This is a rabbi? Oy!

The Christian “rabbi” who offered a prayer for the weekend’s victims of neo-Nazi terror at a rally with Vice President Mike Pence on Monday believes that Jews who do not accept Christ as their savior go to hell.

Wearing a Jewish prayer shawl, Loren Jacobs invoked “Yeshua,” a Hebrew word for Jesus, in his prayers for Republican candidates at the start of the Oakland County rally, near Detroit. Pence later called on Jacobs, whom he described as “a leader in the Jewish community here in Michigan,” to offer a special prayer for the victims of the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting and their families.

Jacobs, who leads the messianic congregation Shema Yisrael in Bloomfield Hills, again invoked Jesus in his remarks.

“Lord, I pray that we would see fewer and fewer horrible tragedies like this. And I pray this ‘beshem Yeshua’ — in the name of Jesus,” he concluded.

  HuffPo

Must be from Jews for Jesus.

Jacobs was not ordained by a recognized Jewish rabbinical school, according to his congregation’s website.

Well, there's a surprise.

Instead, his web biography states that he graduated from the Jewish studies program at the Moody Bible Institute, a Christian institution, and holds a bachelor’s degree in biblical studies from Northeastern Bible College, another Christian institution. He was raised in a conventional Jewish household and became “messianic” — embraced Jesus as his personal savior — in 1975, according to the bio.

[...]

The American Jewish community, which consists of about 5.7 million people ― more than 40 percent of the Jews in the world ― is riven with multiple religious denominations, as well as political and philosophical differences. But one thing that Orthodox, Reform, Conservative, Reconstructionist and secular Jews generally agree on is that belief in Jesus as the messiah is fundamentally antithetical to Judaism.

Attempts to cloak Christianity in Jewish garb or co-opt Jewish language and rituals are typically seen as efforts to convert Jewish people.

[...]

Pence was not the one who invited Jacobs to the event, the vice president’s office said. That was Lena Epstein, a Jewish Republican candidate in the hotly contested race for Michigan’s 11th Congressional District, according to Pence’s staff.

[...]

“My family’s history as Jews and my commitment to my Jewish faith are beyond question,” the candidate said in a statement posted on Twitter. She noted that she is a fourth-generation member of Temple Beth-El, a Reform congregation in Bloomfield Hills.

“I invited the prayer because we must unite as a nation ― while embracing our religious differences ― in the aftermath of Pennsylvania,” Epstein continued. “Any media or political commentator who is attacking me or the Vice President is guilty of nothing short of religious intolerance and should be ashamed.”

[...]

Jordan Acker, a Jewish Democrat running for the University of Michigan’s Board of Regents, tweeted in response, “Nobody thinks you’re not Jewish. They think that you’re deeply insensitive for bringing a group on stage [whose] entire mission is to convert Jews 3 days after the worst anti-Semitic attack in American Jewish history.”

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.