A Match Made in Heaven

by Zev Chafets

  PART TWO

  IS IT GOOD FOR THE JEWS?

  EIGHT

  THE KINGDOM GUY

  I heard rumors about Yechiel Eckstein before I met him. Word reached New York that a Chicago rabbi—an Orthodox rabbi—had become a televangelist. He was, it was said, taking in millions of dollars from evangelical Christians. This was startling. Even more amazing, he was said to be giving the money away to Jewish charities.

  Ever since my father had forced me to cut the grass of the local rabbi for free, I have regarded people of the cloth as schnorrers— expert beggars—and nothing I saw of the political divines in Israel ever disabused me of that idea. Now here was a rabbi who supposedly not only pushed his own lawn mower but carried a magical checkbook. This I had to see for myself.

  Our first meeting, in March 2004, was in Manhattan, over lunch. I let Eckstein pick the place, which was a mistake. It is a rule of thumb never to eat in a restaurant where the kosher certificate is bigger than the menu. But we hit it off despite the execrable pizza. I wrote a column about Eckstein in the New York Daily News, and began following his activities. Not exactly publicity-averse, Eckstein invited me to visit him in Chicago at the headquarters of his International Fellowship of Christians and Jews. In the spring of 2005, I took him up on the offer, especially after he volunteered to throw in a road trip to Indiana.

  “THIS GUY IS a kingdom guy,” said Pastor Steve Munsey, pointing his finger at Rabbi Eckstein. We were sitting in the Green Room of the Family Christian Center in Munster, Indiana, about forty minutes from Chicago. It was between Sunday morning services, and Pastor Steve was taking a break, kicking back to welcome his guest. “What do I mean by kingdom guy? Like a godfather in the mafia. It’s a term of respect.”

  Eckstein accepted the compliment with a bland smile and sipped his coffee; Family Christian Center, we had already been informed by Associate Pastor David Jordan Allen, is the only church in the United States that has its own Starbucks. Eckstein has spent a lifetime in Pentecostal churches, but rarely had he seen one this grand. The FCC boasted a 3,000-seat auditorium and a pulpit adorned by a theatrical set of biblical Jerusalem complete with Golgotha’s Hill and, in the words of Pastor Steve, “a very lifelike cave depicting the tomb where Jesus was lain.”

  A lanky deacon came over to shake Eckstein’s hand and said, “It’s a thrill to meet a man like you.” Eckstein smiled again. The deacon was reputed to be one of the biggest steel contractors in the country. Devout Christian laymen like him have built Eckstein an empire. “I’m with Israel and the Jewish people all the way.”

  “I support Israel in every way possible,” said Pastor Steve, regaining control of the conversation. “For example, I make it a point to buy my clothes from Jews.” A small, compact man of fifty, he was wearing jeans and a battered sport jacket, an outfit that made it impossible to assess the monetary value of this sartorial contribution. Pastor Steve was dressed with such ostentatious informality because he planned to ride his customized Harley motorcycle onto the pulpit that morning. The bike, he explained, is named “The Passion” and it has a crown of thorns painted on the rear fender.

  The door opened and Bishop Frank Munsey walked in. He is Pastor Steve’s father. Bishop Munsey founded the Family Christian Center fifty years ago, and then passed it along to his son. Someday Pastor Steve will turn it over to his own son, Pastor Kent. “We call it Levitical succession,” Associate Pastor Allen explained. If he felt frustrated by the glass ceiling of nepotism, he gave no sign of it.

  Pastor Steve made the introductions. “Meet Rabbi Einstein,” he said to his father. “You’ve seen him on TV. He’s the head of the International Fellowship of Jews and Christians.”

  “You from the Jewish side or the Christian side?” asked the elderly bishop in a throaty voice. Lately he had been spending a good deal of time in Bulgaria, where his church runs a still unlicensed mission school.

  “Jewish,” said Eckstein, touching his small black skullcap. He didn’t bother correcting Pastor Steve’s mangled introduction.

  The bishop’s face lit up. Evidently he considered this a grand stroke of luck. For some reason, he was under the impression that Jews govern Bulgaria and were, for motives of their own, withholding accreditation from his school. Now, here was a Jewish rabbi sitting right in the Green Room. “I’d like to ask you a favor,” he said, handing Eckstein a card. “Maybe you can get somewhere with these Bulgarians.”

  Eckstein took the card and placed it in his pocket. Help the born-again Christians of Bulgaria? Sure, why not. You never know what opportunities might present themselves.

  SINCE HE BEGAN his ministry to the gentiles in 1980, Yechiel Eckstein has traveled to China to liberate persecuted preachers, hiked through Ethiopia and Siberia in search of endangered Jews, advised prime ministers in Jerusalem, and fellowshipped with evangelical Republicans at the White House. His immediate plans included transporting the biblical “lost tribe” of Manasseh from northeast India to the Holy Land, launching a Spanish-language campaign among the Pentecostals of Latin America, preaching in several Asian churches, and, maybe, recording some sacred hymns with Debbie Boone. And, as Eckstein himself would say, God only knew what would come after that.

  All this hyperactivity is financed by the contributions of evangelical Christians. In the last eight years alone, approximately half a million born-again donors have sent Eckstein about a quarter of a billion dollars for Jewish causes of his personal choosing. No rabbi since Jesus has commanded this kind of gentile following. None today has his financial clout.

  The IFCJ is now ranked among America’s top four hundred charities by the Chronicle of Philanthropy. The Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz lists it as Israel’s second largest charitable foundation. All this money has made Eckstein a much sought after fellow in certain Jewish circles—-and a pariah in others.

  Some of Eckstein’s fellow Orthodox rabbis have tried to excommunicate him. Liberal Jews denounce his friendship with evangelicals as cultural and political treason. Even those who applaud Eckstein’s philanthropies are sometimes dubious about what he calls his “ministry.”

  ECKSTEIN DIDN’T START out to be controversial. The son of an Orthodox rabbi in Ottawa, Canada, he got his own rabbinical ordination from Yeshiva University and joined the staff of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). In those early days he was the model of a young mainstream Jewish organization man.

  In 1977, American Nazis threatened to stage a march in Skokie, Illinois, a Chicago suburb with a large population of Holocaust survivors. The ADL sent Eckstein from New York to help the local community organize and round up Christian support. What he found surprised him. Jesse Jackson was headquartered in Chicago but, unlike his mentor, Martin Luther King Jr., who was always attentive to Jewish causes, Jackson had little interest. White Protestant mainstream churches were apathetic at best. The American Civil Liberties Union actually supported the First Amendment rights of the Nazis to march. Eckstein was surprised to find that evangelicals, more than any other group, were prepared to stand with the Jews of Skokie.

  He went back to New York with this news like Marco Polo returning from China. There were conservative Christians in the heartland who took the Bible literally and believed the Jews were God’s Chosen People. Not only that, they wanted to be friends. Eckstein saw this as a vast reservoir of support, an untapped resource for Israel, Soviet Jewry, and other causes, but his report was greeted in New York with incredulity. Few ADL leaders had actually met an evangelical. As far as they were concerned, born-again Christians were KKK night riders, toothless fiddlers, and flat-earth troglodytes. They ordered Eckstein to return to Chicago and commune with some respectable Episcopalians.

  In 1980, the head of the Southern Baptist Convention, Reverend Bailey Smith—who had come to office as the result of a conservative coup in the Southern Baptist denomination—publicly declared that God doesn’t hear the prayers of Jews. The Jewish establishment went crazy. Here was proof, if more proof was needed, that Chr
istian fundamentalist anti-Semitism was alive and well in the boondocks—always a worthwhile discovery for fund-raising as well as a boost to the communal sense of beleaguered solidarity.

  Eckstein saw a different sort of opportunity. Smith, a small-town preacher from Oklahoma, had been shocked and mortified by the national publicity his remarks engendered, and he was more than eager to clear himself of any and all charges of bigotry. When the head of the Dallas office of the ADL, Mark Briskman, contacted Reverend Smith and suggested a trip to Israel, Smith readily agreed. And Eckstein decided to join them.

  In Jerusalem, Smith got the royal treatment. Prime Minister Begin, who had lost eight straight national elections before winning office, had few illusions about the efficacy of Jewish prayer. He did, however, know the value of allies. Did Reverend Smith believe that the Bible had conferred title to the land of Israel on the Jews? Splendid! Begin put out word to make Smith’s trip enjoyable.

  Smith enjoyed, and he returned to his fellow Baptists loudly proclaiming the message of Genesis 12:3: “God will bless those who bless Israel and curse those who curse Israel.” Around this time, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and other fundamentalist preachers were saying the same thing, but Smith was an organization man, head of the largest Protestant denomination in the country.

  “That was the turning point,” says Eckstein. “From that moment on, I had an open door to every Baptist church in America.”

  In 1981, Israel bombed the Iraqi nuclear reactor, sparking worldwide rage. Even the normally pro-Israel Reagan administration was officially critical (although the wink from the White House was practically audible). The New York Times was scandalized. Many American Jewish leaders ran for cover.

  But the evangelicals were not merely supportive, they were enthusiastic. When Begin called Falwell on the day after the bombing to ask for his help marshaling conservative opinion, Falwell congratulated the Israeli prime minister for “putting one right down the smokestack” and promised to stand by Israel all the way.

  WHEN YECHIEL ECKSTEIN brought all this to the attention of the ADL home office, he was again rebuffed as a simpleton and a nudnik. If Menachem Begin wanted to cozy up to Bailey Smith and Jerry Falwell and other such hick undesirables, that was Begin’s problem. Begin was an embarrassment anyway.

  But Eckstein knew what he knew. He quit the ADL and tried, unsuccessfully, to interest some other mainstream Jewish group in establishing relations with the Christian fundamentalists. There were no takers. Eckstein didn’t even bother reaching out to his fellow Orthodox rabbis, many of whom considered (and still consider) even setting foot in a Christian church to be a grave sin.

  Instead, Eckstein went back to Chicago and opened his own organization, which he grandly dubbed the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews. He had no salary, no health plan, no insurance, and a pregnant wife. By day he made a little money as a part-time congregational rabbi. In off-hours he toured the country, going from church to church preaching a gospel of Jewish-Christian common interest and solidarity.

  By this time, the American Jewish community had been very thoroughly schnorred by an army of enterprising fund-raisers. But Eckstein found himself in virgin territory. Evangelicals badly wanted to express their love for Jews and Israel in a personal way. It was his insight that nothing is more personal than a personal check.

  “ASK AND IT shall be given,” says Matthew 7:7. “Knock and it shall be opened unto you.” In those first years of knocking, Eckstein barely made ends meet. He got some money from plate-passing Christians on Sunday mornings, and a little more from Jews—mostly political activists who were waking up to the nascent political power of the evangelical vote. “I don’t know what you’re doing, and I don’t know if I like what you’re doing,” a Democratic Jewish philanthropist from Chicago told him, “but I’ll give you a thousand bucks just in case.”

  Eckstein’s next big breakthrough came in 1993. The gates of the former Soviet Union were open and tens of thousands of poor Jews wanted to emigrate to Israel. He knew that the ingathering of Jewish exiles resonated with evangelicals as biblical prophecy. With $25,000, he recorded his first TV infomercial. On the Wings of Eagles was hosted pro bono by Pat Boone, who delivered a message from Isaiah 49:22: “I will beckon to the Gentiles—they will bring your sons in their arms and carry your daughters on their shoulders.” The show aired throughout the United States on Christian TV stations and the money began flowing in. “When I told Pat Robertson how much people were sending, he thought I was totally inflating the numbers,” Eckstein recalls. In all, the infomercial ran for eighteen months and raised millions. Yechiel Eckstein was on his way.

  THE AUDITORIUM OF the Family Christian Center was packed for the second ser vice. The congregation, like most evangelical megachurches these days, was racially mixed. Munster, Indiana, is a white, semirural area, but the church aggressively recruits blacks in nearby Gary. Pastor Steve and his minister of music are white, but the choir is mostly black, and it started things off with a rousing rendition of “God Bless America” while giant screens projected action scenes of U.S. troops in Iraq.

  Assistant Pastor Allen sat with me in the front pew and provided a running commentary. According to him, roughly 70 percent of the members of the Family Christian Center are Republicans. “A lot of the African Americans came as Democrats, but some of them are turning Republican, too,” he said. He seemed proud of the diverse makeup of the church, whose members included establishment figures like the local sheriff and the prosecutor, a club of bikers-for-Jesus, and even a Jewish convert who played Pontius Pilate in the recent Easter pageant.

  The choir started singing “Amazing Grace” and Pastor Steve, who had been sitting nearby, rose to take the pulpit on foot (the Harley ride came later). As he passed by he leaned down and whispered to me, “I have a passion for healing. We have the highest rate of cancer healings in the nation in this church.” He said it in the matter-of-fact tone of a guy bragging about his bowling average.

  Pastor Steve, shaggy-haired as an aging hippie, is a salesman as well as a showman. That morning he offered his congregation a warranty on tithing. “If God doesn’t pay you back, with increase, in ninety days, then I’ll refund the money myself,” he promised to serious applause.

  Israeli flags appeared on the huge screens above the pulpit and Pastor Steve summoned his guest. “Yek-eel Epstein is a powerful giant,” he proclaimed, butchering the name again with Midwestern aplomb. “He rates right up there. You’ve seen him on TV. He was a rabbi and he became a born-again Christian!”

  Eckstein, sitting nearby, visibly blanched. For decades his Jewish critics have spread the slander that he is a closet Christian, a missionary out to steal Jewish souls for Jesus. A few years ago, four senior Orthodox rabbis convened a religious court of inquiry in New York to try him for the “crime” of “teaching Torah to gentiles.” He was acquitted in a split decision, but it was one of the great humiliations of his life.

  The verdict didn’t end the muttering, either. As Eckstein has grown more powerful, he has attracted ever harsher criticism from parts of the Orthodox community whose good opinion he covets. Just a few days earlier, the Jewish Observer, house organ of the ultra-Orthodox Agudat Yisrael of America, had called his work “a curse.” And now here he was, publicly getting introduced as a born-again Christian, with a writer sitting there in the front pew. “This has never happened to me before,” he muttered to me, as he rose to applause. “I’ve got to do something.”

  Despite his consternation, Eckstein appeared perfectly composed as he took the pulpit. He has the physical presence of an Eagle Scout troop leader, tall, broad-shouldered, and friendly-faced. The black yarmulke he wears is intentionally unobtrusive. Sometimes when he is traveling, he replaces it with a baseball cap.

  “Shalom,” he called to the congregation in a lilting voice.

  “Shalom,” they replied tentatively.

  “Come on, I can’t hear you. Give me a Shalom they can hear all the wa
y to Jerusalem!” The congregation responded with a high-energy “Shalom!” and Eckstein, who has the bland delivery of a Canadian folksinger, grinned at his successful foray into Pentecostal call-and-response.

  Sunday ser vices in megachurches like the Family Christian Center are tightly scripted. Giant or not, Eckstein got just five minutes on the pulpit (he’d get another ten at next ser vice) and he began his remarks with damage control. “I’m a Jewish rabbi,” he informed the puzzled congregation. “An Orthodox Jewish rabbi. I believe in a Messiah, but I am an Orthodox Jewish rabbi.” There was applause and Eckstein smiled again, relieved to have reestablished his kosher bona fides without insulting either Pastor Steve or Jesus.

  Eckstein went on to thank the congregation for their support for Israel. He spoke not merely as a rabbi but as an official emissary of the Jewish state. Although Eckstein’s office remains in Chicago, he officially moved to Israel and became a citizen in 1999. His Jerusalem branch has a staff of ten and hands out millions of dollars to Israeli charity projects, from mobile dental clinics to antiterror systems. Naturally, such largess has not gone unnoticed by Israeli politicians. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon appointed him an unofficial adviser. Sharon’s political rival, Foreign Minister Sylvan Shalom, topped that by naming Eckstein official Israeli emissary to evangelicals of the United States, Latin America, Africa, Korea, and other places where Protestant fundamentalism is on the rise. When he spoke for Israel, it was with the authority of an ambassador.

  There was a huge digital clock mounted on the face of the FCC’s balcony, ruthlessly counting down time. Eckstein spoke about the challenges facing Israel and the Jewish people, citing a few biblical passages about God blessing those who bless the Jews. It was a corny performance, and the audience loved it.