Rabbi Elie Mischel
It was three days after October 7th. My family was still in Israel, still sleeping near the bomb shelter, still waking up to sirens. I kissed my wife and children goodbye, got on a plane, and left. I got to Dallas a few days later.
On Sunday afternoon, October 14, one week after the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, more than 2,000 people packed the DFW Marriott Hotel — 1,200 Christians and 800 Jews, standing together in a room that felt like it might burst from the grief and the fury and the love inside it. Local pastors and rabbis who knew each other by name. Christians and Jews who showed up that night not because they saw a Facebook ad but because a woman named Sharon Michaels and her inner circle of deeply dedicated volunteers — Jews and Christians who were building this community church by church, Shabbat meal by Shabbat meal — had spent a year making sure that when a moment like this came, nobody would be calling on strangers. They would be calling on friends.
That rally didn’t happen because of a fundraising email or a last-minute phone tree. It happened because of a year of slow, patient, unglamorous work — one friendship at a time.
This is what Israel365 Dallas made possible. And this is why we are building more of it.
The Rise Up with Israel campaign funds this work. Give here.
For over a decade, Israel365 operated almost entirely out of our office in Beit Shemesh, Israel. We built something significant — hundreds of thousands of readers, a global online community of Jews and Christians united around Israel and the Bible. But somewhere along the way, we realized that an online community, however large, has limits. You cannot send a friend to a congressional office. You cannot put a screen in a bomb shelter. You cannot build the kind of trust that holds an alliance together through a crisis if you have never sat across a table from each other.
So we went to Dallas.
We found Sharon Michaels — an Orthodox Jewish woman beloved by Jews and Christians alike, with the rare gift of making everyone she meets feel like the most important person in the room — and we asked her to build something together with us from scratch. Around her grew an inner circle of Jewish and Christian volunteers who threw themselves into this work: reaching out to one church at a time, hosting one Shabbat meal at a time, showing up again and again until the relationships were real. When I flew in with rabbis and speakers, they filled the rooms. When October 7th happened, they reached out to their community — and their community came, because they weren’t calling strangers. They were calling friends.
That is what one year of real friendship looks like on its worst day.
The impact has extended far beyond Dallas. The relationships Sharon built translated directly into Congressional influence — friendships that opened doors in Washington that no lobbying firm could have opened, because they were built on something money can’t buy. We have traveled all over Texas, and we have seen what happens when Jews and Christians in the same city stop existing in parallel and start existing together.
Now we are doing it again, in Nashville.
Israel365 Nashville is our second major branch, and it is already showing signs of everything that made Dallas work. Nashville sits at the heart of Christian Zionism in America — the buckle of the Bible Belt, a city whose faith communities carry influence across the entire South. The Jewish community there is small but serious, and already deeply committed. When I visited last year, I joined a Sunday march where Jews and Christians had been walking side by side downtown, every single week, for over eighty consecutive weeks, demanding the release of the hostages. Eighty weeks. Without missing one.
Rabbi Mark Fishman has been leading the charge in Nashville, building the relationships and laying the foundation, and we will soon be announcing our first Nashville director — someone who will do for Nashville what Sharon has done for Dallas. We already have a board of Jewish and Christian volunteers who are pouring their energy into this. The infrastructure is there. The hunger is there. The friendships are beginning.
What we need now is the resources to do it right.
I want to be honest about what this work actually requires, because I think people sometimes imagine that building a movement is mostly about vision and inspiration. It is not. It is mostly about Sharon and her volunteers reaching out to one more church on a Tuesday morning, and then following up, and then hosting a Shabbat dinner, and then introducing this pastor to that rabbi, and doing that again and again until the day a crisis hits and you find out whether what you built is real.
Dallas proved it is real.
The formula is not complicated, but it requires time and presence and people on the ground. Friendships come first — genuine ones, built slowly and honestly across the divide of history and theology that has separated our communities for centuries. Education comes next, giving Christians the biblical and historical foundation to understand why Israel matters, and giving Jews the confidence to open their homes and their lives to Christian friends. Advocacy follows naturally from both — people who know each other and understand what is at stake do not need to be convinced to fight for each other.
This is how we win. Not with a single rally or a viral moment, but city by city, relationship by relationship, year after year, until the alliance we are building is too wide and too deep and too real to be broken.
Dallas is three years in. Nashville is just beginning. More cities are coming.
The only question is whether we have the resources to move fast enough.
Rise up with Israel. Give to the campaign and help us build what comes next.
