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For anyone interested, here is what I am talking about
Association of Hebrew Catholics
https://www.hebrewcatholic.net › fr-antoine-levy
Fr. Antoine Levy, O.P. – Association of Hebrew Catholics
Fr. Antoine Levy is a Dominican priest and a professor of theology who studies Jewish-Christian relations and Messianic Judaism. He is also a member of the Roman Catholic-Messianic Jewish Dialogue Group and a speaker at various …
Fr. Antoine Levy, O.P.
Fr. Antoine Levy OP is Professor at the University of Eastern Finland (School of Theology) and Director of the Helsinki Studium Catholicum. He was born in Paris in 1962. He was raised in a non-religious Zionist home. He discovered Christian faith while studying Philosophy at the Sorbonne and at the École Normale Supérieure (St. Cloud). After receiving Baptism in the Catholic Church, he entered the Dominican Order in 1990.
Fr. Antoine is the author of a monograph on St.Maximus the Confessor and St. Thomas Aquinas, and has published journal articles in French, English, and Finnish on a variety of subjects including Patristics, Medieval theology, Orthodox spirituality, Russian political philosophy, and Messianic Judaism. He is also a member of the Roman Catholic-Messianic Jewish Dialogue Group.
The following talks were given at the Helsinki Consultation on Jewish Continuity in the Body of Christ
Ami Israel as the Founding Principle of a Messianic Ecclesiology, Paris 2011
Torah is the Way, Berlin 2012
Tying and untying shoes: a Church-Jew Messianic approach to Torah fulfillment, Oslo 2013
Church Jews: Self-betrayal or Divine Vocation?, Netherlands 2014
Christophoric Flesh, Moscow 2015
Messianic Judaism – The Ecumenical Factor
His book after years of dialogue in this group
View attachment 367051
The orthodox are also involved with this
I’m not aware of what you mean about the Orthodox being involved by that; of the Eastern Orthodox, large numbers of the members of the Antiochian Orthodox Church (which just suffered a horrible attack on a church in Damascus by Islamic Terrorists in which 24 Christians received a crown of martyrdom and 92 became confessors; this included children) are of Jewish descent, having converted in the first century or at other points early in the history of the church, and this is also the case more broadly among EO churches in the Mediterranean; likewise, among the Oriental Orthodox, the Syriac Orthodox and the ethnically and linguistically related Ancient Church of the East and the Assyrian Church of the East, both in the Middle East and in India are of Jewish descent, some Mar Thoma Christians in the Syrian church are of pure Jewish descent, being the endogamous survivors of a shipwreck of Jews traveling to Kerala via the one of the two popular merchant trade routes (both of which involved an overwater component - one route was overland from Jerusalem or Antioch via Edessa, Nisibis, Nineveh, Tikrit, Baghdad and sailing from Basra through the Persian Gulf and then to Arabia, whereas the other route, used by Jews in Alexandria, was to sail down the Red Sea, stopping at the island of Socotra off the coast of Yemen, which for this reason became a major center of the Church of the East until the Muslims martyred all of them around the year 1200, before continuing on to Kerala, which was the center of Jewish trade in India and thus became the center of the Christian church in India, albeit which also evangelized Hindus, which is why St. Thomas the Apostle received the crown of martyrdom when an enraged Majarah threw a javelin at him in 53 AD - the site where this happened is the second oldest site of continuous Christian worship after the Cenacle in Jerusalem (the Crusaders thought they had found it abandoned and built a Gothic church on that site, but that site was the tomb of King David - the actual Upper Room is in the much more humble building that house St. Mark’s Monastery, which is one of the three main centers of the Syriac Orthodox community in Jerusalem, the others being their small chapel in the Armenian sector of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and the Church of St. Mary that shares a wall with the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem (which is used by the Greek Orthodox and the Armenians, and also the Roman Catholics, but at different times, since all Orthodox in Jerusalem use the Julian calendar for important historical reasons, which has the added benefit of reducing overcrowding at key pilgrimage sights, and the Armenian Church is the only ancient church which celebrates the Nativity together with the Baptism of Christ, which was the normal practice until the late 4th century, so they celebrate the Nativity on January 18th rather than January 7th, further reducing overcrowding.
The Ethiopian Orthodox however have the most Christians of Jewish descent of any church, since Ethiopia was a Jewish land until the fourth century when it converted en masse to Christianity (although some Ethiopians continue to practice Judaism even today; most fled to Israel during the anti-Semitic Derg Communist regime, which also martyred the saintly Emperor Haile Selassie, whose efforts led to the conversion of many Rastafarians to Christianity, and the Ethiopian Orthodox Church strictly bans marijuana, so it also delivered those who were converted from that vice.
That said we have been expanding quite a bit lately, as have all the liturgical churches, but in the case of Orthodoxy the rate of expansion is astonishing; I joined in 2014 when it happened fairly regularly, but there weren’t dozens of people being baptized or chrismated on every major holiday. This has included many Jews, both in the US and in the Holy Land.
That said, I personally have considered the possibility of developing a liturgical rite for Hebrew converts along the lines of what you are talking about, although in a sense the East Syriac RIte probably would be the best choice, since its lectionary retains the Torah and Haftarah portions from the Talmud, albeit reorganized so as to be associated with those events on the Christian calendar they foretold. Additionally, some East Syriac churches have a Bema in the style of a Jewish synagogue (with the altar taking the place of the cabinet containing Torah Scrolls in the sanctum sanctorum).
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