Yesterday’s story in the Cleveland Plain Dealer headlined “Appeals court rejects Jewish postal worker’s bias claim” raised some interesting questions. The most obvious, of course, was whether Jewish postal workers are entitled to avoid working on the Sabbath. There was just one problem with the story- the postal worker in question isn’t actually Jewish. A postalnews.com reader noted that the story identified postal worker Martin Tepper as a “Messianic Jew”. “Messianic Judaism” is actually a pseudo-Christian cult that adopts many practices that it perceives as “Jewish”. The followers of the cult are not considered Jewish by any recognized Jewish organization, including the State of Israel.

Our reader contacted the Plain Dealer, which admitted the error:

You are correct, of course, that the headline on the story about the postal worker was inappropriate. As the story accurately noted, the postal worker was a “Messianic Jew” and not Jewish. We took a shortcut in writing the headline that we should not have taken. We should have taken greater care.

I’ve reminded all of our editors and other staffers about the difference, and I’m confident this won’t happen again. We are publishing a correction of Page A2 of Friday’s paper.”

While the story printed in the newspaper identified Tepper as a “Messianic Jew”, the Plain dealer web site did carry an Associated Press story that began “A Jewish postal worker made to work on the Sabbath day because of staff cutbacks lost an appeal claiming his work schedule violated his civil rights.” To be fair to the Plain Dealer, several other news outlets also carried the AP story. Interestingly, the story, and headline, also made it to some orthodox Jewish sites, including “The Voice of the New York Orthodox Jewish Community”, Voz iz Neias; and Yeshiva World. Read the comments after the Yeshiva World story to see why some Orthodox Jews, regardless of their opinion of “Messianic Judaism”, regard the ruling with some alarm. While the distinction between Judaism and “Messianic Judaism” is clear, the commenters point out that the same principle would apply to an Orthodox Jew, or an adherent of any other traditional religious faith making a similar claim.

We recently read about a service that offered to receive your mail, scan it and let you review it online. Now there’s an online service that takes the idea of ‘remote control’ mail to a whole new level- Post-Rapture Post describes itself as “The Postal Service of the Saved”. The service is designed for those who consider themselves ’saved’, and anticipate being swept up to heaven pretty soon in the ‘Rapture‘. And how will the operators of Post-Rapture Post manage to deliver mail after the ’saved’ have ascended? Easy! They’re atheists, so obviously, they’ll still be here!

It’s a funny site, and gets bonus points for the FAQ page, titled ‘God Hates FAQs’.