Stealth evangelists

For years, I've had my family surnames and the regions from which we hailed posted in an online database for Jewish genealogy. I stopped actively searching the database years ago, but every once in awhile, I get an email from someone else who's been searching, and finds a name or place in common. Once I heard from a cousin of my mom's that I knew about but have never met. Most recently, I heard from a man whose family hailed from the same little Transylvanian village as my great-grandfather.

But a couple of years ago, I had an odd experience. I got an email from a woman with an American name that said something like the following:

"Hi! I saw that you were interested in the Jews of Romania. My dad was Jewish. I'm a member of the Jewish community of Small Romanian City. I would love to tell you more about my experiences here! Looking forward to hearing from you!"

There was something just a little bit off about this missive. The usual genealogical query email is full of names: first names, last names, names of shtetls, names of regions. We're looking for matches, for unknown family long sundered by emigration and genocide and personal tragedy. No one had ever volunteered to tell me about their "experiences" before.

This woman offered no names except her own. And her location, Small Romanian City, was nowhere near the region where my Hungarian-speaking family hailed. I was suspicious without knowing exactly why.

On a whim, I Googled the woman's name. In an instant, the answer was before me: the woman and her husband were Christian missionaries posted to Romania by an evangelical Midwestern church. Apparently the local heathen proved unresponsive to her message, and she'd decided to try her luck with the unwashed hordes on the Internet.

I don't think I can articulate how angry I was. There were so many things to be angry about. The deception. The presumption. The arrogance. The Jewish community of Small Romanian City was probably less than 200 people, and those people had survived unimaginable horrors. This woman and her husband thought that they could somehow make the world a better place by violating them yet again. And when that proved less than successful, she thought she'd try violating those of us who can only piece together the barest outlines of our family history, Jews searching for the faint clues left behind in the smoke, rubble, and ash of the twentieth century.

Eventually Mr. Blue convinced me that there was no use in sending the woman an explosive reply. "She'd think you were starting a dialogue with her. She'd take it as an opening. Just let it be."

That was what I did. But let me tell you, the next stealth evangelist who tries to target me or my family is going to get the explosion he or she deserves, plus the explosion that I never sent to that perky faux-Jew missionary. Isn't there a term Christians use to describe someone who denies their relationship to Jesus out of self-interest? Judas!