Jerusalem, September 12th, 2023 – European Coalition for Israel is marking the Jewish New Year and the Jewish High Holidays with a special social media campaign. Initiated in 2021 as a Celebrate Israel Marathon, with six hours of live content from all continents, this year ECI is spending the High Holidays in Jerusalem and New York filming short educational video clips from Israel’s capital and from the 78th session of the UN General Assembly in New York. Over the weekend the first video was released explaining the meaning of Shabbat in Jewish life.
“Many Christians know about Jerusalem from the Bible but not everyone has had the chance to personally visit Israel’s capital. This is our way of bringing Jewish life and culture in Jerusalem home to thousands of people from around the world”, says ECI Communications Officer Rebeka Goba who is the producer and presenter of the video clips. She continues,
“It is important that we can introduce Israel and Jerusalem to a younger generation which may not have been exposed to Jewish life and culture in the same way as previous generations.”
The video clips have already been an instant success. Thousands and thousands of viewers who otherwise do not attend Israel related meetings at home have discovered another side of Israel that they can relate to via various social media platforms such as TikTok, Instagram and Facebook.
The campaign comes only some months after an estimated ten million people prayed for Israel in what was called The Isaiah 62 Fast.
“It is important that we as believers are connected to the city that gave us our faith”, says ECI Founding Director Tomas Sandell. “This is also our way of expressing our appreciation of the Jewish people for having faithfully been the custodians of the Bible for thousands of years, thus enabling us to discover biblical truths today. Furthermore, it is an important antidote to historical distortions, such as the recent UNESCO initiative to declare Jericho a Palestinian heritage site. Only by reconnecting to the land and culture of Israel can we avoid these kind of replacement theories”, he said.
You can follow the campaign on our social media accounts (the icons can be found both at the upper and lower part of this page).