The peripatetic rabbi (in the lobby of the Family Christian Center) calls himself a "nonevangelical defender of evangelicals." Rabbi Eckstein, left, and Pastor Munsey at the Family Christian Center in Munster, Ind. "This guy is a kingdom guy,'' said the Rev.
We were sitting in the greenroom of the Family Christian Center in Munster, Ind., about 40 minutes from Chicago. We were between Sunday-morning services, and Pastor Munsey was taking a break, kicking back to welcome his guest.
''What do I mean by kingdom guy?'' he said. ''Like a godfather in the Mafia, it's a term of respect.
'' Eckstein accepted the compliment with a smile and sipped his coffee (from the church's own Starbucks). Eckstein has spent a professional lifetime in evangelical churches, although he had rarely seen one as grand as the Family Christian Center, with its 5,000-seat auditorium and a pulpit that boasts a theatrical replica of biblical Jerusalem complete with Golgotha's hill and, in the words of Pastor Munsey, ''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. The deacon is said to be one of the biggest steel contractors in America. Devout Christian laypeople like him have built Eckstein an empire.
''I support Israel in every way possible,'' Munsey said. ''For example, I make it a point to buy my clothes from Jews.'' Since he was wearing jeans and a battered sports jacket, it was hard to assess the monetary value of this contribution.
Munsey was dressed informally because he planned to ride his customized Harley motorcycle onto the pulpit. The bike is named the Passion, and it has a crown of thorns painted across it. The door opened, and Bishop Frank Munsey walked in.
He is Pastor Munsey's father. Bishop Munsey founded the Christian Family Center 50 years ago and then passed it along to his son. Someday Pastor Munsey will turn it over to his own son, Kent, who is now the center's youth pastor.
''We call it the Levitical order of succession,'' David Jordan Allen, the associate pastor, told me. Pastor Munsey made the introductions. ''Meet Rabbi Einstein,'' he said to his father, misspeaking.
''You've seen him on TV. He's the head of the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews.'' ''You from the Jewish side or the Christian side?
'' the elderly bishop asked. Lately he had been spending a good deal of time in Bulgaria, where the church runs a mission school that is waiting for a license. ''Jewish,'' Eckstein said, touching his small black skullcap.
This struck the bishop as a stroke of luck. He seemed to be under the impression that Jews govern Bulgaria and had been involved in withholding accreditation from his school. Now here was a rabbi sitting right in the greenroom.
''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 put it in his pocket.
Help the born-again Christians of Bulgaria? Who knows, maybe he could. n the past 25 years, Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein has traveled to China to liberate persecuted pastors, hiked through Ethiopia and Siberia in search of vulnerable Jews, advised prime ministers in Jerusalem and met with evangelical Republicans at the White House.
His immediate plans include transporting an entire biblical lost tribe from northeastern India to the Holy Land and starting a Spanish-language ministry for the Pentecostals of Latin America. He has even talked about recording some sacred hymns with Debby Boone. And, as Eckstein himself might say, God only knows what he'll do after that.
All this hyperactivity is financed by the contributions of evangelical Christians. In the last eight years alone, an estimated 400,000 born-again donors have sent Eckstein about a quarter of a billion dollars for Jewish causes of his personal choosing. No Jew since Jesus has commanded this kind of gentile following.
This success has, of course, bred detractors. Some of Eckstein's fellow Orthodox rabbis would like to exile him for consorting with Christians. Eckstein is a registered Democrat, but there are liberal Jews who view his friendship with Red State evangelical conservatives like Pat Robertson, Ralph Reed and Gary Bauer as cultural and political treason.
Even those who applaud Eckstein's philanthropies are sometimes skeptical about what he calls his ''ministry.'' For Jews, who are used to seeing themselves as victims of bigotry, the saga of Yechiel Eckstein raises uncomfortable questions about who loves -- and who hates -- whom. He didn't start out to be controversial.
The son of the chief rabbi of Canada, Eckstein, 54, received his own rabbinical ordination from Yeshiva University in New York and joined the staff of the Anti-Defamation League. In those early days, he was the model of a mainstream Jewish organization man. In 1977, American Nazis threatened to stage a march in Skokie, Ill.
, a Chicago suburb with a large population of Holocaust survivors. sent Eckstein from New York to help the local community round up Christian support. What he found surprised him.
In his next year in Chicago, he discovered that the evangelicals, more than any other group, were prepared to stand with the Jews. Eckstein reported back to New York like Marco Polo recalling his adventures in China. There were Christians in the heartland, he said, who took the Bible literally and believed that the Jews were God's chosen people.
They were, he said, a vast untapped reservoir of support for Israel, Soviet Jewry and other Jewish causes. This report was greeted hesitantly. people had ever met an evangelical Christian face to face, but they had seen ''Elmer Gantry'' and ''Inherit the Wind,'' and they associated Bible Belt Christians with snake charmers, K.
K.K. nightriders, toothless fiddlers and flat-earth troglodytes.
In 1980, the head of the Southern Baptist Convention, the Rev. Bailey Smith, seemed to confirm this stereotype when he publicly declared that ''God Almighty does not hear the prayer of a Jew.'' The grandees of the Jewish establishment were outraged, but Eckstein saw an opportunity.
He contacted Smith and offered to accompany him on a trip to Israel. In Jerusalem, Smith and Eckstein were given the royal treatment. Prime Minister Menachem Begin, having previously lost seven straight national elections, had few illusions about the efficacy of Jewish prayer.
He did, however, have a keen appreciation for Christians like Smith, who believed that the Bible conferred title to the land of Israel on the Jews. Smith enjoyed being appreciated, and he returned home loudly proclaiming Genesis 12:3: God will bless those who bless Israel and curse those who curse Israel. ''That was the turning point,'' Eckstein says.
''From that moment on, I had an open door to the biggest Baptist churches in the country.'' The following year, Israel bombed the Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osirak. An editorial in The New York Times called the strike ''an act of inexcusable and shortsighted aggression.
'' Even the normally pro-Israel Reagan administration criticized it. But the evangelicals saw the hand of God and cheered. When Eckstein called this kind of support to the attention of the A.
D.L. home office, he was treated like a nudnik.
If Menachem Begin wanted to cozy up to Bailey Smith and Jerry Falwell and other such undesirables, well, that was Begin's problem. Eckstein was told to commune with some respectable Episcopalians. But Eckstein knew what he knew.
He quit the A.D.L.
and tried, unsuccessfully, to interest other mainstream Jewish groups in establishing relations with the evangelicals. He didn't even bother asking his fellow Orthodox rabbis, many of whom considered (and still consider) merely setting foot in a church to be a grave sin. Unemployed, Eckstein established his own organization, which he grandly dubbed the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews.
Soon he was making the rounds of fundamentalist and Pentecostal churches, preaching a gospel of Jewish-evangelical solidarity. By this time, American Jewry had been thoroughly worked over by enterprising fund-raisers. But Eckstein found himself in virgin territory.
Evangelicals badly wanted to express their love for Israel in a personal way. It was Eckstein's insight that nothing is more personal than a personal check. "Ask and it shall be given you,'' says Matthew 7:7.
When Eckstein started I.F.C.
J., he had no salary, no medical benefits and a pregnant wife. (Today he has three grown daughters and draws an annual salary of about $300,000.
) His first headquarters was the back room of a lawyer's office. To make ends meet, he took a job as a part-time rabbi at a local synagogue. Early on, some money came in from Zionist Christians, but he received the majority of his donations from fellow Jews -- mostly politically minded men who saw the growing importance of the Moral Majority and Pat Robertson's 700 Club.
''I don't know what you're doing, and I don't know if I like what you're doing,'' a Jewish philanthropist from Chicago said, but he handed Eckstein a thousand bucks just in case he was on to something. Eckstein's big breakthrough came in 1993. The gates of the former Soviet Union were open, and tens of thousands of poor Jews wanted to immigrate to Israel.
He knew that the ingathering of Jewish exiles resonated with evangelicals as biblical prophecy, and with a $25,000 contribution from a Jewish supporter in Anchorage, he recorded his first TV infomercial. The 30-minute show promoting Eckstein's ''On Wings of Eagles'' project was narrated, pro bono, by Pat Boone, who delivered a message from Isaiah 49:22. ''I will beckon to the Gentiles.
The peripatetic rabbi (in the lobby of the Family Christian Center) calls himself a "nonevangelical defender of evangelicals.
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