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My name is Avi Goldstein and that was me on the afternoon of March 27th, 2024.

I stood at the microphone staring at over 8,000 Israelis packed into the Ashkol events hall in Ashdad with another 7,000 watching the live broadcast online across Israel.

As a former Mossad operations officer and lifelong Orthodox Jew, I was expected to fade quietly into retirement and keep my secrets.

Instead, I gripped the microphone and said the words that would destroy my reputation and change Israel forever.

18 months ago, I died on a street in St.

Petersburg, Russia.

I met Yeshua face to face.

He showed me heaven, hell, and the future of Israel.

Today I stand before you to declare that Yeshua of Nazareth is the Messiah we have been waiting for.

The room exploded.

Some screamed in anger.

Others began weeping.

And then the impossible happened.

From every section of that massive hall.

Jewish people started standing up and shouting, “I saw him too.

Yeshua appeared to me in a dream.

” What began as a messianic testimony event became the largest public confession of Jewish faith in Yeshua in modern Israeli history.

This is my story of how one Orthodox Jew who hated everything about Jesus came to know him as the living Messiah.

How one supernatural encounter led to a testimony that ignited a movement across Israel.

And how the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is calling his chosen people home.

I’m 42 years old.

I was born in the Maya Sharim neighborhood of Jerusalem, one of the most strictly Orthodox communities in the world.

My father, Kaim Goldstein, was a respected Torah scholar who spent his days studying Talmud in a small yeshiva near our apartment.

My mother, Rivka, Jehan came from a long line of rabbis going back generations.

In our home, every moment of life was governed by halaka, Jewish law.

We woke up with prayers, ate only strictly kosher food prepared according to the most stringent standards, observed Shabbat so carefully that we would not even tear toilet paper on Saturday, and spent our evenings studying sacred texts by candle light.

My father wore a black coat and fur hat even in the summer heat.

My mother covered every strand of her hair with a tyel headscarf.

My four brothers and I attended a chedair religious school where we learned to read Hebrew before we learned to read modern texts and where the secular world was presented as a dangerous threat to our souls.

From my earliest memories, I was taught that being Jewish was not just a religion, but the very core of who I was as a human being.

We were God’s chosen people, set apart, holy, called to obey the Torah and preserve the traditions of our fathers.

Every morning I wrapped to fill in felactories around my arm and forehead binding myself physically to the commandments.

Every evening I recited the shama declaring that the Lord our God is one.

I learned to read the Torah in its original Hebrew, to debate the finer points of Talmudic law and to see the world through the lens of a strict separation between the sacred and the profane, between Jews and Gentiles, between those who kept the law and those who broke it.

My identity was so completely wrapped up in being an Orthodox Jew that I could not imagine existence any other way.

To stop being Orthodox would be like trying to stop breathing.

It was not just what I believed.

It was who I was at the deepest level.

And within that identity was a specific taught hatred for one name above all others.

Yeshua, Jesus.

In our community, that name was never spoken except as a curse or a warning.

From the time I was old enough to understand, I was taught that Jesus was the greatest enemy the Jewish people had ever known.

Not because of what he claimed about himself, but because of what his followers had done to us for 2,000 years.

My teachers told me that Christianity was built on Jewish blood, that the crusaders had slaughtered our ancestors in his name, that the Inquisition had tortured and burned Jews while holding up crosses, or that the pgrams in Europe were carried out by Christians who blamed us for killing their god.

They showed us pictures of Jews being forced to convert or die, of synagogues being burned, of children torn from their parents and baptized against their will.

They explained that Hitler himself had grown up in a Christian society that had prepared the ground for the Holocaust with centuries of theological anti-semitism.

The message was clear and repeated constantly.

Jesus was not just a false messiah.

He was a dangerous lie that had brought more suffering to the Jewish people than perhaps any other force in history.

I was taught specific theological reasons to reject Jesus as well.

He could not be the Messiah because he did not fulfill the prophecies.

The real Messiah when he comes will gather all the Jews back to Israel.

F rebuild the third temple in Jerusalem, bring world peace, and cause all nations to recognize the God of Israel.

Jesus did none of those things.

He was killed by the Romans like a common criminal.

His followers claimed he rose from the dead, but we had no proof of that except the word of people who wanted to start a new religion.

Even worse, Christianity taught that God became a man, which contradicted everything we believed about the absolute oneness and transcendence of Hashem.

The idea that God could be three persons or that he could have a son or that he could take human form was complete idolatry to us, a violation of the first and most important commandment.

To worship Jesus was to worship a man instead of God, which was the worst sin a Jew could commit.

I was taught that Jews who converted to Christianity were traitors, worse than dead, cut off from the people of Israel forever.

We called them Meshumadim, the destroyed ones.

If a Jew became a Christian, the family would sit Shiva and mourn them as if they had died.

Because in our eyes, they had died spiritually and were lost forever.

So when I say I hated Jesus, I need you to understand the depth and specificity of that hatred.

It was not casual prejudice.

It was a carefully constructed world view built on real historical suffering, theological conviction and communal identity that had been passed down through generations.

I hated Jesus because I believed he represented everything that threatened the survival of the Jewish people.

I hated him because I thought his name was a cover for violence against my ancestors.

I hated him because accepting him would mean betraying everything and everyone I loved.

This was not something I questioned.

It was simply true.

As true as the fact that the sun rises in the east.

And yet, despite this strict religious upbringing, I did not stay in May to become a rabbi like my father hoped.

When I was 18 years old, I made a decision that shocked my family and community.

I decided to join the Israel Defense Forces and eventually pursue a career in intelligence.

This required me to get a secular education to interact with non-orthodox Jews and to operate in a world that my father considered spiritually dangerous.

My father was devastated.

He believed I was abandoning the path of Torah study for the empty pursuits of the material world.

We had terrible arguments.

He quoted scriptures at me warning that I was risking my soul.

But I could not shake the conviction that God had put this desire in my heart for a reason.

I believed and still believed even as an Orthodox Jew that protecting the state of Israel was a holy calling.

After 2,000 years of exile and persecution after the Holocaust that destroyed a third of our people, we finally had a homeland again.

We had a nation, an army, a flag.

We could defend ourselves instead of relying on the mercy of Gentiles who had shown us no mercy.

To me, serving in the IDF and later in the MSAD was not a rejection of my faith, but an expression of it.

I was defending God’s chosen people in God’s promised land.

What could be more righteous than that? So, I left Jerusalem and entered a world that was completely different from anything I had known.

I completed my military service with distinction.

And then I was recruited into the Mossad at age 24.

The Mossad does not advertise or accept applications.

They find you.

A handler approached me after observing my performance in an intelligence unit during my army service and he asked if I would be interested in serving my country in a different way.

I said yes without hesitation and that decision shaped the next 17 years of my life.

The training was brutal, designed to break down every assumption you had about yourself and rebuild you into something harder, sharper, more ruthless.

They taught me to lie so convincingly that I could pass polygraph tests while telling complete fabrications.

They taught me to read people, to find their weaknesses, to manipulate them without them ever knowing.

They taught me to kill efficiently and without hesitation if the mission required it.

But most importantly, they taught me to bury my true identity so deep that I could live for months as someone else entirely.

I became fluent in Russian and Arabic.

I learned to pray like a Muslim when operating in Tehran, bowing toward Mecca five times a day with such convincing devotion that no one suspected I was an Israeli Jew.

I lived double lives and triple lives.

Each one carefully constructed, each one maintained with absolute discipline.

And through it all, I remained orthodox in my heart.

When I returned home between operations, I went back to synagogue.

I kept Shabbat.

I wore my kipa and tits.

My faith was the anchor that kept me sane in a world of deception.

Over the years, I participated in operations across the Middle East, Europe, and Asia.

I cannot give you specific details because many of these missions remain classified even now.

But I can tell you that I helped prevent terrorist attacks that would have killed hundreds of Israelis.

I gathered intelligence on nuclear programs that threatened our existence.

I tracked weapon shipments, identified enemy agents, and conducted operations that dismantled networks planning to destroy us.

Every mission reinforced my sense of purpose.

I was protecting the Jewish people.

I was making sure that never again would we be helpless victims.

Never again would we depend on others for our safety.

We had our own strength now, our own intelligence service, our own ability to strike our enemies before they could strike us.

This work became my identity just as much as my orthodox faith.

I was Avi Goldstein, defender of Israel, the servant of the Jewish people.

I was proud of what I did, and I slept well at night, knowing that my hands might be dirty, but my cause was righteous.

By the time I reached my early 40s, I’d become a senior operations officer with significant autonomy and responsibility.

I was no longer the young agent taking orders.

I was planning missions, recruiting assets, and making decisions that affected national security.

My superiors trusted me completely.

I had never failed a mission.

I had never been compromised.

I had never given them reason to doubt my loyalty or competence.

In early February 2024, I was assigned to an operation in Russia that would require deep cover work lasting several months.

The target was a Russian arms dealer named Dmitri Vulkoff, who was selling advanced weapon systems to Hezbollah and Hamas.

Our intelligence indicated that he was about to close a deal for sophisticated anti-aircraft missiles that could shoot down our fighter jets.

If those missiles reached Lebanon or Gaza, Israeli pilots would die, and our ability to defend our airspace would be seriously compromised.

My mission was to infiltrate Volkov’s network, gain his trust, document the weapons deal, and if possible, sabotage it before the transfer could happen.

I entered Russia under a false identity.

as Victor Koff, a Ukrainian businessman with connections to the black market.

I had a complete legend built for this identity, including financial records, a business history, references from criminal contacts who were actually Mossad assets, and even a fake family with photographs and background stories I had memorized.

Uh, I spent weeks in
Moscow making the right connections, attending the right parties, being seen in the right places.

Slowly, carefully, I worked my way into Vulov’s circle.

I met him at a private club in central Moscow in late February, and I impressed him with my knowledge of weapon systems and my apparent willingness to deal in illegal arms without asking moral questions.

He was cautious at first, as all successful criminals are, but I had played this role many times before.

I knew how to seem trustworthy while remaining slightly dangerous, how to show competence without appearing threatening.

Over several weeks, I became a regular presence in his organization.

By mid-March, I had access to detailed information about the missile deal, including shipment routes, payment methods, and delivery dates, and everything was proceeding perfectly according to plan.

I was feeding intelligence back to Tel Aviv through encrypted channels, and my handlers [snorts] were pleased with the progress.

We were close to having everything we needed to either intercept the shipment or expose the deal publicly and create enough pressure to shut it down.

Then on March 19th, everything went catastrophically wrong.

I was supposed to meet Vulov at a warehouse in the Franzenski district of St.

Petersburg to inspect the missiles before the final payment was made.

This was the critical moment of the operation.

I would photograph the weapons, confirm the details, and transmit the final intelligence that would allow Israel to act.

I arrived at the warehouse at 8:00 in the evening just as the winter sun was setting and the temperature was dropping below freezing.

The building was an old Soviet era industrial facility abandoned except for the criminal activity that happened inside its walls.

Vulkoff was there with six of his men, and the missiles were laid out on wooden crates in the center of the warehouse floor.

I played my role perfectly, examining the weapons, asking technical questions, nodding with satisfaction.

But then, one of Vulkoff’s security men, a former FASB agent named Sergey, pulled him aside and whispered something I could not hear.

I saw Vulov’s expression change instantly from relaxed confidence to cold suspicion.

He looked at me with different eyes, and I knew immediately that my cover was compromised.

I do not know what gave me away.

Perhaps they had run a deeper background check on Victor Klov and found inconsistencies in my legend.

Perhaps [snorts] one of my contacts had been arrested and given me up under interrogation.

Perhaps it was simply bad luck, a random piece of information that did not fit.

In that world, it does not matter how it happens.

What matters is that once they suspect you, you have seconds to react or you die.

[snorts] Vulkoff said something in Russian that I will never forget.

He said, [snorts] “Victor, or whatever your real name is, you have made a terrible mistake coming here.

” His men pulled out weapons.

I reached for the pistol I had concealed under my coat, but I was not fast enough.

Sergey shot me twice in the chest before I could draw.

The impact of the bullets felt like being hit with a sledgehammer.

I fell backward onto the concrete floor and immediately I could not breathe.

There was a massive pressure in my chest and I could taste blood in my mouth.

I heard shouting around me, but the sound seemed to be coming from very far away.

I tried to move, but my body would not respond.

I looked down and saw blood spreading across my shirt, dark and wet, pooling on the floor beneath me.

I had been shot before in training scenarios, wearing protective gear, so I knew what gunshot wounds looked like.

But this was different.

This was real.

I was dying.

I could feel my life draining out of me with each weak beat of my heart.

Vulkoff stood over me and said something about disposing of my body where it would never be found.

Then he and his men walked away, leaving me alone on that warehouse floor.

I lay there in the darkness and the cold, struggling to breathe, feeling my consciousness starting to fade.

My training had prepared me for many things but not for this moment of absolute helplessness.

I thought about my wife Shosana waiting for me at home in Ramadan.

I thought about my two daughters Tamar and Leah who believed their father worked as an import export consultant and had no idea what I really did.

I thought about my mother in Jerusalem still praying for me every Shabbat.

I thought about all the operations I had survived, all the close calls I had walked away from and the bitter irony that after 17 years of dangerous work, I was going to die on a warehouse floor in Russia and no one would ever know what happened to me.

The MSAD would list me as missing in action.

My family would wait for news that would never come.

My body would be dumped in some frozen river or buried in an unmarked grave.

This was the risk every intelligence officer accepted.

But knowing the risk intellectually and experiencing it physically are two completely different things.

As I felt myself dying, I was not brave or peaceful.

I was terrified and angry.

This was not how it was supposed to end.

The pain in my chest was unbearable at first, but then gradually it started to fade.

My vision became darker and narrower, like I was looking through a tunnel that was closing.

I [snorts] could no longer feel the cold of the concrete beneath me or hear any sounds from the warehouse.

There was only silence and darkness pressing in from all sides.

And then I died.

I know I died because what happened next was not a dream or a hallucination or my brain misfiring in its final moments.

It was more real than anything I had ever experienced in my entire life.

The darkness suddenly gave way to something else.

I felt myself lifting up, separating from my body.

I looked down and saw myself lying on the warehouse floor in a spreading pool of blood.

My eyes open and lifeless, my chest no longer moving.

I saw Volkov’s men returning with plastic sheeting to wrap my corpse.

I saw all of this from above, as if I was floating near the ceiling.

I was dead, but I was still conscious, still aware, still myself.

Then something pulled me away from that warehouse with a force I could not resist.

It was not violent or frightening, but it was absolute.

I moved through what felt like a tunnel of light, traveling at impossible speed, leaving St.

Petersburg in the warehouse and my dead body far behind.

The sensation was beyond anything I can properly describe with human language.

I was moving, but not through physical space.

I was being drawn towards something or someone with a magnetic pull that I had no desire to fight.

The light around me grew brighter and brighter until it seemed like I was inside pure brilliance itself.

And yet somehow it did not hurt my eyes.

I could look directly into it.

And then suddenly the movement stopped and I found myself standing in a place that I knew immediately was not earth.

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