Evangelical Christians, Jews and “Messianic Jews” prayed together Wednesday at the 10th annual National Christian Prayer Breakfast for Israel, which for the first time took place during a major crisis.
“Disruptions of families, threats to loved ones and the constant preoccupation and concern with war — these things help us to understand, or at least to begin to understand, the sacrifices that have been made in Israel,” former Attorney General Edwin Meese told the 600 participants in the breakfast, sponsored by the Tennessee-based Religious Roundtable.
This year’s breakfast featured an attempt at building a new Evangelical Christian group to support Israel politically and economically, called Watchmen on the Walls.
The name is taken from Isaiah 62:6, which reads: “I have set watchmen on thy walls, O Jerusalem, which shall never hold their peace day nor night.”
About 125 of those present attended a Religious Roundtable forum afterward addressed by representatives of Jewish groups, including Americans for a Safe Israel and CAMERA, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America.
They also heard from Raphael Farber, Israel’s tourism commissioner for North America.
After that, 160 boarded buses to the Israeli Embassy, where they were given Israeli-grown olive and palm branches to mark the Tu B’Shevat holiday, which fell on Wednesday. Many of them waved miniature U.S. and Israeli flags and joined in singing the Hebrew melodies “Hinei Ma Tov” and “Bashanah Haba’ah.”
There is “an everlasting covenant that God has made with the people of Israel,” Sen. Don Nickles (R-Okla.) told the breakfast guests earlier. “And he also said that he would bless those who blessed the nation of Israel and he would curse those who cursed” it.
‘MODERN-DAY APOSTLES’
Dr. Elwood McQuaid, director of the Friends of Israel Gospel Ministry in Bellmawr, N.J., received rounds of applause when he said, “We come here with one purpose in mind: to express our unqualified love for the Jewish people” and a “resounding affirmation of our belief in the right of the Jewish people under international law, but supremely under the mandate of the word of God, to live in peace in Eretz Yisrael.”
Irvin Borowsky, Jewish founder and president of the Philadelphia-based American Interfaith Institute, thanked the guests for being “modern-day apostles who bring hope and love to the descendants of the ancient Hebrews, who are today protecting the holy shrines, the roots, the very heritage of Abraham and Jesus.”
Other Jews on the dais included Thomas Dine, executive director of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Sitting seven seats to Dine’s right was Burry Rubin, president of the Lederer Foundation, a Baltimore-based group of “Messianic Jews,” those who believe in Jesus while continuing to practice Judaism.
One table at the breakfast was sponsored by Sid Roth, president of Messianic Vision, a nationally syndicated religious radio broadcast.
Roth attacked “secular Jews” in a brief interview, contrasting them to Orthodox and Messianic Jews. “I am an American, but I am a Jew too,” Roth said.
Zalman Shoval, Israel’s ambassador to the United States, thanked the crowd for the “pleasure and privilege” of being invited.
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