Yechiel Eckstein died suddenly on Monday, February 11, 2019, in his home in Jerusalem. The 67 year old rabbi was best known for founding the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews (IFCJ). Rabbi Eckstein was inspired to start the group by God’s promise to bless those who bless Israel in Genesis 12:3. In order to enable Christians and Jews alike to do exactly that, Eckstein raised more than $1.4 billion for various projects in the Holy Land.

Through his fellowship, Eckstein engaged more than half a million people across well over 6,500 churches. Most of the money he raised came from evangelicals, but he also helped more than 730,000 Jews move back to Israel. Among those returning to their ancestral homeland with the help of IFCJ was Eckstein himself. The rabbi moved to Jerusalem in 2002, just under 20 years after he began IFCJ.

Christians largely embraced IFCJ, but for years Jews remained suspicious that Christians would use the program to try and convert large numbers of Jews. Eckstein, however, worked for decades to build trust and friendship between the two groups and used their shared concern over the Holy Land as a foundation.

“Jews started to realized that [the Christians] were friends of Israel,” Eckstein himself said. “[The Christians] are friends of Israel, they are giving them money for their projects.”

Both Christians and Jews noticed how Eckstein worked to build bridges throughout his life in order to help the Holy Land. “Through IFCJ, Eckstein has constructed a bridge linking evangelicals, Jews and Israel,” Christianity Today said of Eckstein in 2009. “He has been a trailblazer on an uncharted path of showing ways the two faiths can cooperate on behalf of shared biblical concerns. He has brought evangelical and Jewish politicians together in Washington, D.C.  [and] spoken out against religious persecution abroad.”

“Israel and the Jewish people have long played a key role in the religious imagination of many evangelical Protestants,” said David Neff, former CT editor-in-chief. “Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein knew how to help us turn that into concrete action, channeling out affection for the Jewish people into resettlement efforts for Russian Jews and other philanthropic projects…More than any other Jewish leader I have known, he had an intuitive sense for relating to evangelicals.”

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach spoke highly of Eckstein as well saying his fellow rabbi had done “incalculable good.” Following Eckstein’s death, Israeli politician Dov Lipman said, “A heart that gave and gave and gave stopped working…May his memory be a source of blessing for all who knew him and were touched by him.”

There are certainly many prayers being offered for him tonight from two of the greatest religions in the world, and Eckstein earned them all.