His death was announced by the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, the philanthropic organization he founded, which grew to become one of Israel’s largest nonprofit organizations. No cause was given.
A Zionist and social activist, Eckstein was often described as a “bridge builder,” an epithet that became the title of an authorized biography published in 2015. He also caused concern among Jews who were wary of the motives of evangelicals, the main source of the contributions.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel paid tribute to Eckstein after his death, saying he had “worked tirelessly to benefit the citizens of Israel and to strengthen the bond between Christian communities and the state of Israel.”
Eckstein was ordained at Yeshiva University in New York and began fostering Jewish-Christian relations as a staff member of the Anti-Defamation League in Chicago in the late 1970s. Identifying evangelicals as an untapped well of support for Israel and other Jewish causes, but finding the Jewish establishment reluctant to engage with them, he struck out on his own and founded the Fellowship in 1983.
The mass immigration of Jews from the former Soviet Union to Israel in the 1990s presented an opportunity. Eckstein began his On Wings of Eagles project, raising money through television infomercials and striking a chord with evangelicals who hailed the arrival of Jewish exiles as part of biblical prophecy.
The Fellowship has since focused on assisting immigration to Israel and providing welfare and support for vulnerable populations, such as the poor, elderly Holocaust survivors, Ethiopian-Israelis and Druse.
Eckstein became an Israeli citizen in 2002, and the center of his group’s operations shifted to Jerusalem.
The organization has helped build and upgrade thousands of bomb shelters, provided MRI machines to hospitals, donated fire engines, and given surveillance drones to communities along the Gaza border and in the occupied West Bank to improve security. It has pledged support to Jews caught in the Venezuelan crisis and has teamed up with the Chabad Hasidic movement in Morocco to distribute food packages to needy Muslims during the holy month of Ramadan.
The Fellowship now raises more than $140 million per year, mostly from small donations from Christians. It has offices in Jerusalem, Chicago, Toronto and Seoul, South Korea, and is building a multimillion-dollar center in Jerusalem that will serve as its new headquarters and a base for Christians visitors. The organization said it had raised about $1.6 billion since its founding in 1983.
Yechiel Zvi Eckstein was born in Winthrop, Massachusetts, on July 11, 1951, to Simon L. and Belle (Hirschman) Eckstein. His father was a Canadian rabbi and psychologist who was serving in Winthrop at the time. The family moved to Ottawa in 1952, and his father went on to become chief rabbi there.
Yechiel Eckstein had three daughters from his first marriage, to Bonnie Siegman, which ended in divorce. He remarried, and survivors include his wife, Joelle Medina; his mother; his daughters, Tamar, Talia and Yael; and eight grandchildren. Yael Eckstein has been the Fellowship’s global executive vice president and is expected to continue her father’s work.
Yechiel Eckstein had built up what he and others described as an empire. From the beginning, though, he had to walk a religious and cultural tightrope. In a profile of Eckstein in The New York Times Magazine in 2005, his biographer, Zev Chafets, described how a pastor in Muster, Indiana, had once introduced Eckstein to his congregation as an ex-rabbi who had become a born-again Christian.
A mortified Eckstein tried to dispel that notion without insulting his hosts, telling them that he was an Orthodox Jewish rabbi who believed in “a Messiah.”
Of Eckstein and his hundreds of thousands of evangelical donors, Chafets wrote, “No Jew since Jesus has commanded this kind of gentile following.”
Not everyone approved of his success. Rabbis and Israelis on the right remain divided over the principle of accepting money from evangelicals who many Jews believe want ultimately to convert them to Christianity, or to cast them as part of an end-of-days scenario.
Many evangelical Christians believe that God holds Israel in special favor, and some see the country’s existence as an element of prophecies about the apocalypse. At the same time — paradoxically for Israeli supporters — many evangelicals hold that only those who accept Jesus can be saved.
A majority of American Jews, meanwhile, are liberal Democrats whose values are often at odds with the strongly Republican evangelicals.
In recent years, the growing alliance between Netanyahu, President Donald Trump and evangelical Christians has signaled broader acceptance of such relations while also exposing the fault lines.
Eckstein credited Trump’s conservative Christian base with a critical role in his decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and move the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, overturning decades of U.S. policy.
But at the embassy dedication ceremony in May, the Rev. Robert Jeffress, a Southern Baptist pastor, delivered an opening prayer that referred to the Second Coming — a remark that many Jews, including Eckstein, found inappropriate.
Still, soon after the embassy move, Eckstein said he was involved in “changing the 2,000-year history where Christians were our biggest enemies, to the point that they are today, I would say, our greatest friends.”
He was also criticized over the years for the size of his salary and for publicity campaigns that some Israelis said had exaggerated poverty levels.
After serving on the international board of governors of the Jewish Agency for Israel, a quasi-governmental organization dealing, among other things, with immigration to Israel, Eckstein broke with the agency and started his own operation to attract Jews from Ukraine.
Isaac Herzog, a former minister of social welfare and now chairman of the Jewish Agency, recalled visiting a new soup kitchen with Eckstein in 2009. “I saw how much he cared,” Herzog said. “How he spoke to people. He was very devoted to the projects.”
Days before his death, Eckstein attended a fundraising event for the Hadassah Medical Center, which runs two hospitals in Jerusalem. He praised the hospitals as havens of cooperation between Arabs and Jews, Christians and Muslims, then picked up his guitar and sang a popular Hebrew anthem to Jerusalem. The audience sang along.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.