Dear Folks,  Shalom!

    How are you?  What's new?  Anything new with the Lord's working in your life?

  Sorry I haven't written lately.  I have been in Soroka Hospital in the city of Beer Sheva for a whole week.  I want to thank those of you who knew and prayed for my healing...I am finally home after my first ever trip to the hospital.  It was really not too nice, and I am blessed to have been able to come home this afternoon...Here's the story in short...

MY FIRST HOSPITAL STAY EVER ...

  Last Tuesday evening I went to a Bible study at the congregation building.  During the study, a group of our "friends" the Religious Hasidei Gur came by and demonstrated, by yelling, screaming and cursing at us seemingly with the police's blessings.   (Same as every other time!)...I didn't think much of it, and it might not of had anything to do with it, but toward the end of the study,  I started feeling very strange...hot, sweaty, very thirsty, very tired, a bit dizzy, elevated blood pressure, and a bit more… I was taken to the Hospital in an ambulance. 

  At the hospital, I was led into a bed and put in the hall because there was no space in a room at about 1:30AM...(Sort of a "NO ROOM AT THE INN" experience.)  I had a very stressful and restless night, including being waken up every few hours for blood pressure tests, and more forceably at 6am by a very loud-mouthed nurse that seemed to be practicing for the opera by screaming "Boker Tov" (Good morning in Hebrew.) and turning on all the lights while the cleaning women were cleaning and mopping the floor around my bed!    Without going into too many sometimes-wonderful and sometimes-difficult details, and finally after a whole bunch of NON-painful tests (I thank God for that!!!) , after 7 long days there, they concluded that my heart is in fairly good shape, but what had probably happened to me is a small stroke.  The medical term is TIA.  They took a brain CT scan on Sunday morning but needed two days to make a final decision if they really saw blood on the scan or not.  One doctor saw a blood spot on the brain, one didn't, and it took almost two days for them

to come to a conclusion!!!  I thought I was going home two days earlier, but...NO!!!

ON THE PERSECUTION FRONT...

  Back at the home front, things here seemed to be getting a bit calmer, but are heating up again, with continuous harassment when we are eating out in restaurants and they happen to see us; loud and unruly demonstrations outside our congregation building while we are having Bible studies and services, and still bothering the chess and domino players who play outside the burnt out Chess club building.  By the way, chess- and domino-playing activity outside the the chess club really never stopped after they burnt it out, but the inside is still mostly unusable...Eddie and others have been slowly cleaning it up and making it usable again...

LOCAL TV COVERAGE    Our cause was recently taken up and aired on local TV here in the South in Hebrew...it was very favorable, and hopefully will make a few people think about what these guys are doing to us...Here's a link of a news broadcast aired on a local station here in the south last week.  For those of you who you can't understand the Hebrew, the ones in the black hats and black coats are slandering us, and most importantly, Yeshua...saying things like  "Come and get clothes sacrificed to the bast...Yeshu" (Their slanderous way of saying Yeshua),  as well as "Be careful of these dangerous people because they will steal your children and baptize them..."  Here's the link.  Let me know what you think.  The whole thing takes about 3 1/2 minutes to watch, and two of our members-Eddie (English) and Rebeka (Hebrew)-get to comment...  here's the link. Even if you don't understand it, you can see and feel the hate in their eyes and voices.   http://news.walla.co.il/?w=/3807/770929

                                                                      Your brother,  A*