TIME FOR FAVOUR

TIME FOR FAVOUR

The Scottish Mission to the : 1838 – 1852

John S. Ross Tentmaker Publications 121 Hartshill Road Stoke-on-Trent Staffs. ST4 7LU

www.tentmaker.org.uk (UK) www.tentmakerpublications.com (USA)

ISBN: 978-1-901670-67-7

© 2011 John Ross Jane Mathison Haining

Born: Dumfriesshire 1897 Died: Auschwitz 1944

For

Elizabeth

CONTENTS

Preface ...... 13 Introduction: On the Road to Heaven ...... 15 1 Entering into the Jewish Heritage...... 23 2 Claudius Buchanan: the True Pioneer ...... 37 3 From Voluntary Societies to Church Mission ...... 53 4 Thomas Chalmers and the Jewish mission ...... 63 5 Oh Then Pray – Pray Without Ceasing ...... 69 6 A General and Cordial Support ...... 75 7 Where in the World? ...... 89 8 M’Cheyne in London...... 105 9 Outward Bound ...... 119 10 Journey to Jerusalem ...... 129 11 From Galilee to Europe ...... 143 12 Returning to Revival ...... 159 13 A Door Opens ...... 171 14 On the Brink of a Great Adventure ...... 183 15 The Narrative of a Mission of Inquiry ...... 195 16 Daniel Edward: Faith and Perseverance at Iasi ...... 205 17 A City and its Bridge ...... 229 18 A Foundation Laid with Sapphires ...... 241 19 Hebrew Christians are Everywhere ...... 259 20 The Results Have Been Great and Glorious ...... 275 Appendix 1 Scottish Influence and the Growth of Jewish Missions ...... 285 Appendix 2 To the Children of Israel in all the Lands of their Dispersion ..... 297 Notes and Further Reading...... 309 Select Bibliography of Primary Sources ...... 323 Index ...... 327 7 PICTURES

Front Cover: Jerusalem from the South, David Roberts Frontispiece: Jane Mathison Haining

Between pages 176 & 181: 1. George Whitefield preaching 2. Claudius Buchanan 3. John Eliot preaching to the Algonquins 4. Thomas Chalmers 5. The National Scotch Church, Regent Square, London 6. ‘Rabbi’ 7. The Disruption Brooch 8. Robert Murray M’Cheyne 9. Andrew A. Bonar 10.Alexander Keith 11.Portable photographic equipment, c.1838 12.The Archduke József, Palatine of 13.The Archduchess Maria Dorothea 14. 15.

Back flap: John Ross

8 ABBREVIATIONS

Annals ...... Annals of the Free BSPGJ...... British Society for the Propagation of the Gospel Among the Jews. CMR ...... Children’s Missionary Record of the Free Church of Scotland DSCHT ..... Dictionary of Scottish Church History and DNB...... Dictionary of National Biography ECI ...... Christian Instructor Fasti ...... Fasti Ecclesiae Scoticanae HMFR ...... Home and Foreign Missionary Review of the Free Church of Scotland LSPCJ ...... London Society for Promoting Among the Jews MBRPC ..... Minute Book of the Reformed Presbyterian Church MCCH ...... M’Cheyne Archive in New College Library, Edinburgh. Memoir ...... Memoir and Remains of Robert Murray M’Cheyne Narrative...... Narrative of a Visit to the Holy Land and Mission of Inquiry to the Jews NAS ...... National Archives of Scotland NCL ...... New College Library NIDCC ...... New International Dictionary of the Christian Church NLS ...... National Library of Scotland PGACS ...... Proceedings of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland RSCHS ...... Records of the Scottish Church History Society RThJ ...... Reformed Theological Journal

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

N writing this book I have received help from a great many people I and I take this opportunity to thank them. I am immensely grateful to Rev. Professor Andrew T B McGowan, Professor of Theology at the University of the Highlands and Islands, and Rabbi Professor Dan Cohn- Sherbok, former Professor of Judaism at the University of Wales, Lampeter, for their perceptive advice, and good humoured and erudite supervision of the original research on which this book is based. I am greatly indebted to my former employers, the Council of Management of Christian Witness to Israel, for permitting me time to engage in research and for very generously underwriting the costs entailed. Of the CWI staff, I especially thank my successor, Mike Moore, for his encouragement and his willingness to write the foreword, and Sally Hutson, my former Personal Assistant, who frequently went the ‘the second mile.’ Without libraries and librarians adequate exploration of this subject would have been impossible. I am, therefore, happy to acknowledge the professional assistance of the librarians and staff of the following institutions: the National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh; New College Library, Edinburgh; and the Principal and staff of the Free Church of Scotland College, Edinburgh. In addition, I am grateful for help to access other important collections, such the library of the former Rutherford House, Edinburgh; the library of the Henry Martyn Centre, Cambridge; the United Reformed Church Historical Collection, Westminster College, Cambridge; the Linen Hall Library, Belfast; the library of Union Theological College, Belfast; and the Robinson Library, Armagh. Ten years ago, during two months of intensive reading and writing, the congregation of Greyfriars Free Church of Scotland, Inverness,

11 Time for Favour called me to be their minister and supported my continued involvement in this project. To them I express deep gratitude. From Inverness I went to join the teaching staff of Dumisani Theological Institute, King William’s Town, South Africa, where the project lay dormant until 2010. My colleague, Dr Alistair Wilson, Principal of Dumisani, encouraged completion and undertook to read the final manuscript. Further proofreading was kindly undertaken by our good friend, Miss Mary Gillies. I am exceedingly grateful to Phil Roberts of Tentmaker Publications for backing this project at a time when books of missions’ history are not at their most popular with the Christian public. Finally, to my longsuffering wife, Elizabeth, to whom this book is dedicated, I owe an incalculable debt of gratitude. She kept me at it and uncomplainingly coped with my many absences from home and distraction from the affairs of family life. I alone am responsible for any remaining errors of fact, infelicities of language and inadequacies of presentation.

12 PREFACE

OT so lon g ago, a well-known evangelical told an Islamic newspaper N in Malaysia that to believe, as many Christians do, that the Jews are God’s chosen people is “total rubbish”; neither the New Testament nor the Old Testament teach such an idea. Another eminent evangelical told me he believes that, according to Romans 11, God has cast away ethnic Israel. The Jews are no longer God’s people and there is no future hope for them as a people. He made the telling observation, however, that no one who shares his opinion ever becomes a missionary to the Jews. As more and more Christians identify with that rejectionist position, God is saving an ever-increasing number of Jews. About fifteen years ago, the anti-missionary rabbi, Tovia Singer asked why more Jews had become Christians in the last nineteen years than in the previous nineteen centuries. When the state of Israel came into being in 1948, it was rumoured that the number of Messianic Jews in the country was, significantly, just twelve. Twenty years later, in 1968, there were less than fifty Jewish believers in the land. In 1988, there were probably less than 500. Today, almost 25 years on, no one knows for certain how many Israelis believe in Jesus, although some suggest as many as 20,000. In Time For Favour, a former General Secretary of Christian Witness to Israel uncovers the roots of the modern Jewish missions movement. In the middle of the nineteenth century, God began to lay on the hearts of his people in the Church of Scotland a concern for the evangelisation of the Jews that in the second half of that century would result in a quarter of a million eastern European Jews finding salvation in their Messiah. This book tells the extraordinary story of the birth

13 Time for Favour of the Scottish mission to the Jews, which also resulted in the establishing of the society that became CWI. The cast of characters in Time For Favour features some of the most remarkable figures in the history of missions, including an archetypal eccentric absent-minded professor, a group of gung ho young ministers full of romantic ideas about the Holy Land and the Jews, head-strong and sometimes morally-weak missionaries and awkward mission boards. It is a story of fallible but heroic men and women who were prepared to forsake everything, even their lives, all because they not only had faith that God was far from finished with the Jewish people but they also believed in the priority of Jewish mission. My predecessor is well qualified to tell this story of an all-wise God who, more than 150 years ago, laid on the hearts of Christians in Scotland a burden for the salvation of his ancient covenant people, allowed them to make mistakes but sovereignly overruled personal agendas and denominational politics to achieve his purposes. Time For Favour is the story of a God who moved his people both great and small, rich and poor to pray and give so that the people of promise might hear the message of Messiah.

Mike Moore General Secretary of Christian Witness to Israel

14 INTRODUCTION

On the Road to Heaven Konzentrationslager Auschwitz, German occupied Poland, July 1944

HEY lied about her death. The death certificate said she had died Tin hospital, but the sketchy details were suspicious. The cause of death was said to be ‘cachexia, following intestinal catarrh’ or, to put it in layman’s terms, she had suffered a chronic infection of the bowel resulting in a fatal and irreversible loss of weight, muscle wastage, fatigue and death. Had she been deliberately starved to death? It is possible. Many were. In fact, a short time before her death she had written to a friend craving apples, fresh fruit and bread. But she probably did not die of starvation. It is likely that on 17th July, 1944, prisoner 79467 found herself among a group of Hungarian Jewish women herded into the gas chamber in Auschwitz. They were not the first, and would not be the last. From July to September that year, the tally of Jews liquidated with heartless industrial efficiency amounted to an estimated 1,400,000, of which it was said, one in three was Hungarian. Though despised as worthless sub-humans by the Nazi system, all who died in that terrible place were special. All bore the image of God. Each had their own dignity. Everyone was someone’s father or mother, husband or wife, uncle or aunt, brother or sister, or lover, or friend. United in their human dignity and suffering, they were individual in their difference. Forty-seven year old prisoner 79467 certainly did not look very different. Her soft dark hair framed a warm, sympathetic, bespectacled face, not unlike many of the other Jewish women of her age. A few weeks earlier you might have passed her in a street and, except for

15 Time for Favour her piercing blue eyes and broad Scots accent, you would have thought that she was Jewish. But she wasn’t. She was a Scot. So what was it that brought middle-aged Jane Haining from the security of Scotland, first to Hungary and then to this fearful place of death in remote Poland? The short answer is that the Germans had sentenced her to death for being a spy. Whilst working as matron of the girls’ school of the Church of Scotland Mission on Vörösmarty utca, in Budapest, Jane had been denounced to the Gestapo, who raided the mission in May. As they searched her office and her bedroom, Jane was given just fifteen minutes to get ready before being driven away, the car’s siren blaring. She was charged on eight separate counts, including listening to the BBC, which the Nazis had made a criminal offence punishable by jail, hard labour, or death. And just as Jesus refused to defend himself before Pilate, so Jane did not deny their charges, apart from the political accusations. In any case, it was undeniable that she had worked with Jews, and of course the heartless indictment that she had wept when sewing the compulsory yellow star on the girls’ clothes was true. From jail in Budapest she was transported to a holding camp east of the city and from there to the extermination camp of Auschwitz, but death did not come easily. ‘Even here on the road to Heaven,’ she wrote in one of her last letters, ‘there is a mountain range to climb.’

* * * *

A slightly fuller answer to the question of why Jane Haining died in Auschwitz is that she had responded to what she believed was God’s call to serve him by serving the Jewish children in the school on Vörösmarty utca. Jane Mathison Haining was born on a farm called Lochenhead in Dumfriesshire in 1897, the third child born to her parents, Thomas and Jane. When Jane was five her mother died giving birth to a fourth baby, a daughter, who did not survive infancy. Some say the experience of helping care for the ailing infant left its mark on Jane and gave her a capacity for mothering that would not find its fulfilment in marriage.

16 Introduction Jane attended the village school at Dunscore where it soon became very clear that she had an outstanding mind. At the age of twelve she won a bursary and entered Dumfries Academy, where she was awarded the amazing number of forty-one prizes during her school career. Rather than attend university, Jane preferred to enter the world of business, taking up employment with the well established and highly successful thread manufacturers, J & P Coats of Paisley. Here, her ability soon came to the attention of the company secretary, who invited her to work as his private secretary, a job in which she was to remain for the next fifteen years. Jane’s family were evangelicals, attending the Craig church in Dunscore, where she was baptised. Lying in the heart of Covenanter country, the Craig had been established around 1649 as a congregation of the Church of Scotland. In the reign of Charles II, the anti- Presbyterian polices of the government gave rise to what Robert Wodrow called ‘the Killing Times’, when, between the years 1680 and 1688, Presbyterians who had signed the Solemn League and Covenant were treated as subversives and were liable to summary execution. Dunscore lay within the territory of the notorious Sir Robert Grierson of Lag, one of the King’s cruel men who once coming across an illegal conventicle at Kirkconnell killed all the worshippers he could catch. It was reported that some were despatched by being rolled down a hill, shut inside a spiked barrel. None were given Christian burial. Grierson was a byword for evil among Dumfriesshire folk, who said his spittle scorched the earth where it fell. Legend has it that on the night he died a chariot surrounded by thunder clouds swept him away to hell. Another tale tells how the horses pulling his hearse to Dunscore’s old Kirkyard died of exhaustion on the way and a black raven flew down and settled on the coffin, flying away only at the moment of burial. Such myths may not be the stuff of scholarly history, but they vividly demonstrate the loathing and fear in which this evil man was held. It was during this time that the Craig minister, Rev. Robert Archibald, was ousted from his congregation for his Covenanter sympathies. Like the minister, the laird of Dunscore, James Kirko, was

17 Time for Favour also a Covenanter, whose home was a favoured refuge of persecuted ministers and field preachers such as John Blackadder and John Welch of Irongay. For his sympathies, James Kirko suffered imprisonment and ruination due to the imposition of extortionate and punitive fines. Taking up arms on the Covenanting side at the battle of Rullion Green, Kirko escaped to Ireland but returned to Scotland to fight again for ‘Christ’s Crown and Covenants’ before being shot dead by government troops on the White Sands of Dumfries in 1685. Three years later, the majority of the members of the Craig found the terms of William III’s Revolution Settlement unacceptable and loyal to the principles of the Covenanters, the congregation joined the Reformed Presbyterian Church. At the time of the New Statistical Account (1835) the congregation had about four-hundred and fifty communicants. In 1876 the Craig joined the Free Church of Scotland and in 1900 became a congregation in the newly formed United Free Church, the union of the Free Church and the United Presbyterians. In 1904 the congregation called the Rev. Alexander Masterton, whom the growing Jane knew as her minister and who remained with the congregation until his death from appendicitis in 1930, having the previous year brought the church full circle back into the Church of Scotland. Whilst working for Coats, Jane stayed in . She lived in the south-side suburb of Pollockshields and commuted by train each day to her work in Paisley. She became a member of Queen’s Park West United Free Church which, during the time of her membership, like her home congregation in Dunscore, re-united with the Church of Scotland. Jane taught in the Sunday School, becoming its secretary and simultaneously working enthusiastically with the Band of Hope, a temperance organisation for working-class children which had been founded in Leeds in 1887, and referred to by the Glasgow children as the ‘Bandyhope.’ Aware of Glasgow’s infamous reputation for hard drinking, Jane sought not only to keep her children from the bottle, but also to win them for Christ. The Band of Hope Manual, written by James Dunn in 1867, suggests Saturday afternoon as the most suitable time for holding

18 Introduction what was called ‘the service.’ Strict order was observed. As the children came in, the girls sat to the left of the aisle and the boys on the right. The meeting opened with the children reciting in unison The Pledge. Sometimes a temperance catechism was used as a teaching aid and occasionally a paper called Youth’s Temperance Banner was shared out. We can imagine the room being dimmed and Jane using ‘magic lantern’ pictures to share with the children Christian stories and the teaching of the Bible. The meetings were famous for their hearty singing of the hymns and songs characteristic of the movement, including ‘Father Guide Us’ sung to the simple and stirring tune Vesper Hymn, by today’s standards the hymn seems somewhat quaint and outdated, but it was an earnest prayer asking God to keep vulnerable young people from dangerous habits. One verse gives us a flavour. Fallen is our favoured nation, Sunk in sorrow and in shame; Speed the Temperance reformation, Ev’ry drunkard now reclaim. Each a pilgrim and a stranger, Keep us Lord, from evil ways, Lead us through this world of danger, Guide us in our early days. The Band of Hope was renowned for its annual outings and we can picture Jane taking her children on a steamer trip from Glasgow’s Broomielaw ‘doon the water’ to a Clyde coast seaside town, perhaps Largs, Rothsay or Dunoon. The organisers saw these outings as more than pleasure; they were opportunities for Christian witness. Often accompanied by a band, the children would stand on a street corner, or take up a prominent position on the promenade, vigorously singing songs and hymns as a witness to other trippers. In 1932 Jane heard an address by Dr George Mackenzie on the Church of Scotland’s Jewish mission, and she was deeply moved. She was convinced that it was this work to which God wanted her to commit herself. ‘I have found my life’s work’, she soon told a friend. Resigning from her comfortable and well paid job at Coats, she

19 Time for Favour returned to college to take a diploma in domestic science and then, to gain further experience, travelled to Manchester to work as matron at the newly opened Holt Radium Institute at Withington, a hospital at the forefront of the application of radiotherapy to the treatment of cancer. So it came about that having had her offer of service accepted by the church, the thirty-five year old Jane was appointed matron at the Scottish Mission School in Budapest, where she personally cared for fifty, mainly Jewish, boarders. The Magyar language of Hungary is considered extremely difficult to learn and so it is a measure of Jane’s commitment that she accepted the discipline necessary to master it. It was not long before she was able to converse freely in the language. Another sign of her dedication was her reluctance to leave her girls even for holidays in Scotland. She did so only twice, once in 1935 and again in the summer of 1939. It was during this second home leave, whilst she was holidaying in Cornwall with the school’s Hungarian headmistress, that Britain declared war on Germany following Hitler’s invasion of Poland. Aware that German ambitions might bring Hungary into the war, without any thought to her own safety, Jane immediately made plans to return to Budapest. The following year, her employers, the Church of Scotland, pleaded with her to return home, but Jane, trusting God, politely yet adamantly refused, and although other colleagues did heed the summons and returned home to safety, Jane never saw Scotland again. In 1941, as Europe descended deeper and deeper into the Nazi maelstrom, David McDougal, the General Secretary of the Jewish mission, was putting the final touches to his book, In Search of Israel. It was published later that year in Edinburgh by Thomas Nelson. Towards the end he movingly remarked that, ‘Miss Haining, the matron of the girls’ home, stayed on after the others, and she is there still. By roundabout ways we hear from her sometimes.’ In March 1944, as Hungary was invaded, McDougal, on behalf of the whole Church which was deeply concerned for Jane’s safety, once more pled with her to hasten home. Yet again she gently but firmly refused.

20 Introduction In May that year she was arrested by the Gestapo, charged with espionage and imprisoned in the Fõ utca jail. Then, with hundreds of Jewish people from the Budapest ghetto, she was held a while in the transit camp at Kistarcsa just outside Budapest, before her final rail journey by cattle wagon to Auschwitz, 500kms away in Poland. From here she sent her last postcard home, dated 15th July, two days before her death. It was a measure of the fanatical intensity of Nazi hatred for the Jewish people that in the last year of the war, when the tide had turned against Germany, it dedicated its valuable transport resources not to reinforcing its battling troops, but to clearing the Budapest ghetto and exterminating its occupants. In the inscrutable but all-wise and all-loving purposes of God, gentle Jane Haining was caught up in those terrible events and martyred for her faith. On the day of her arrest, one of her former girls had been visiting the Scottish mission and witnessed the whole event. She later shared her recollection: I still feel the tears in my eyes and hear in my ears the siren of the Gestapo motor car. I see the smile on her face while she bade me farewell. I never saw Miss Haining again, and when I went to the Scottish Mission to ask the minister about her, I was told she had died. I did not want to believe it, nor to understand, but a long time later I realised that she had died for me, and for others. ... her smile, voice and face are still in my heart. Jane Haining is commemorated by the Hungarian Jewish community by a plaque erected in 1984 in the Scottish Mission in Vörösmarty utca with the following inscription: Remembering with eternal gratitude and reverence Miss Jane Haining who in 1944 for her humaneness died as a martyr in Auschwitz. The Jewish parish Budapest 1944-1984. In Glasgow, a memorial stained glass window has been installed in her old church, now called Queen’s Park West. At Dunscore, a memorial cairn has been built between the Kirk and the village graveyard. In 1997, the Yad Vashem Holocaust Martyrs and Heroes

21 Time for Favour Memorial in Jerusalem awarded Jane the honourable status of Righteous Among the Nations ‘for her selfless dedication to the children.’ More recently, the Association of Contemporary Church Historians has suggested her memory be perpetuated along with other modern Christian martyrs in Westminster Abbey. Even this account, however, is far from the whole story. Many questions still remain unanswered. How was it that a Scot should take an interest in the Jewish children of Hungary and be so dedicated to them that she counted her life cheap if their lives might be saved? How was it that the Church of Scotland had missionary work in Budapest? Why was it that for centuries Scottish Christians had a special place in their hearts for the Jewish people? It will take the rest of this book to unfold the fascinating story that provides answers to these questions.

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