JERUSALEM – Prominent Israeli rabbis are for the first time speaking out against Israel’s profitable alliance with evangelical Christians in the United States who have funneled tens of millions of dollars to the Jewish state.
The rabbis fear the Christians’ real intent is to convert Jews, their aides said Monday. Others are concerned about the evangelicals’ support for Israel’s extreme right wing, opposing any compromise with the Palestinians.
The dispute touches on an increasingly sensitive issue in Israel: the country’s dependence, economically and politically, on conservative American Christians.
Besides contributing tidy sums to projects in Israel, some evangelical Christians have lobbied in Washington, D.C., in support of the Israeli government.
Troubling to Israelis is the fact that one influential group of evangelicals believes in a final, apocalyptic battle between good and evil in which Jesus returns and Jews either accept him or perish – a vision that causes obvious discomfort among Jews.
“I’m worried as a Jew,” said Mina Fenton, a Jerusalem City Council member from an Orthodox Jewish party, who has led opposition to the evangelical groups. “I don’t want my people to be assassinated, sacrificed, killed or slaughtered because of their beliefs.”
Concern has been bubbling under the surface for some time, and although leading rabbis had stayed in the background, their worries emerged Monday in the Israeli media.
The focus of the latest criticism has been the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, a Chicago-based group that has raised tens of millions of dollars from Christian supporters of Israel.
Two former chief rabbis of Israel, Avraham Shapira and Mordechai Eliahu, recently approved a religious ruling urging followers not to accept money from the group.
The ruling, issued by Shapira in March and later signed by Eliahu, accused the fellowship of accepting money from groups involved in “missionary activity.”
Rabbi Simcha Hacohen Kook, another critic of the fellowship, said he fears the donors are trying to exploit Israel’s most vulnerable people. “Those who don’t have money don’t ask questions,” he said.
“They are spending millions of dollars to make people closer to Christianity,” said Kook, chief rabbi of the city of Rehovot and member of a rabbinical dynasty. “The situation is very serious.”
Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein, president of the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, brushed off the criticism as complaints by a tiny minority.
He said the group has raised $100 million, including $20 million last year alone, to assist Israel’s poor, elderly and new immigrants, as well as impoverished Jewish communities in the former Soviet Union. The group sponsors projects in 85 Israeli towns and cities, he said.
Although many of the thousands of donors to his group may hope to convert Jews, Eckstein said, “We just don’t allow any kind of missionary activity.”
He said his donors are motivated by other factors, including the Jews’ connection to the biblical land of Israel and feelings of guilt over anti-Semitism.
“Judaism does not focus so much on motivations as much as deeds,” he said. “In Judaism, the actions speak louder than words, and certainly louder than motivations.”
Associated Press
Christians from the Denver Faith Bible Chapel from Arvada, Col., plant trees in a vineyard during a visit to the northern West Bank Jewish settlement of Ariel.
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