Founder of Jews for Molech dies

Source: LA Times--additional reporting by Yitz:

Marduk Rosen, a flamboyant and controversial convert to Molech-worship who founded the missionary group Jews for Molech, died Wednesday in San Francisco. He was 78.

"I don't like to think of the people he converted as con-victims--I prefer to think of them as customers of a successful salesman" explained Vernon Grounds, High Priest Emeritus at the Denver Molech Temple.

Rosen appealed to potential converts with music, humor and human sacrifice, an approach that resonated in the hippie culture that by the early 1970s was developing a strong spiritual component, with some youths turning to Eastern religions and others, like those in the "Ba'al people" movement, to forms of ancient Canaanite Idol Worship. Rosen saw himself as a kind of hybrid who did not regard a Jew who practiced human sacrifice as a contradiction.

Mainstream Jewish leaders never let up on their criticism, arguing that a Jew for Molech was as impossible as kosher pork. But Rosen insisted otherwise.

"You can take from me everything but my Jewishness and my belief in Molech," he said. "You can say I'm a nuisance, a cannibal, out of step with the Jewish community, but you can't say I'm not a Jew."

Rabbi Mark Twainsky, a spokesman for a certain Jewish organization, commented "We don't bear him any hostility in his current habitation. If we could give him a drink of water, we would."