. Monday evening we had a great Passover Seder in our congregation, we had near 100 people celebrating with us and we had guests from Hong Kong, Slovakia, United States, France, Mexico, Columbia, and Tel-Aviv. It was a wonderful celebration and although many of our brothers and sisters were not with us because they celebrated with their family or friends the place was full and the food was very good and plentiful and the spiritual side was the best because the kids participated and read from the story of Passover and acted out their parts as prose.

The most important aspect of the Passover like many of God's commandments is the care and attention given to the children. In fact many of the traditions and the customs of the biblical holiday are tuned and aimed at the children. The children have to learn from the drama of the feast and from the fellowship of the family and congregation the stories that make up our history. They only way they can learn these things which are the building blocks of our faith is through the family and around the table. If a little big to sugar can make the medicine go down a lot of good food can and good attention and participation of the children can make them remember and feel good about their heritage and identity. This is really the reason for the Passover Seder, to train our children and instill in them an identity and a motivation for being God's children and members of that elite group of people whom God has saved from darkness to light and from slavery to freedom. One reason why Jewish people have such a keen social awareness and they participate in social action and in the struggle for righteousness and civil rights and justice is the participation and understanding that we as a nation have gathered from the story of the Passover. We were slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt and God has delivered us but not without our cry and our shout and our insistence for forty years in prayer and supplication begging and fighting for our deliverance. Being quite and just biting the bullet and not responding to injustice and discrimination and evil in our world is just not who we are as a nation. I hope that Christians can learn from the story of the Passover and shout to God, cry to God, cry to the media and speak our mind so that all may know what we think. If we would learn to cry out and to shout to God may be governments would not take away our right to pray in school and to have the ten-commandments in our court houses. May be our privileges would be as honored and respected as the privileges of the loud and aggressive minorities.

I ask you to pray for our brother David and for his mother and father in California. His mother is 90 years old and needed to be hospitalized. Now David is still in the United States taking care of his family.

I ask you to pray for Sara and Zvi they are both getting more feeble and need more care, and the same is true for Liora and Ahuva our dear sisters. These are the soldiers of prayer and intercession of our congregation and we need to stand with them and shout to God to give them strength to continue and health to enjoy the years of their life that He will give them.

We have to continue prayer for our chronically sick brothers and sisters: Paulo, Tim Tucker, Ruby, Marcia, Miriam, Leah, Ilana, and David S.

For Passover the food distribution that we have gave a lot of extra food and especially the kind of food that people use in the Passover like packages of Matza, and other special Passover food packages. Yuda has managed to double the number of people who receive food from our humanitarian aid ministry and all those who receive this food are always so thankful to God for this gift of love to the poor of Jerusalem.

Kol HaYeshua radio broadcasts needs your prayer. We are having a bit of a hard time keeping up with the number of programs that we must produce for the Through The Bible teaching program and also we are improving our other programs as well. We must upgrade our quality and also work on a fresh and more dynamic programs that will get the response of our wonderful Israeli listeners. We need your prayers for all of us who are working with the Radio programs and produce programs of quality worthy of our Messiah.

We have so many new people in our congregation and many of them are Spanish speaking. We ask you to pray for our Spanish brothers and sisters so that they can find good jobs and settle down in Israel with joy and providential care from the Almighty God for all their needs. The same prayer should be prayed for several families who are in financial need and who find it so difficult these days to just keep body and soul together. We do what we can to help these families but your prayers and the Lord's provision can do much above and beyond. This is what we are waiting for right now. There is significant progress in the preparation for the conference in Portugal and please, please, lift us all up in your prayers to have God's blessing on this conference and to be able to make the registration and program exactly what it ought to be and bring the desired fruit for Israel and for God's Kingdom and especially for all those who have suffered from Christian discrimination, hate, and shame, in the hands of the Catholic church.

I will, the Lord willing, travel to New York for a few days and from there to Odessa, Ukraine. In New York I shall participate in the Borough Park Seminar that the Chosen People Ministry is putting together. I shall be reading a paper on the divinity of the Messiah in Rabbinical Sources. In Ukraine I shall be teaching in a kind of a school connected to Messianic Jewish interests. For both I ask you to pray for me.

Please keep my family in your prayers, Danah and Noaam, Barry, Beth and Joseph, our children and grandchildren.

Blessings to you from Jerusalem!