Finding the Promised Land

Evangelical Christians provide millions of dollars to help Jews

Every morning, right after she wakes up and before she eats breakfast, Ruth Dick, a devout Christian in Lake

Mary, Fla., dials a toll-free number and donates $15 to a charity that will buy a box of food for an impoverished Jew in Jerusalem.

In September Mrs. Dick had seen fund-raising infomercials on satellite TV broadcast by the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, which expects to raise at least $40-million this year, almost entirely from evangelical Christians, most of whom make small gifts.

The charity, which was created by a Chicago rabbi, has grown faster than most fund-raising organizations. A decade ago, it was raising less than a half-million dollars annually; now it is among the 400 most-successful fund-raising organizations in the United States, ranking No. 351 on The Chronicle’s Philanthropy 400 list of the charities that take in the most from private sources.

The money underwrites the costs of helping Jews from troubled lands emigrate to Israel, provides food for children and the elderly poor in the former Soviet Union, gets winter coats and school book bags to needy Israeli youngsters, pays for synagogues and job-training and placement for Ethiopian Jews who have moved to Israel, supports shelters for battered women in Israel, and finances hundreds of other projects to benefit Jews.

The fellowship’s effort to encourage Christians to support Israel has long spawned controversy among many Jewish leaders, many of whom fear that the charity is working with organizations that hope to convert Jews to Christianity.

Yet as the violence between Israelis and Palestinians continues, and with Israel maintaining few longstanding allies other than the United States, some Jewish groups are becoming more tolerant of the fellowship’s work.

Prominent Evangelical Leaders

The organization clearly has tapped into something powerful among America’s evangelical Christians, including the Rev. Jerry Falwell and the Rev. Pat Robertson, who appear in the televised fund-raising appeals like the ones that prompted Mrs. Dick to make her gifts.

Mrs. Dick, who says she and her husband feel religiously obligated to give 10 percent of their income to charity, says the two of them prayed about whether to support the fellowship. They concluded that “our family could no longer sit down for a meal without thinking about God’s people in their state and how some of them don’t have enough to eat,” says Mrs. Dick, who provides school instruction at home to her 11-year-old daughter. By making a gift each day, rather than one big annual donation, she says she and her family keep the needy at the forefront of their consciousness.

They give to the International Fellowship — and plan to do so “indefinitely” — because it is Christians’ religious duty to help the Jewish people, she says. “It gives us an opportunity to bless God’s people as we have been commanded to,” she said. “The Jewish people are the apple of God’s eye.”

Evangelical Christians make up the second-largest single religious group in the United States, outnumbering all but Roman Catholics, and they count among their members many high-ranking politicians in the U.S. government, including President Bush.

Most of them believe, as Ruth Dick does, that the Bible is literally God’s word. And in the Bible they read that “those who bless Israel will be blessed, and those who curse Israel will be cursed.” Israel also plays a central role in the beliefs of many evangelicals about how Jesus will return, though religious interpretations vary widely.

Fund-Raising Breakthrough

The International Fellowship of Christian and Jews was founded in 1983 by Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein, who had left his job as the national co-director of interfaith affairs at the Anti-Defamation League, an organization that fights anti-Semitism.

For more than a decade he had to struggle to make the charity work. Finances were so tight, he recalls, that some days he raced to the mailbox to see if a donation had arrived so he could hire a secretary or buy a computer.

But the fellowship’s fortunes began to change in the mid-1990s, when it started using television appeals. The breakthrough came after Rabbi Eckstein had been invited to speak in Australia and couldn’t make the trip, so he sent videotaped remarks. Soon after the video was shown, people from Australia began calling to praise his work.

“That showed me that with one video, I was reaching hundreds of thousands of people,” he recalls. “At that moment I realized if I wanted to keep my sanity I had to come up with a way to raise money other than going from church to church.”

At the time, most of his donors were Jewish, though his original goal for the organization was that it would be an equal partnership between Christians and Jews. He decided that focusing on evangelical Christians would be a good strategy.

“I saw great potential in Christians wanting to help,” says Rabbi Eckstein, speaking softly but fervently. “I’m not good at soliciting people one-on-one, so TV is a medium I’m comfortable with in which I can instantly communicate with millions of people with low stress.”

He asked his friend Pat Boone, the influential evangelical entertainer, to tape a test commercial. A Jewish donor put up $28,000 to cover the cost of producing the 30-minute television promotion in 1994. The response from Christians was almost immediate, and subsequent versions of the commercials have continued to be popular.

Today, the infomercials, which are broadcast between 30 and 40 times a day across the United States, account for 70 percent of the charity’s donations. The televised appeals highlight the plight of Jews in Ethiopia, Russia, and other countries where Jews struggle to practice their religion, and show tearful arrivals of immigrants as they arrive in Israel for the first time.

The fellowship also works closely with churches. The Southern Baptist Convention was a major supporter of the fellowship’s “Stand for Israel” campaign this year, which organized millions of Christians in some 26,000 churches across the country for a “Day of Prayer and Solidarity” on the last Sunday in October.

Concern About Conversion

But such support is a major reason Jewish groups often oppose Rabbi Eckstein’s efforts. The Southern Baptist Convention has in recent years started major programs singling out Jews as the targets of evangelism and conversion to Christianity.

Leaders of prominent Jewish groups contend that those interested in converting Jews to Christianity gain credibility from their association with Rabbi Eckstein, and, in some cases, also get access to vulnerable Jews, such as recent immigrants to Israel, who may be in financial distress and have had little Jewish education.

“Let’s not be blind or stupid,” says Mark Powers, director of Magen, an anti-missionary group in Harrisburg, Pa., whose name means shield in Hebrew. “The reality is that they want to convert us. Working with them opens us up to the most pernicious groups who prey on the most vulnerable among us.”

Rabbi Moshe Tendler, a prominent Orthodox rabbi and member of the faculty of Yeshiva University, in New York City, where Rabbi Eckstein was ordained, says, “We deeply appreciate the support of fundamentalist Christians for Jews’ rightful claim to Israel. But we must raise our defenses against all attempts to use this as leverage for their missionary activity.”

He adds:”It is against Jewish law to take money from non-Jewish sources for support of poor Jews. That’s our responsibility. Eckstein is masquerading as a rabbi and violating fundamental tenets of our faith.”

Rabbi Eckstein says he doesn’t endorse missionary activity or work with those who single out Jews for conversion. Criticism of his activity, he says, “hurts, if I’m honest.” He adds: “I know I’m supposed to be callous to it, but to be called this stuff is painful.”

Mrs. Dick, the Florida donor, says she worries that Jews think she and other Christians “have a hidden agenda to evangelize through our giving,” but, she says, “nothing is further from the truth. Converting God’s elect is not in our hearts at all.”

Aside from the concerns about conversion, some leaders of Jewish groups also say they are bothered by the idea of accepting money from evangelical Christians who are pushing domestic policies that are counter to those the Jewish groups support. They note that many of the evangelicals who support the fellowship have been pushing to outlaw abortion and to encourage a greater role for religion in schools, courtrooms, and other government-financed operations — views that many of the biggest Jewish groups in the United States oppose. But Rabbi Eckstein says he is not bothered by such criticism: “I stay away from politics,” he says. “We don’t take positions on abortion, school prayer.”

Personal Connections

Since the fellowship was created, some 320,000 Christians have made gifts to the organization. Many of the donors have been attracted recently: About 150,000 gave for the first time within the last year. Most have called after seeing one of the fellowship’s infomercials, which are broadcast at a total cost of between $6-million and $7-million a year, according to Rabbi Eckstein.

While the infomercials are the most important fund-raising medium for the fellowship, about 20 percent of the charity’s donations come through direct mail and the remaining 10 percent from word of mouth.

Rabbi Eckstein says one reason for the charity’s success has been its efforts to maintain a personal connection to its donors.

Every person who donates $1,000 or more gets a call of thanks from a fellowship staff member. And when a natural disaster strikes, fellowship employees call donors who give significant sums to check whether they have been affected by the disaster. At the end of October, five people worked for close to a week to call people who had donated $500 or more and live in cities and towns affected by the California wildfires.

Donations are never solicited during these calls, Rabbi Eckstein says. Staff members ask how the donor is, if the charity can do anything to help, and if they can pray for them.

They say, “‘Rabbi Eckstein and the staff wanted to know how you’re doing,’” he explains. “I get a report of every phone call. The average conversation is three to five minutes, and we offer to say an ecumenical prayer for them, which nobody’s offended by. They all really appreciate the calls. It seems like such a simple thing, but they’re not getting calls from every other charity they give to.”

Once a year the fellowship also sends a mailing to donors asking if they have special prayer requests that Rabbi Eckstein can bring to the Western Wall, which is considered the holiest site in Judaism.

Thousands of people respond. “People ask me to pray for their daughter who’s dying of leukemia, to bless their son who’s on death row, bless their marriage, pray for a job or that they will get out of debt, or that they will be freed from an addiction to alcohol or drugs or tobacco,” he says. “Hundreds say, ‘Please pray that God blesses you, Rabbi Eckstein. Pray for peace in Israel and the Jewish people.’”

He says the Western Wall appeal, plus other efforts to thank donors, mean that there are “250,000 people who think I know them by their first name,” he says.

Telemarketing to lapsed donors has also been effective for the fellowship, though it has not been fruitful in acquiring new supporters.

After someone hasn’t given for two years, they receive a recorded telephone call that includes a 30-second “message from Israel” that has been taped by Mr. Eckstein. The fellowship gets a return of roughly $3.50 for every dollar it spends on the telephone effort, Rabbi Eckstein says.

The fellowship has never had a dinner to honor donors, a source of significant funds for many organizations. Nor has it put any effort into attracting bequests or other planned gifts, or cultivating large donations, as many charities do. That is changing, however.

“We have just now hired someone to link up people with whole huge projects,” says Rabbi Eckstein. “We’re able to raise $40-million through direct response, and we’re continuing, Baruch Hashem [Hebrew for ‘Thank God’], to grow each year that way. Now that we’re building planned gifts I’m hopeful that it could double within two to three years.”

Moving to Israel

For years, some American Jewish organizations were willing to accept sizable checks from the fellowship but refused to honor their source, Rabbi Eckstein says.

The largest donations received by the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago in the late 1990s were from the fellowship, he says, but Rabbi Eckstein says the organization did not do enough to publicly acknowledge the money.

The federation’s president, Steven B. Nasatir, declined to discuss Rabbi Eckstein or his support of the Jewish federation.

Frustrated by the response from the Jewish federation, Rabbi Eckstein began giving the money straight to the Israeli groups that directly support immigration and social services, and in 2001, he became an Israeli citizen.

Israeli groups have expressed no qualms about applauding the source of the donations. Rami Levy, who is Israel’s tourism commissioner for North America and South America, says, “Evangelicals’ support of Israel is deep, real, and complete.”

Soon after opening a Jerusalem office in 2000, where he now has 10 employees, Rabbi Eckstein began gaining access to government officials at the highest levels: The country’s prime minister began inviting him to meetings, and Rabbi Eckstein was made Jerusalem’s official representative to Christians worldwide.

Though he originally intended to spend three weeks a month in Israel and one week tending to the fellowship’s business in Chicago, where he still has some 50 employees, Rabbi Eckstein instead finds himself traveling to speak before Christian groups all over the world, soliciting their support for Israel. Much of the time he says he is not even raising money for the fellowship, but gaining support from Christians on behalf of Israel’s government.

“My world now is the road,” he said, in an interview from Dresden, Germany, where he was addressing a group of potential supporters. It was his fifth trip to Germany in the past two years. In recent months he has also traveled to several Latin American countries, and next he is off to India.

Slowly, Israel’s warm embrace of the fellowship seems to have influenced the way American Jewish groups view Rabbi Eckstein and his work.

In the past year the women’s Zionist organization Hadassah invited him to speak to its board, and the Orthodox Rabbinical Council of America asked him to address its convention. He was also honored by his peers — the rabbinical alumni of Yeshiva University.

“I’ve gone from pariah to prince,” he says. “After 20 years, it does feel like vindication.”

Political Clout

Rabbi Eckstein is well aware of the potential political clout of the Christian donors to his organization. He hopes to soon mobilize his constituents to lobby their members of Congress on Israel’s behalf.

“Hypothetically, say the head of the Armed Services Committee is from a place in Nevada where there are no Jews,” he says. “We could have 25 Christian supporters of Israel meet him.”

Rabbi Eckstein says he knows that it is not necessarily his organization’s marketing skills that have made it a fund-raising success. Instead, he says the charity’s fortunes have been lifted by concerns about terrorism.

“The worse the situation in Israel is, the more there are Christians in America who want to do something to help,” he says. “The Christian community responds to trouble in Israel very much like the Jewish community does. Their response is intensified by the level of threat Israel faces.”

That’s because Israel is the spiritual homeland of evangelical Christians just as it is for Jews, he says: “They feel a little different than Jews do, perhaps, but in my opinion their feeling is just as powerful, and sometimes even stronger.”