Based on Myrna Grant’s fascinating biography.
Only Rose (to the right) and her sister survived the Nazi onslaught.
It was the 1930s and the atmosphere in Europe was becoming more tense by the day. Following in the footsteps of Germany and Poland, atrocities against Jews were becoming commonplace in Austria and Czechoslovakia; Jews were being forced to wear the yellow star and were thrown out of professional jobs to work as cleaners and garbage collectors in the streets. In Hungary, reports reached the family of Rose Warmer that Rose’s oldest brother had been deported to a concentration camp in Czechoslovakia. They barely understood what a concentration camp was, but the rumors were terrible beyond belief. Rose’s aging father could no longer endure the increasing pressure and died suddenly of a heart attack. But surely they were far enough out of Hitler’s reach in their beloved Hungary?
The death of Rose’s father shocked and grieved her immensely. With her young husband urging her on, she turned to spiritualism in a search for reassurance about the afterlife. But instead of finding peace, her mind became tormented by evil spirits; once, these spirits even attacked her physically and tried to tear her body apart. Now, instead of finding relief from the grief of losing her father, Rose had a far worse problem – the demonic spirits would not leave her!
As if these desperate problems were not bad enough, Rose’s heart bore an even deeper burden; her young husband taunted her continually with his flagrant unfaithfulness. Rose was overwhelmed with misery; her troubled soul groped in the darkness for light and life. Where could it be found? If only she could become a new Rose altogether!
Still mourning for her father, Rose began with desperation to turn the pages of her Jewish Bible, anxious to find some hope and comfort. Over and over again she devoured the book of Job, then the Psalms … but to her frustration, she could not make head or tail of it. She longed to meet someone who could talk to her about the meaning of the Bible. She learned that there were weekly meetings in a local church, where the Bible was explained clearly. Rose could hardly wait for the next meeting. The day finally came and she took her place in the front row. When the American missionary stood up to speak, Rose was instantly gripped: he was speaking about the Jewish Messiah! Wasn’t this meant to be a Christian meeting? But here the speaker was telling her about the Messiah of the Jews! He explained prophecy after prophecy from the Scriptures, each of them fulfilled in the life of Jesus of Nazareth. Little time was wasted at the close of the meeting before Rose was intently questioning Mr. Miller, the speaker. She gladly accepted his offer to meet him and his wife regularly to discuss the Bible.
Rose proved a fiery debater at these meetings. She began earnestly flicking the pages of her Bible at home after the first session, to find things for herself and to see if she had been told the truth. The next day she sought out Mr. and Mrs. Miller again, full of questions after searching the scriptures in her Bible. At home, three days after the gospel message, Rose was reading the Gospel of John. She recalls, ‘With everything in me, I gave my heart to the Messiah, to the Savior, to the Lord Jesus Christ. At the very same moment I also gave my life to Him. I knew how worthless it was to me. Born again! A new life! Not Rose anymore!’
With exuberant joy, Rose sought out the Millers to tell them she was now one of the flock of God. She couldn’t keep the good news to herself and began telling her Jewish brethren about the Messiah of Israel. Until she met the Millers, no one had told her that she could be saved from her sin and from Hell. Rose advised the Millers to buy more seats for the church, because she was going out to tell everyone!
Rose began quickly spreading the Gospel to crowds of hungry souls. The people couldn’t have been more desperate and needy. The Hungarians were horrified when their long-standing ally, Austria, joined in alliance with Hitler. They felt powerless as, by military defeat or by persuasion, the countries of Europe were falling one by one into Hitler’s dark grasp. When Hungary’s premier committed suicide, a Nazi was appointed in his place.
With the Nazi terror drawing closer and closer to the field of their work, the Millers understood that as American citizens they would probably be deported from the country. Working with Rose, their evangelistic efforts became all the more fervent. Many came to faith through their final days of ministry in Budapest. Then, one day, Rose received the terrible news that the Millers had been imprisoned; like Rose, they were Jewish and their faith in Jesus did not exempt them from suffering with their nation. Rose rallied the believers to watch in prayer for the Millers day and night. God mightily answered prayer and after only a few days their release was secured by the American government. They were immediately evacuated from the country.
Now without her spiritual parents, Rose continued the work of ministering to dear Jewish souls – especially to children and to young Jewish wives whose husbands had been taken off to the camps. Vast numbers of Jewish children had been abandoned to survive in the woods when their parents had been taken away to the camps. Others had simply got lost in the terrible upheavals of whole populations, migrating from country to country in faint hope of finding shelter from the Nazi storm. Rose visited hospitals, giving out the Word of God everywhere she went. She became like a mother to two little girls, whose father had been sent to the camps and whose mother was dying of tuberculosis in hospital. It wasn’t long before both girls received the Lord Jesus as their Savior. The Lord further magnified His grace to the family when their mother recovered and also put her faith in the Lord Jesus! During the Bible studies Rose conducted for the girls, she often found desperate young wives from the Jewish community eagerly joining her.
For this trembling Jewish community in Hungary, darker days lay ahead. While the Hungarian people had few sympathies with Hitler, they felt overshadowed by the Nazi presence in Europe and became allies of Germany in November 1940. Still, Hungary tried to maintain neutrality as far as was practically possible. Hitler’s wrath was soon kindled against Hungary’s stance and he ordered the German takeover of Hungary. A senior SS officer, Adolph Eichmann, lost no time in beginning the deportation of Hungarian Jews. His operation began on May 15th, 1944. By the beginning of July he had sent over 437,000 Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz-Birkenau, 90% of whom went to a quick death. The train line to Auschwitz was extended in preparation, so that the Jews of Hungary could be taken straight to the gas chambers without unnecessary delays. Between May and June of 1944, 20,000 Jews a day were arriving at the death camps and the crematoria were operating 24 hours a day in an attempt to cope with the vast numbers.
In the early days, Rose was safer than most Jews because she had papers from the Baptist church stating that she was a Christian missionary. Life was far from easy, however. She had to keep a very low profile and sought families to shelter her. One family threw her out because of the risk involved. Throughout the war, she could not even apply for rations, because this would mean automatic deportation. As the deportation of Jews to the labour camps became ever more frequent, Rose found shelter with a simple peasant woman, who showed her all the love of Jesus. Together they kept mournful watch from a window looking down on to the street below, crying to the Lord for the flock of Israel. Rose saw friends and neighbors with whom she had shared the Gospel, rounded up and taken away by the cart load. She longed to go with them and to tell them about the Messiah, the Hope of Israel. If she remained in hiding, who would tell them the good news? Rose counseled with other believers about her growing desire to go with her people to the camps. Deeply concerned for her safety, her friends urged her to stay in hiding and to continue to minister to the believers. Rose knew that if the idea was not from God, she would never be able to stand under all of the horrors that she would encounter if she was taken to a concentration camp. She sought God’s face and felt increasingly compelled by the Lord to join her people. She was comforted that it was indeed His will and not her whim. When she knew God’s will and needed no further confirmation, she went into the street and gave herself up into the hands of the SS officers. To the insulting cries of watching townspeople, Rose was herded into a cattle cart together with Jewish friends and neighbors, and transported to the concentration camp at Auschwitz.
The people in the camp numbered one million. Mountainous heaps of women’s hair, phylacteries and prayer shawls outside the crematorium were the only visible testimony of the thousands of victims. Living prisoners were employed in spreading huge cartfuls of human ashes over the fields.
Among the shabby masses, heads shorn, bodies scantily covered with grey sackcloth, Rose stood to attention for hours each morning in the bitter cold, enduring abuse, whipping and blows from the gun butts of German officers. Old men and women and any mothers with babies had been sent immediately for gassing. The officers were gruesomely faithful to their strict orders to work the remaining prisoners to death. With such vast numbers, they couldn’t hope to gas everyone at once. Despite the horrors all around her, Rose knew the peace of the Lord and His presence with her. She was not afraid of death; to her, death meant meeting face to face with her glorious Savior! At every opportunity, Rose witnessed from the Scriptures of the Jewish Messiah who died to save them from sin and death and give them everlasting life in Heaven.
Conditions were insanitary beyond belief, and Rose longed to feel a few drops of water on her face and body to wash away the grime. One day, together with a bunch of other women and children, she was selected to go to the showers. Standing naked and shivering in the showering chambers, they were all given a bar of grisly, grey soap printed with the letters ‘RJF’. The officers then ordered most of the group to move off to the left, while a few were funneled off to the right. Rose was pushed off with a small group that was directed out of the showers. They stood naked and bewildered, wondering why they hadn’t been able to wash. One of the Jewish overseers (called capos), approached Rose and congratulated her, ‘So, you escaped the selection! It’s not surprising; the ovens are slow. There are too many people for them.’ The ‘showers’ were not showers at all, but gas chambers. Only later, Rose realized the significance of the initials on the soap, which in German, stood for, ‘Pure Jewish fat’.
Rose was selected a second time for the ‘showers’. Everyone was ordered to strip. Children’s eyes stared questioningly at their hopeless mothers. The officers took hold of Rose and a handful of others and forcefully threw them out of the room. Lying outside, naked in the cold, Rose listened to the nightmarish noises from within as the gassing began. Children cried, ‘Momma, I can’t find you!’ Bodies softly thudded to the ground. Faintly, there rose a low corporate murmur of a Hebrew chant: ‘Ani Maamin be’emuna shlema be’viat haMashiah’ (I believe with perfect faith in the coming of the Messiah!)
A soldier approached the huddled group that had been spared and they were rounded up and packed into a train that took them out of the camp. As the train pulled away from Auschwitz, Rose knew that she had been saved from the jaws of death. She was among 2050 that were sent to work in a factory on the Ruhr.
Rose was transported across Germany almost to the border with the Netherlands, where the prisoners were put to work in an oil refinery. Prisoners were crammed into vast tents by night and suffered continual abuse from their overseers by day. Conditions were terrible, but in this hole of hatred and wickedness, Rose shared the love of God. She was thankful to find one or two who listened with interest. One sweet girl, Ruby, even professed to believe in Jesus and became like a daughter to Rose. The other women tormented Ruby without ceasing, condemning her as a traitor to the Jewish people who had adopted the religion of the Nazis. Rose was grieved to see Ruby gradually behaving more and more coldly with her. One of Rose’s greatest disappointments came when Ruby turned back from following the Lord.
They were treated more kindly by the German soldiers who controlled the oil refinery, than by the SS men in Auschwitz. This all changed when a group of SS soldiers stormed the factory. Again the selection was made. Women were ordered to strip to the waist. Refineries in the area were now under heavy bombing by the Americans and the German soldiers had to again select and deport a number of prisoners that they wanted to keep for slave labor. The rest were taken by train directly to the ovens at Auschwitz.
Rose was taken with a group of 520 to work in a Krupp canon and iron factory in Essen. She was put to work beating out huge iron bars with an electric hammer that was situated above her head. Terrible beatings followed any clumsiness and incompetence, which were frequent in her weakened condition.
When the ‘Day of Atonement’ was approaching, Rose was overwhelmed with the desire to ask the SS officer in her section for a Bible. Any unsolicited communication with the officers was strictly forbidden. Unable to contain herself, Rose blurted out her request, fully aware of the most likely consequence of such an act. The officer stared straight ahead, without uttering a word. The offence didn’t go unnoticed. There was one SS officer who was particularly vicious and beat Rose violently every day. He sharply ordered Rose to the fence. Would she be killed? Trembling, Rose approached the fence, knowing that she need have no fear of death. The officer there handed her a paper bag and told her to hide it. When Rose had escaped to safety, with delight, she saw that it contained a Bible! Rose was overwhelmed that God had shown His love to her in such a way; she knew that God was mindful of her and was listening to her prayers and had answered her specific request in a miraculous way. His workings in the heart of the SS man are a mystery perhaps known only by God to this day.
One day the leader of the camp found Rose reading her Bible. He beat Rose terribly on the head and confiscated her precious book. Sorely bereft of her most precious possession, Rose miserably questioned the Lord – why had He allowed her Bible to be taken from her? Only about an hour after this event, the whole camp was severely bombed with phosphorous bombs. The wooden barracks became a mass of flames and there was hardly a structure that escaped destruction. Rose was in awe: ‘It was like the judgment of God.’ She emerged from the flimsy bomb shelters into the smoking ruins, praying earnestly for God to work in the heart of the camp leader, ‘one of the most wicked of the SS men I had known.’ God emboldened her to approach him. ‘I have been praying for you,’ she said. ‘Will you please give me back my Bible now?’ ‘All right! All right!’ came the gruff answer, ‘You shall have it!’ Miraculously, the Bible had been kept in a hut that was completely burnt to the ground, while the Bible was not even singed! Rose’s fellow-prisoners saw that Rose had placed more value on the Word of God than on her own life. From then on, whenever she read to them from the Bible, they listened intently.
The factory had been destroyed. The SS men who ran the factory had to decide the fate of the surviving prisoners. The factory belonged to Buchenwald, so the prisoners should have been transported there for extermination in its concentration camp. But because the ovens were unable to keep pace with the numbers, the factory workers were spared. The 550 survivors of the camp were bundled into a cattle car. During intermittent spurts of allied bombing, the train would stop for the officers to run off and find shelter, while the prisoners sat locked up in the railcar. Finally their journey terminated at infamous Bergen Belsen, where all 550 were packed into a single room, already bursting with political prisoners.
The SS officers knew that time was short. Much of Germany lay in ruins. In Bergen Belsen there were still tens of thousands of unburied corpses. The officers were driven by a frantic need to eliminate all evidence of Nazi atrocities, prior to an allied takeover. Any survivors were brutally employed in dragging corpses, digging holes and covering the mass graves with earth. Rose dragged her sick and aching bones to the gruesome work; any cessation of activity could mean instant death. In Rose’s barracks, fellow prisoners were dying around her all the time. Those remaining alive had no strength to move the corpses out of the sleeping quarters, so they simply bore the stench of the decaying bodies around them.
Rose lay in her barracks with the other prisoners, waiting for the wake-up call to drag them to their labor. The call was late? The prisoners waited. Still the call did not come. After a long time, some brave prisoners began to venture cautiously out of their barracks. Rose ventured out and saw some of the last Hungarian soldiers running out of the camp. All the guards had fled.
Pandemonium broke out in the camp and the survivors began pulling all that they could out of the storage rooms and kitchens. There was one working tap in the whole camp, to supply the thousands of people who were dying of thirst. Hoping to feel one drop of that water on her tongue, Rose was knocked to the ground by the scrabbling crowd. As she lay there, unable to rise, she heard over the loud-speaker system an announcement in English: the camp has been liberated! The announcement followed in Hungarian, German, French and every other language of the people. British trucks rolled in bringing tanks of water, first to all who were strong enough to come out for it, then to all of the survivors still in the barracks. Although the liberating soldiers had tried to brace themselves for the scenes of the camp, nothing could prepare them for the horrors that rose before their eyes. They had smelled the stench of decaying bodies eight miles away on their approach.
Rose was taken to a make-shift hospital created in the officers’ barracks of Bergen Belsen. She was immediately given a can of meat and, on request, an English Bible. Rose lay in her bed, helpless to open either the Bible or the meat. “I wondered if I would die still holding my two possessions,” Rose recalls. Afterwards, Rose realized that God, out of mercy, had not enabled her to open that can of meat. Many survivors died after gulping down the food that they were given; it was too much for their malnourished bodies to handle.
Ordinary German people were constrained by the Allied forces to enter the camp to help with the thousands of sick, needy and dying in liberated Bergen Belsen. Many officials had asked Rose for her name and details of her family, but Rose was so sick that she simply could not recall. But Rose had peace: “God knew my name, and I rested and waited for Him to tell me.” Once, Rose woke to see a German lady over her who had been forced by the liberating allied armies to come into the camp to help. With her little strength, Rose turned to ask the lady weakly, ‘Who am I?’ The lady replied with a sharp slap to Rose’s sunken face. Unfortunately, Nazi anti-Semitism was alive and well among the German people.
Gradually Rose recovered her memory and some measure of strength, and she began to plead for release, longing to see her beloved family. She was certain that her family had weathered the war in America and made her plans to get to them as soon as possible. She could not return to her home in Hungary, as the country had been taken over by communists. One day she consented to be taken to Sweden, and from there to America. That night Rose heard the Lord gently questioning her, ‘Did you ask Me?’ She struggled with the Lord, weeping, longing to go to America to be with her family. Again and again came the question, ‘Did you ask Me?’ In the end she committed herself to the Lord’s will in prayer. She was happy to go where He would send her. With this, she felt the Lord directing her to Czechoslovakia, where she had been given citizenship as a child.
Finally Rose obtained permission to leave, although her bodily weakness was still very great. On the train, full of survivors, that rattled out of that camp to freedom, Rose’s body was so small and weak that some others helped her to slide on top of the baggage compartments so that she could lie down. Everyone was full of hope at the thought of returning to their villages, their homes, their families; the train was full of joyful chatter and an air of expectation. But as the train lumbered on through village after village and desolation stretched as far as the eye could see, the chatter in the train dried up. Then something amazing happened. At night stops along the way, Jewish officers in British uniform were offering to take anyone who wanted to Palestine, to build a national homeland for the Jews. Rose’s heart thrilled within her as she heard the words! Had she not told the women in the factory and the camps that the Lord would bring His people back to the land of Israel?!
When Rose got off the train at her stop in Czechoslovakia, she numbly watched the crowds rush past her out into the city. Having nowhere to go, she placed her bundle of clothes under her head and went to sleep right there on the train station. Czechoslovakia had been liberated by the Russians, who were looting, raping and rioting. The Lord watched over Rose that night and she was not roused from her sleep until she awoke in the morning.
Rose was indeed a strange sight to see, with her funny dress hanging over a bony, bruised and sick body. Her hair was still less than half an inch in length. When walking in the street that morning, Rose asked a startled passerby where the nearest Baptist church was. ‘Why, just around the corner!’ Rose sighed with relief, ‘I can manage just around the corner!’ She slipped quietly into a back seat of the little church, just after their Sunday morning meeting had begun. Rose poured out her heart in floods of tears as the simple songs of praise rose from the place. A lady next to her tried to show her kindness by giving her a hymn book and finding the right place for her, but Rose’s eyes were helplessly blinded by tears. At the end of the meeting a crowd of people surrounded her and listened to her story. Rose could think of nothing but finding her family members. She began desperately pouring out to them all the names that she could think of, in hope of finding a connection – names of neighbors, friends, associates, believers they knew – a pastor who had baptized her sister … ‘Ah!’ there was an exclamation, ‘His daughter is here in our church!’ In no time, Rose was taken to that pastor’s house. He was delighted to reassure Rose that her sister was alive and had survived the war with her husband and two children. They took Rose to see her sister immediately. She wanted for nothing else.
The two sisters stood embracing each other in the doorway of the home. Rose noticed that Felice was much thinner and more worn than before. Felice had survived with her family by hiding in the mountains, fleeing from place to place, often a hair’s-breadth in front of the Nazi soldiers, and surviving on whatever they could find. Rose soon learnt from her sister the agonizing news of the family. Her precious mother had been discovered hiding with her cousin in a cave in the mountains. An eyewitness said that the SS guards had asked for any Jews to step forward. Under the circumstances, there were no papers available to prove who was Jewish and who was not, but Rose’s mother had innocently obeyed. Because she was an elderly woman, she was sent straight to the gas chambers. Two of Rose’s brothers had also perished in the camps, along with almost all of her very large extended family. All along, Rose thought that she alone had suffered among the members of her family, only to find that the majority had perished.
Rose again felt the Lord speaking to her and urging her to move on from the safe haven of her sister’s home, where she was slowly recovering. Against the advice of her sister and other believing friends, she decided to go into the city again in order to testify to the Jewish people there. It was a dangerous place, and Rose had nothing to her name and no bed in which to lay her head. All the way, the Lord provided for every need. Parcels of food and beautiful clothing arrived from praying friends in America, which Rose gladly shared out with others in need. She was deeply burdened to reach all of the Jewish survivors of the Holocaust with the good news of Jesus the Messiah. One day she heard that all of the survivors were listed in a huge two-volume directory; Rose’s heart leapt for joy as she realized that this meant she could trace each one and send them Gospel literature and offer them each a New Testament.
But Rose’s hands were empty; she had no money and no Bibles to give. Then she discovered that missionaries from the American Million Testament Campaign had left boxes of Hebrew New Testaments in a Baptist church in the town; the boxes were untouched and waiting for distribution! Rose began a small-scale printing and distribution operation as the Lord provided money – printing tracts, envelopes, buying stamps and carting everything to the post office in a broken child’s pram that had been given to her. After a short time, the Lord provided her with an apartment. She moved in and showed hospitality to everyone the Lord sent her way. In this way, Rose ministered to many hopeless people. One Jewess who had survived by being hidden in someone’s home (at the price of all of her earthly possessions), came to faith after one month of living in Rose’s apartment. Many Jewish survivors came and stayed with Rose, as they had nowhere else to go.
Not long after the Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia, Rose felt a circle closing tightly in on her. She was followed everywhere she went. Distribution of Christian literature was forbidden. Rose felt more and more a deep longing to go to the land of Israel as she watched many Jews pack up and leave. She felt the same longing to go with her people that she had felt when she watched them being rounded up and taken to the concentration camps. Her mission field was again on the move and Rose longed to move with them. But the authorities in charge of giving visas for entry to Palestine were religious Orthodox Jews. Rose was known everywhere as a missionary and obtaining entry to Israel seemed impossible. Rose’s friends were becoming more and more anxious that her arrest was imminent and feared that she would not survive another imprisonment in her weakened condition. She had no way of exiting Czechoslovakia, as she had no passport. When Rose eventually secured a passport, it was one that permitted her only to exit the country: it was a stateless passport. Rose’s friends were persistently trying to obtain a visa for her to the USA or Canada, but neither place would grant a visa to a lady who did not have a state to return to. Again and again she was refused a visa of entrance to Palestine on the grounds that she was not Jewish because she had believed in the Lord Jesus. Her suffering out of love for her Jewish brethren and the fact that she had lost most of her large family to the fires of the crematoriums, were of no consequence to the rabbinic officials. Rose again committed everything into the loving hands of God and handed herself into His tender care to do with her as pleased Him, whether it meant life or death.
One day, the Lord opened the door of escape. A Canadian friend was with Rose in the Canadian Consulate and over the phone persuaded a Palestinian representative to promise Rose a visa for Palestine upon her arrival in Canada. Because they had received this promise, the Canadian consulate granted Rose the visa for Canada. During Rose’s short stay in Canada, her visa for entry to Palestine arrived, signed by the rabbinate of Bratislava, the city in Czechoslovakia where she had labored for the Lord before leaving for Canada. Shortly after this, her visa for visiting the USA arrived.
Because her visa for Palestine had not been granted to her while she was in Czechoslovakia, Rose was now able to travel to the USA before finally setting off for the shores of the Promised Land. This enabled her to meet with the only one of her four brothers who was still living. Rose marveled at how every tragedy in our lives abundantly shows forth God’s goodness and grace. Everything that He does with us is good – how good! Rose delighted in meeting perhaps the only member of her family who had been untouched by the horrors in Europe. She spoke to her dear brother much about the Gospel, but to her sorrow, he hardened his heart. Rose was also reunited with the Millers. They had prayed for Rose throughout her time in the camps and had encouraged much prayer from other believers. They testified to her that many times they had felt it was hopeless to continue to pray for Rose, as they thought that she had surely perished, yet they felt the Holy Spirit prompt them to continue. For the first time Rose met face to face with many believers who had borne her before the throne of grace through those terrible years in Europe.
During this time in America, Rose’s sister, Felice, who had emigrated to Israel with her husband and children, began urging Rose by letter not to come to Israel. Thousands were enduring the terrible heat and cold in tent camps. Agriculture and factories were not yet developed, so food and water were very scarce; Israel was unprepared to cope with the masses of immigrants pouring in each day. These immigrants had to fight for their entry into the land and for their existence there, on all fronts. The British, who controlled Palestine under mandate since the First World War, were determined to severely restrict and even halt Jewish immigration. The British White Paper of 1939 limited Jewish immigration to 75,000 for the first five years. After the five years, no further Jewish immigration would be allowed unless the Arabs would agree to it. Historians have correctly noted that this pre-World War II policy of restricting Jewish immigration to Israel, “contributed in no small measure to the annihilation of European Jewry”. After the war, shiploads of Jewish survivors struggled on their hopeful way to the land of their fathers, only to be turned back with violent force by the British blockade. Daring immigrants had to smuggle their way in through the vigilant patrols of armed British soldiers along the shorelines.
On top of opposition from the British, the Jews in the Promised Land, impoverished and often stricken by sickness and malaria, were constantly attacked by Arab guerilla fighters. While taking strict measures to restrict Jewish immigration, the British turned a blind eye to floods of illegal Arab immigrants into Israel, who should have been settled in Transjordan; this stirred up no small trouble for the Jews in the land. Israel’s struggle continued, even when Israel was officially established as an independent nation in 1948, because all of the surrounding Arab nations declared war on her. Poorly equipped Israel was defended by the mighty hand of God, but it is hardly any wonder that Rose’s sister begged Rose to stay put in prosperous and secure America!
In spite of her sister’s pleas not to come to Israel and the petitions of many American friends to stay in the USA, Rose knew where God wanted her. It was to a land of men “escaped from the sword” that Rose journeyed in August 1950. When her feet touched the soil, she became a citizen automatically. Her service in Israel was abundant as she travelled the length and breadth of the land of Promise, giving out the Word of God in the newly established schools and kibbutzim. With the holocaust such a vivid memory in the Jewish mind, Rose suffered rejection and persecution for propagating the ‘religion of the Nazis’ in the new Jewish homeland. Still, Rose stretched out her hand and held forth the Word of Life. The last nine years of Rose’s richly fruitful life were spent in “Ebenezer Home” in Haifa. Then, a few years before she went to be with the Lord, she was greatly encouraged by God’s provision of a successor in the work of Bible distribution in the land. Today many Jews in Israel are still receiving the Word of Life through the continuation of this work.
” … the land that is brought back from the sword, that is gathered out of many peoples, … the mountains of Israel, which have been a continual waste” Ezekiel 38:8.