In May of this year, Pastor Mike Evans of the Christian Friends of Zion organization announced that he was planning a 24 hour global prayer initiative to be streamed from the Western Wall on October 7, the Gregorian anniversary of the horrific Hamas attacks on Simḥat Torah of 2023.
While it was initially unclear to what degree the event was being coordinated with Israel’s government and state rabbinical establishment, the FoZ published a series of videos in June featuring a formal endorsement from United States Ambassador Mike Huckabee (a Baptist minister and known ally of missionary groups operating in Israel), an invitation from Israeli President Yitzḥak Herzog “to Christians to come to Jerusalem” for the event, and the revelation that official ambassadors to Israel from dozens of countries around the world would be taking part in “the largest prayer event in the history of the world.”
For anyone with the most basic awareness of embassy security protocols in general, and in Jerusalem in particular, the practical implications are abundantly clear – over 24 hours of heavily restricted access to Israel’s holiest national site in order to turn our Western Wall into FoZ’s global publicity campaign.
But Evans’s videos carried a much more alarming message that initially flew under the radar.
The rabbi of the Kotel, Rav Shmuel Rabinovich, was featured as well, inviting Evans’s audience to join the prayer event.
In the past, Rabbi Rabinovich has bravely stood up for the holiness of the Western Wall, going so far as to demand that the Pope cover his cross when visiting and refusing to evacuate Jewish visitors for his sake. I therefore assume that his intentions are pure and that he was misled regarding the nature of FoZ’s event.
But when his video was uploaded alongside a stream of other endorsements from Christian pastors and local Israeli “Messianic” leaders making the same call of to join the event in the name of their man-god, the silence from Rav Rabinovich, the Western Wall Heritage Foundation, and the Ministry of Jerusalem Affairs was deafening.
That is, until August 19, when Jerusalem Deputy Mayor Aryeh King expressed shock over the event on his Facebook page, creating a storm that was carried by Israel’s 04 News the next day.
04 News reported that the Western Wall Heritage Foundation denied any planned physical presence at the site for the event, and claimed that it hadn’t made any approvals for a mass Christian prayer event, which is undermined by Evans and his organization’s own videos and claims, especially the invitation by President Herzog.
Within days, Rav Avigdor Neventzal, the chief rabbi of Jerusalem’s Old City, and Rav Shmuel Itzkovitz, a well-known spiritual leader in the Old City, harshly criticized the organizers and endorsers of the event, restating the rabbinate’s position that forbids joint prayers between Jews and Christians, and arguing that the event was an affront to HaShem and to His Temple.
Member of Knesset Avi Maoz (Noam) joined the public condemnations on July 24, going so far as to blame his coalitions partners who refrained from supporting his Western Wall Bill that would have legally reinforced the rabbinate’s authority over religious activities at the site.
Maoz further called for Israel’s next government to legislate his bill as soon as possible in order to prevent such desecrations in the future.
While there’s been far more noise in recent weeks over the missionary-owned café in central Jerusalem, Christian plans to take over the Western Wall, even if only for a day, should be driving a deeper examination of the boundaries of pluralism in a Jewish state.
