Effort to Ease Disagreement Over ‘Temptation’ Film Ends in Rancor

It was billed as a fence-mending session between a fundamentalist preacher, whose vocal campaign against Universal Pictures’ “The Last Temptation of Christ” has been criticized as anti-Semitic, and Irv Rubin, leader of the militant Jewish Defense League.

But by the end of the meeting, which took place downtown Sunday at a service before Rev. R. L. Hymers’ Fundamentalist Baptist Tabernacle congregation, Rubin walked out angrily shaking his head.

“We’re dealing with a crazy man here,” said Rubin of Hymers after the meeting, which came to a sudden close as Rubin’s angry remarks about the anti-Semitic tone of recent protests by church members were cut off and the congregation broke into a religious hymn at Hymers’ direction.

“He’s meshuggener,” countered Hymers after the meeting, using the Yiddish term for crazy to refer to Rubin.

While Rubin told about 200 people in the congregation that he, too, opposes the film and strongly endorses their right to protest against it, he urged them to protest the film’s content rather than making their protests a “Jewish thing” by focusing their attacks on the fact that Lew Wasserman, chairman of MCA Inc., parent company of Universal, is Jewish.

Hymers has argued that release of the film this fall will bring hatred upon Jewish people because Wasserman is Jewish. While Christian religious leaders have generally been critical of the movie, which they complain portrays Jesus Christ as “wimpy” and mentally unstable, many have objected to Hymers’ tactics.

Rubin told Hymers’ congregation they owed the Jewish community an apology.

Hymers said that his intent has been to gain the support of Jews in his campaign to stop the film’s release but admitted that his “appeal . . . may not have been done with all the finesse and courtesy” warranted. He denied that it has been anti-Semitic.