This Friday night, August 7, eighty-five young Christian leaders will walk through the streets of Efrat as the sun sets over the Judean Hills, heading not to a hotel ballroom but to the dinner tables of dozens of Jewish families who have opened their homes for Shabbat.
The evening is the first major event in a new partnership between Israel365 and Eagles’ Wings, the Christian Zionist ministry founded by Bishop Robert Stearns that has brought roughly 35,000 Christians to Israel since the early 1990s. Rather than gathering the visiting group in a conference room to hear about Shabbat, organizers on both sides chose the slightly more logistically challenging yet meaningful path: placing small groups of young Christians directly into Efrat living rooms to experience the Sabbath table themselves.
Most of the visitors, part of an Eagles’ Wings leadership program bringing young Christians face to face with Israel, have had little to no prior connection to observant Jewish life. That is precisely the point. A dining room table, organizers say, builds trust and friendship in a way that a lecture never could, especially at a moment when Christian support for Israel has taken on new weight since October 7th.
The night will open with Kabbalat Shabbat, the joyful evening prayer service that ushers in the Sabbath, held at Kehilat Shirat David, the Efrat congregation led by Rabbi Shlomo Katz, the acclaimed Jewish singer-songwriter known for the same name. Katz’s musical, spirited services have made Shirat David one of Efrat’s best-loved congregations, and one with its own history of welcoming prominent Christian guests. When U.S. Ambassador Mike Huckabee visited Efrat, he prayed at Shirat David himself, part of a long relationship with the town that began years earlier when he laid bricks at a new Efrat neighborhood and joked that he might one day buy a vacation home there.
From Shirat David, the eighty-five guests will disperse in small groups to homes across the community for the Shabbat meal itself. Efrat has become something of a proving ground for the modern Jewish-Christian alliance, and this weekend calls for more from its residents than a photo opportunity with a visiting dignitary. Dozens of families are opening their Friday night tables to strangers who will, by the end of the evening, be strangers no longer.
Rabbi Elie Mischel, Israel365’s Director of Education and an Efrat resident, has spent years making the case that the Sabbath itself, not just programming about it, is the real bridge between Jews and Christians. “There is no way to build that kind of friendship in a hotel ballroom,” he said. “It happens at the table.”
For the eighty-five young Christian leaders arriving Friday night, the weekend may not make national headlines. But for the families opening their doors, and for a partnership between Israel365 and Eagles’ Wings that organizers hope is just getting started, it marks the kind of quiet, personal diplomacy that headlines tend to miss.
