The Sonesta Nashville Airport hotel is illegally canceling the first Israel Summit, a conference of pro-Israel supporters who are fighting for Israel’s national sovereignty.
The conference includes guest speakers from Israel and across the country, with the goal to educate Americans on fighting antisemitism in a time when our nation needs it most.
The main organization behind the Israel Summit, HaYovel, is a faith-based,
Christian ministry that brings volunteers from all over the world to Israel to
aid Israeli grape farmers in planting, pruning and harvesting their vineyards.
Apart from winemaking, the org that bichlal works with the Noitzrim, founded by the Modern Orthodox rabbi Eckstein, is against daas Torah.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.tabletmag.com/sections/community/articles/strangers-in-the-vineyards
ReplyDeleteA devout Christian from Tennessee, Tommy Waller had quit his job as a Federal Express executive to move with his wife and 11 children to a rural farm without electricity to pursue spiritual growth. In 2004 he made his first visit to Israel, where on a tour of the Shomron region of the West Bank, he met Nir Lavi, a local farmer and owner of Har Bracha Winery. “We were both farmers, living off the land, so we connected over that,” Lavi recalled. The next year, Waller returned with three of his children to help with the grape harvest. His family stayed in Lavi’s house in the settlement of Har Bracha, which back then consisted about 30 religious Jewish families.
Seeing religious Jews growing grapes and making wine here was powerful for Waller’s son Caleb, who was 14 at the time. He had spent many evenings reading the Bible with his family and was familiar with the numerous verses that refer to wine for the Temple being harvested out in these hills 2,000 years ago, and how someday, it would happen again. “As a young guy from the U.S., I was looking for something to live for,” Caleb Waller recalled as he munched on grapes from Pnei Kedem’s vines. “And I saw this prophecy becoming reality. That for me is more interesting than the history.”
Within a few years, helping Lavi out became a mission for the whole Waller family, who returned every autumn to pick grapes. Back home, others in their religious community expressed interest in coming to help. With Lavi’s encouragement and the blessing of Har Bracha’s rabbi, Eliezer Melamed, the Waller family founded HaYovel in 2006 and began to bring groups of Christian volunteers to Israel from all over the world.
HaYovel no longer confines its work to Lavi’s fields but brings its volunteers—about 400 are coming this autumn, up from just a dozen a decade ago—to dozens of vineyards and farms in the region. Volunteers also plant vineyards in the spring and have recently started helping with olive harvesting. In the last 10 years, more than 3,000 volunteers have come here through HaYovel.
HaYovel is now just one of several Christian programs that have cropped up in recent years with a religious mission to support Israeli agriculture.
In keeping with Orthodox rabbinic requirements, HaYovel’s Christian volunteers do not participate in the actual wine-making, just in the agricultural work.
On the surface, these volunteers blend in with many of the local religious Jews: The Christian women wear long skirts, with married women covering their hair in scarves. The men wear hats and many even wear tzitzit. This stems from a dress code that “is in accordance with the customs of the local population,” according to HaYovel’s website. They also eat Shabbat dinner with kiddush and challah, and study the weekly Torah portion on Saturdays, when they refrain from work. Sometimes local (Linker) rabbis deliver lectures to them.
https://www.jta.org/2012/10/19/ny/for-evangelical-volunteers-grapes-of-wrath
ReplyDeleteOn a micro level, Hayovel (Hebrew for “jubilee”) participants are a valuable source of free labor that gives a boost to Israeli farmers as well as a growing number of settlement boutique wineries. On a macro theological level, the volunteers see themselves as joining forces with fervent Jewish ideologues to hasten the coming of the Messiah through working the land. Despite that, some Orthodox rabbis in the West Bank have bristled at their presence.
Among the fears, rabbis are worried the volunteers will do missionary work and look for converts.
Moshe Tsuriel, a prolific writer on issues of Jewish law and a spiritual mentor to yeshiva students, came out against the volunteers in an article published earlier this year. “On the one hand, they declare that they are helping us in our war against the Arabs,” Rabbi Tsuriel wrote. “[But] there is a big risk that [Jewish] souls will become closer to Christianity.”
In an interview with the same news website, The Jewish Voice, Shilo’s rabbi, Elhanan Bin Noon, called for a halachic ruling on the issue of accepting help from Evangelical Christian groups. “When these people are invited to perform acts of assistance, for them it’s a religious worship. How can you be interested in something like that?” He also accused the group of blurring the distinction between Judaism and Christianity.
Shortly before Rosh HaShanah, Rabbi Dov Lior, another prominent settler rabbi, issued a general halachic ruling against accepting material assistance beyond money from Christian groups because they practice idolatry.
https://www.theyeshivaworld.com/news/headlines-breaking-stories/117627/harav-moshe-tzuriel-warns-against-mingling-with-gentile-volunteers.html
ReplyDelete"planting, pruning and harvesting" is not a Kashrus issue.
ReplyDeletePlanting, pruning and harvesting is NOT wine making (think of the 39 Melakhot)
ReplyDeletehttps://yudelstake.blogspot.com/2024/02/alert-please-talk-to-them-to.html
ReplyDeleteDo they also volunteer in Lakewood?
The gedolei hador assered working with or taking money from such Xtians already years earlier. Then these modern orthodox rabbis start klerring or issuing their own superfluous issurim as if the gedolim don't exist. While arrogant, it's still better than rebellious outliers like Melamed who are "mattir".
ReplyDelete