By Charles Gardner, Special to ASSIST News Service
LONDON, UK (ANS -- August 24, 2015)
-- Just as the “swinging sixties” started to gain momentum, a Jewish
teenager called Helen Shapiro from the East End of London took the pop
world by storm with a string of hits.
Her first – Don’t Treat Me Like a Child – was appropriate enough as she was only 14 at the time (1961) and it reached No 3 in the charts.
By early 1963 she was bigger
than The Beatles – for a time. They actually accompanied her on a tour
of the UK as her support act; she was the main attraction.
She recalls with affectionate
nostalgia the banter she shared on the bus with John, Paul, George and
Ringo. And it was during this tour, in February 1963, that Please, Please Me became the Fab Four’s first No 1.
Helen also made No 1 around this time with her classic upbeat number Walking Back to Happiness, but says the lyrics of the song were not fulfilled until August 26 1987 – over twenty years later – when she found Jesus!
That was 28 years ago almost to the day, as she told an audience in South Elmsall, near Doncaster, Yorkshire, on Saturday night.
And for someone who associated Christians with persecutors of her people, it was quite an amazing turnaround.
She had been confused and upset when, as a child in the school playground, someone yelled at her: “You killed Jesus Christ!”
[This is a common misconception
about Jews, especially among those untutored in the Scriptures, which
make it clear that Christ had to die as the spotless Lamb of God paying
for the sins of the world. He had offered himself of his own accord to
be nailed to a cross.]
Helen duly developed her own
system of beliefs after turning to mediums and spiritists, believing
that God was involved in all those things. But then, soon after her 40th
birthday, she no longer believed it and began questioning the very
existence of God.
She was in the midst of this crisis when her musical director (who was unaware of it) gave her a book to read, Betrayed
by Stan Telchin. It was about a respectable member of a Jewish
community who was suddenly faced with a daughter announcing that she
believed Jesus was the Messiah of Israel. He duly set out to prove her
wrong and ended up becoming a believer himself!
Helen began studying the many
prophecies of the promised Messiah in the Jewish Bible (what Christians
refer to as the Old Testament) and was astonished at how accurately they
seemed to be fulfilled in Jesus (Yeshua in Hebrew). 
These
included references to a virgin birth in Bethlehem while the
description of the suffering servant in Isaiah 53 was surely a picture
of the crucifixion, despite having been written some 600 years earlier.
These
included references to a virgin birth in Bethlehem while the
description of the suffering servant in Isaiah 53 was surely a picture
of the crucifixion, despite having been written some 600 years earlier.
“Isaiah 53 was about how He
took our sins… I was gobsmacked. And Daniel prophesied that the Messiah
had to die before the temple was destroyed. It all seemed to point to
Jesus.”
So now she ventured to read
“the chunk on the end I’m not supposed to read. And taking my courage in
both hands, I opened the New Testament.”
She wondered if she would
discover “anti-Jewish poison” in view of the track record of the
professing church, which had committed unspeakable crimes against her
people. “No wonder we don’t come running towards this Jesus.”
She started at the beginning –
Matthew’s gospel – and was surprised to find “the most Jewish thing
outside the Old Testament” – the genealogy of Jesus which included a
list of all the names from which Messiah must come.
“Did you know the New Testament
is Jewish?” she asked the audience. “It was written by Jewish men about
the most famous Jew of all, and they were living in the land of Israel
according to the Law of Moses.
“Jesus rose up out of the pages
to me and I fell in love with him. I was so taken with him. He looked
at people’s hearts and saw all the rubbish and yet still loved them.
Even in his agony he came out with gracious, comforting words. I saw
that he was fulfilling one Messianic prophecy after another.”
Just to make sure the English
translators hadn’t twisted anything to suit their purposes, she got hold
of a Bible (the Tenach, or Old Testament to Christians) from a Jewish
shop to check that it included the same Messianic prophecies.
“Blow me: there they were in all their glory. I was so relieved.”
Back to the New Testament, she
read through the four gospels. “By the end of John I knew without a
shadow of doubt that Jesus was the fulfilment of every Messianic
prophecy; that he was the Jewish Messiah.”
She contacted her musical
director and his wife, bombarded them with questions, realized that she
had been deceived by her dabbling with the occult and, at 10.30pm on
August 26 1987, gave her life to Jesus.
“There
were no lightning flashes, but somewhere inside I knew that I knew, and
that there was no turning back. The Creator and sustainer of the
universe came to live in my life. I didn’t get religion. I got Jesus,
and I love him.”
She had one further question
and wrote to Stan Telchin, the author of the book that had started
things off for her, asking: “Will I stop being Jewish by following
Jesus?”
“Of course not,” he replied. “You will be fulfilling your Jewishness. He’s coming back as the Lion of the Tribe of Judah.”
Acknowledging that God still
has a plan for the nation of Israel, Helen emphasized that both Jew and
Gentile find salvation only through the blood of Jesus.
Though we are born physically,
our spirits are dead because of man’s sin and rebellion against God.
That’s why we need to be born again.
And God established the system
of animal sacrifices to demonstrate that only through the shedding of
the blood of an innocent substitute can a sinner be saved.
“They were pointers to the
once-for-all sacrifice that Jesus became that day on the cross in
Jerusalem when he shed his blood for the sins of the world. That’s why
he came.”
Walking back to Happiness is also the title of Helen’s autobiography, published by Harper Collins.
Photo captions: 1) The Beatles
with Helen Shapiro (next to Ringo). 2) Topping the bill over the
Beatles. 3) Record cover. 4) Helen with John Lennon. 4) Charles Gardner
with his wife, Linda.
About
the writer: Charles Gardner is a veteran Cape Town-born British
journalist working on plans to launch a new UK national newspaper
reporting and interpreting the news from a biblical perspective. With
his South African forebears having had close links with the legendary
devotional writer Andrew Murray, Charles is similarly determined to make
an impact for Christ with his pen and has worked in the newspaper
industry for more than 41 years. Part-Jewish, he is married to Linda,
who takes the Christian message around many schools in the Yorkshire
town of Doncaster. Charles has four children and seven grandchildren.
Charles can be reached by phone on +44 (0) 1302 832987, or by e-mail at chazgardner@btinternet.com
** You may republish this and any of our ANS stories with attribution to the ASSIST News Service (www.assistnews.net).
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