Daniel Nessim is among the third generation of his family who are Jewish believers in Yeshua. His mother Judith (Singer) Nessim is a survivor of the Holocaust, having been spared by being hidden. Her father, who died shortly before the Holocaust began, in the midst of intense persecution of Jewish people in those days, was a believer in Yeshua from Vienna. His wife, Daniel’s maternal grandmother, remarried a German man by name of Smith. With those credentials and many miracles, the little family survived, even living in Berlin during the Blitz.
Daniel’s father, Elie, was born in Kobe, Japan. His parents were business people from Baghdad and Cairo. As the Japanese grew increasingly militant, the family fled to Cairo, and then fled Cairo for Bombay. It was there that Elie grew up. A few years after his arrival in England in the 1950’s, Elie became the first believer in Yeshua in his family. Subsequently he led his older brother Albert to faith in Yeshua. Later, his younger sister Joy also accepted Yeshua as her Messiah.
Daniel has thus had a privilege rarely accorded to Jewish believers in Yeshua, having a heritage of faith in his own family. Daniel’s wife, Deborah, who was the first believer in her own family, has also seen remarkable work done by the Lord as her brother and sister are also now believers in Messiah.
Daniel is committed to enabling other Jewish people come to know the messiahship of Yeshua. Daniel believes that there is a great need to ‘put shoe leather’ on the fact that Jewish people can believe in Yeshua and still be Jews. Thus he maintains his own Jewish lifestyle as a personal commitment of his faith, and encourages other Jewish people to strengthen their commitment to their Jewish faith and community, empowered by the wonderful revelation that Messiah has come, and one day will reveal himself to the Jewish people as a whole.
In the past I have had the honour of serving as the Executive Director of Chosen People Ministries (UK), founder of Messianic Congregation Beit Sar Shalom in London, vice-president (and for a few months President) of the British Messianic Jewish Alliance.
In 2019 I was granted a PhD at the University of Exeter for my research into the Didache, a first-century Christian-Jewish teaching and instructional manual. I am currently a member of the Society of Biblical Literature, Northwest Regional Director for Chosen People Ministries, and lead Kehilat Tsion, Vancouver’s first Messianic Jewish congregation. My publications are Siddur Sar Shalom, which is the most complete Shabbat prayer book for Messianic Jews in print, Derech Yeshua: The Way of Salvation, and Torah for Gentiles? What the Jewish Authors of the Didache Had to Say, a publication of my dissertation on the Didache and its reception of the Torah.