Members“The Hope of Zion”

The prickly pear  Sabra fruit (Tzabar in Hebrew) is a term in colloquial Hebrew for any Jew born in the Land of Israel with reference to the thorny fruit of a local cactus. Symbolically, indigenous/native Jews are being compared to the cactus fruit for allegedly being prickly and irritable on the outside, yet sweet and tender on the inside.

One such Sabra was Morris (Moshe) Sigel (1896-1993), born in Jerusalem, who during the 1920s labored as a Messianic Jewish missionary in Mandatory Palestine/Eretz-Israel.

Fluent in both Hebrew and English, Sigel occupied himself by producing original publications, authored by himself or translated by him, combining biblical and modern Zionism. He often told his expatriate missionary colleagues that “any literature that attacks Zionism must be avoided.”

Messianic Zionist Magazine in Hebrew

In May 1927 Sigel started to edit in Haifa a new missionary magazine called TIKVAT ZION (the Hope of Zion) in the Hebrew language. It was...