Joy Stevenson was a Baha'i of Jewish background

Marion "Joy" Stevenson (March 17, 1919 - April 25, 2016) was a Counsellor member of the International Teaching Centre for ten years from May 19, 1988 to 1998. She served on the National Spiritual Assembly of Australia, and as a Continental Counsellor for Australasia - appointed in 1983 - and an Auxiliary Board member in Australasia. She passed away in Queanbeyan, Australia on 25 April 2016. When she died the Universal House of Justice requested that Baha'i communities around the world convene "commemorative gatherings in her honour." In 1985 she was a Trustee of the Continental Fund and one of nineteen Continental Counselors for Asia. 

Collis Featherstone was a Baha'i of Jewish heritage

Collis Featherstone (5th May, 1913 - 29th September, 1990)

By Mariette Leong (nee Featherstone and fourth daughter)

My parents became Baha’is in late 1944 after hearing the message from Bertha Dobbins, who later became the pioneer and Knight of Baha’u’llah to the New Hebrides – now Vanuatu. Bertha and husband Joe, together with Mother Dunn (Hand of the Cause Clara Dunn) deepened my parents in the Faith. They embraced the Faith immediately and actively supported the activities. It was only a few months after becoming a Baha’i, that my father wrote to Shoghi Effendi seeking his advice on certain matters, and this was the first of many communications with the Guardian over the years.

In 1949 my father was elected to the National Spiritual Assembly of Australia, then in 1954 Mother Dunn appointed him as her Auxiliary Board Member together with Thelma Perks. They represented Mother Dunn on many occasions, both locally and overseas as Mother Dunn was already in her 80’s and too frail to travel.

In October1957 the Guardian appointed my father a Hand of the Cause of God together with seven others. This was the last contingent of Hands to be appointed and brought the total number of Hands at that time to 27 members.

My father did everything he could to make Shoghi Effendi, and later the Universal House of Justice happy. His responsibility of being a Hand of the Cause was enormous. He travelled constantly, meeting with National Spiritual Assemblies, Auxiliary Board Members, Baha’i communities, Heads of State, and Parliamentarians. He attended National Conventions, Summer Schools, he visited villages, he met with their Chiefs. He stayed in posh hotels and he stayed in village huts. He rode in limousines, trucks, cars, boats, canoes, motor bikes and he walked up and down mountains. He ate all kinds of food. One time he came to stay with Ho-San and I in Malaysia when we were living there. He was passing through on his way to another Baha’i Community. He was very tired and worn out from travelling and he was hungry. I asked him what would he like to eat. And he said “Have you got some toast and vegemite?” (He was missing his Aussie food!)

At the last count, throughout the 36 years of Collis Featherstone’s international travels as an Auxiliary Board Member and later as a Hand of the Cause, he made 529 visits to 108 countries outside of Australia.

Collis Featherstone was a leader. He inspired and he enthused the friends. He was warm and joyful and the love of Baha’u’llah shone through. He was detached from the material world and very much in tune with the spiritual realm. He loved the Baha’i Faith. He loved Shoghi Effendi and he loved the Universal House of Justice. He loved to talk about the Covenant, and the Will and Testament of Baha’u’llah and Abdu’l-Baha. He loved quoting from the “Gleanings” and he always knew from which page the quote was. He encouraged many friends to keep records of their Baha’i activities and events for posterity. He always said that the early communities were making history, and that these stories should be kept so that future generations could read about the early development of the Faith.

My father was a wonderful family man who loved his family dearly, and his children loved him back. There were five children and it was a busy household. He was a tool maker, and he had the initiative to go into partnership with an engineering business which he eventually bought over and managed on his own. But between the business and a very busy Baha’i life, there was not a lot of time left for recreational activities. My mother was his best friend, his secretary and help mate in every sense of the word. One of the Baha’i friends asked him what was the hardest thing about being a Hand of the Cause. He replied, “I can’t retire”. And he never did. He passed away during his travels while serving Baha’u’llah. May God bless him. To this day I miss him dearly and long for his hugs on the other side when I arrive. 

https://www.bahaiblog.net/2015/09/25th-anniversary-of-the-passing-of-hand-of-the-cause-of-god-collis-featherstone/

Meeting of Baha'is of Jewish background in Haifa, Israel

Late Dr. Daryush Maani, Giti M. Mithaq, Faraz Maani in Haifa

Benjamin Levy (Ben Levy) was a Baha'i of Jewish background

http://bahai-library.com/levy_pilgrims_1953

Just as the Jews have crucified Christ - they suffered 2000 years of persecution - so also will the Moslems suffer a similar fate. The Jews rejected Christ - the Moslems Bahá'u'lláh and His Cause.

In buying the land of Mt. Carmel we accepted the provision that we cannot sell produce from the land (must give to poor and needy), cannot build, sell or rent. Only Bahá'ís pay no taxes on land (for religious purposes) in Israel - no other religious communities will accept these conditions - not the Muhammadans, the Christians, not even the Jews.

Robert B. Stauffer was a Jewish Baha'i scholar

More about Rob Stauffer can be found here :

https://bahai-library.com/author/Robert+Stauffer

Ali Soleimani is a Baha'i of Jewish background

 

Ali Soleimani is a fourth year sociology major with a minor in Persian studies. He was born and raised in Santa Clarita, California. Within UC Davis, he is involved in APIQ (Asian & Pacific Islander Queers), and he is also the cultural director for ISCAO (Iranian Student Cultural & Æsthetic Organization). He wanted to work at the CCC because he has a deep passion for community organizing and social justice, and he wanted to make ME/SA more inclusive and diverse. A fun fact about Ali is that he knows four languages!

https://ccc.ucdavis.edu/people/ali-soleimani

Mike Hoffman is a Baha'i of Jewish heritage

'Homeland and Holocaust' by Jewish Baha'i scholar Robert Stockman

Secularization of western European society did not solve the "Jewish Question"; anti- Semitism continued. The French Jews, who regarded France as the most secular and tolerant society in the world, were profoundly shocked in 1894 when Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French army, was wrongly accused of espionage. Dreyfus was sent to prison on the Devil's Island in the South Atlantic, and when evidence of the guilt of another officer surfaced the army refused to admit its mistake. French society was torn into two parties for over a decade, and one party was openly anti-Semitic in its literature. Anti- Jewish riots broke out in most major French cities. In Algiers—capital of the French colony of Algeria—the entire Jewish quarter was sacked. In the rest of Europe anti-Semitism was encouraged as well, and openly anti-Semitic politicians began to be elected to legislative positions. It became clear that anti-Semitism would not die simply because society had abandoned much of its religious trappings

Theodor Herzl (1860-1904), a Jewish journalist who was allowed to cover the Dreyfus trial, took up his pen and wrote The Jewish State, the book that launched the modern Zionist movement. Herzl worked tirelessly to promote Zionism, dying young as a result. Eastern European Jews embraced it with particular enthusiasm, for persecution there was growing and citizenship in a secular state was not a reasonable expectation. In western Europe Zionist congresses debated the idea of setting up a Jewish homeland in Palestine and began courting contacts with diplomats. When World War One converted Palestine from an Ottoman Turkish province to a British protectorate and British policy came to favor establishment of a "Jewish home" in Palestine, the political conditions for migration to Palestine were set.

Palestine in 1917 had at most a hundred thousand Jews, out of a total population of 600,000. Many were refugees from pogroms in Eastern Europe; some were religious scholars who were totally uninterested in a Jewish state. The British did not allow unlimited immigration and Zionism at first had little momentum, and thus few potential immigrants. All land had to be purchased from the Arabs, who charged as much as the market would bear. As more Jews came to Palestine the price of land spiraled upward. Eastern European Jews who voluntarily migrated to Palestine were often secularist and Marxist; they founded the kibbutzim, which remain among the world's few successful socialist experiments.

By the end of the 1920s the Jewish population of Palestine had risen to a mere 160,000, and anti-Jewish violence promulgated by angry Arabs became a more serious problem. Jews began to organize military units to defend themselves, units that were broken up by the British. In the 1930s, with the rise of Naziism in central Europe, immigration to Palestine rose sharply; in 1935 alone 64,000 Jews arrived. Arab resistance grew and the British began to face the breakdown of the mandate. Arab and Jewish states, increasingly became inevitable.

The deterioration of the safety of Jews throughout most of Europe accelerated the process. In the Russian Empire tens of thousands of Jews were killed in early the 1920s, for they were heavily involved in the Russian Revolution as Marxists. Under Stalin, who was fiercely anti-Semitic, Marxist Jews suffered terribly and the religion was virtually banned. But the spread of Naziism represented far more serious a threat. In some ways systematic anti- Semitism in Germany was surprising, for violence against Jews had ceased a century earlier and Jews were thoroughly integrated into German science, literature, and philosophy. Germany was winning half of the Nobel Prizes being awarded; and a third to a half of the German Nobels were being won by Jews. But the lost of the First World War was a terrible blow to German pride and needed an explanation; blaming the loss on the Jews was persuasive to many. The collapse of the German economy in the early 1930s required a scapegoat and pushed the country to desperation. It elected a demagogue in one of the first national elections it had ever held. Hitler had an obsession against Jews and as a result Naziism bolstered its nationalist theories of racial superiority of the Germans with arguments of Jewish genetic inferiority and conspiracy theories of Jewish dominance of the German economy. Even before Germany began military action it began to crack down on its Jewish population. Two hundred thousand Jews fled Germany for France, Holland, and countries beyond Europe.

Creation of a powerful German military machine and its use to conquer France, Poland, and much of the Balkans and the western Soviet Union brought much of European Jewry under German authority. Nazi-occupied Poland alone had 3.3 million Jews, and Hitler could do anything with them he pleased. Labor camps where Jews and other non-Germans were reduced to slave labor were built, then concentration camps. When the Soviet Union was invaded the Jewish populations of occupied Soviet cities were rounded up and shot in the hundreds of thousands. While some two and a half million Soviet Jews fled the German armies, a million and a half remained behind, and most were killed.

In 1941 the first gas chambers were constructed. Ironically, as the tide clearly turned against Germany, Hitler and his generals put a higher priority on the "Final Solution" to the Jewish problem than on prosecuting the war. Trains carrying Polish, German, and other Jews to death camps were given priority over military trains carrying soldiers and supplies to the front. Ninety percent of Poland's Jews were gassed, shot, or worked to death. At Auschwitz alone over two million human beings were gassed and incinerated. The war saw the cold-blooded killing of six million Jews, almost two thirds of the total in Europe.

The horror produced two results of lasting significance. One was the Nuremberg trials and the creation of international law against genocide. The second was awareness of the need to create a Jewish state. Not only were Jews convinced it was essential, but international sympathy made Jewish migration to Palestine easier. The result was an explosion of the Jewish population of Palestine. When the British sought to prevent Jewish immigration a campaign of terrorism—coordinated by young men like Menachem Begin—forced them to reverse their policy. The Czech government agreed to sell arms to the Jewish agency (the coordinating agency of Jews in Palestine), which began importing weapons via a clandestine airfield. When the British surrendered their mandate in 1948 to independent Jewish and Arab states, Israel was prepared to defend itself against Arab invasion. The Jewish question was replaced by the Arab question, for hundreds of thousands fled the land that became Israel. But the Jews reestablished their own sovereign state, for the first time in over two thousand years.

 

https://bahai-library.com/stockman_notes_judaism

God has forgiven the Jews in this Dispensation and that they will return to their homeland.

http://bahai-library.com/compilation_holocaust_greater_plan

You should certainly endeavour to establish further contacts with your Jewish fellow-citizens, as their spiritual destiny is assuredly bright. The age-long sufferings and tribulations which the Jews all over the world have so cruelly experienced will be terminated during the Bahá'í era, as they will be gradually led to embrace the Faith, which, indeed, constitutes the only means of salvation to their race.

http://bahai-library.com/compilation_holocaust_greater_plan

Robert Stockman is a Baha'i scholar of Jewish heritage

Robert Stockman (born October 6, 1953) is a scholar specializing in Bahá'í studies who has been called "the foremost historian of the Bahá’í Faith in America." He received his undergraduate degree from Wesleyan University (B.A., 1975) and a doctorate in religious studies from Harvard University (Th.D., 1990).

He was introduced to the Bahá'í Faith while an undergraduate student and converted at the age of twenty, on October 16, 1973. He has been an active Bahá'í since his conversion, and in 1979 participated in mass teachings in rural central Florida.

During his studies for his master's degree in geology, he developed an interest in the history of the Bahá'í community in Rhode Island which led to his researching the biography of Thornton Chase. This endeavor led to the publication of Baha'i Faith in America: Origins 1892–1900 followed by Baha'i Faith in America, The: Early Expansion, 1900–1912 Volume 2 before the ultimate publishing of Thornton Chase: First American Baha'i. Starting in 1989, he has worked for the National Spiritual Assembly of the United States, based in Wilmette, Illinois, in various capacities. He is married to Mana Derakhshani.

Subsequent to earning his doctorate from Harvard Divinity School, Stockman began teaching at the DePaul University in Chicago prior to proceeding to his current position as a lecturer at Indiana University South Bend, where he teaches religious studies. He serves as director of the Wilmette Institute. He has served on the boards of the Bahá'í Encyclopedia project, the Association for Bahá'í Studies, and World Order magazine. He has lectured on Bahá'í topics across the world and is a frequent contributor to Bahá'í panels at the American Academy of Religion. 

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Stockman 

 

Research Documents by Robert Stockman

https://bahai-library.com/author/Robert+Stockman

These affluent Jewish families quickly converted to the Baha'i Faith and served it when it was a Child.

In the early part of the twentieth century, as millennial expectations swept through a fast-changing world, there were many in the United States who sought spiritual awakening. On any given night in the country’s most vibrant cities, rooms were filled to capacity with spiritual seekers gathered to listen to gurus, teachers, and charlatans holding court on biblical prophecy, the End Times, and a myriad other religious subjects. Among the inquisitive souls attending such meetings in Washington D.C. was the young Pauline Hannen, the first in her family to investigate what was at the time a little-known religion of the East called the Bahá’í Faith. Pauline was enthralled by what she heard, and she quickly immersed herself in study of the new Faith and shared all that she learned with her sisters, Fanny and Alma Knobloch, and her mother Amalie. Her husband, Joseph Hannen, soon embraced the Faith as well, and the Hannens and Knoblochs became active members of the small but growing American Bahá’í community. Their embrace of the Cause came at significant personal sacrifice as it meant breaking with the social mores and status quo of Washington society as they strove to put the Faith’s social teachings into practice. They were privileged, however, to visit and correspond with ‘Abdu’l-Bahá personally and were intimately involved in serving Him throughout His visit to North America. Clearly aware of the significance of the times in which they lived, the families documented their correspondence and activities meticulously and left extensive written records of their lives. 

KNOBLOCH MEMORIAL ANNOUNCEMENT
Email Date: Thursday, June 29, 2000 1:24 PM 

Local Spiritual Assembly of the Baha’i’s of Washington, DC
 

Subject: Knobloch Family Memorial

"You are invited to a unique event that will pay tribute to a distinguished Baha'i family of Washington DC, the Knobloch family. 

Pauline Knobloch was the first of the family to become a Baha'i (in 1903), followed by her mother Amalie and her sisters Fanny and Alma. Pauline's husband, the saintly Joseph  Hannen, took notes of all Abdu’l-Bahá talks in Washington. It was through this devoted couple that Louis Gregory became a Baha'i, studying with them each week in their  modest home.
 

Fanny was the first Baha'i teacher to go to South Africa, where she stayed for three years developing the first Baha'i settlements. She returned to the US because of ill health but later, at age 68, returned to South Africa. She lived her life out at the home of Carl Hannen in Wilmette.
 

Alma Knobloch went to Germany in 1907 to implant the Baha'i Faith there. Abdu’l-Bahá instructed her to remain as long as she could and she was there through the horrors of the first world war and beyond.
 

This family is buried in a family plot at Prospect Hill cemetery just north of Rhode Island Avenue and North Capitol Street in Washington, and about 20 of the descendants are flying in to hold a commemorative ceremony there on July 8th at 11 am. You are all invited to attend, and to come for a light lunch at the Baha'i Center to meet the descendants of this outstanding family.
 

Please join us on this occasion.
 

Sincerely,
 

The Local Spiritual Assembly of the Baha’i’s of Washington, DC

Margit Warburg is a Jewish but she loves the Baha'i Faith and the Baha'is

Margit Warburg is a Jewish academic scholar, she has written extensively on the Baha'i Faith and the human rights of Baha'is in the Middle East. May the Blessed Beauty reward her for her wonderful work and may the favors of the Blessed Beauty, Baha’u’llah, encompass her, and may the lights of the Sun of Reality be her illumination.

More can be read here:

https://bahai-library.com/pinella_warburg_i_bahai

https://books.google.com/books?id=Ab0yAQAAQBAJ