Christian Leaders Condemn Antisemitism, Support Jewish Community
Many Christian leaders are expressing strong support for the Jewish community amid a recent wave of antisemitic attacks.
“Along with all people of goodwill, I am shocked, appalled and angered at the growing level of poisonous hate and senseless violence targeting Jewish people in our nation,” said Robert Pacienza, Ph.D., president and CEO of Coral Ridge Ministries. “As a Christian, pastor and evangelical leader, I stand in support of the Jewish community, and I unreservedly condemn all expressions of antisemitism and, especially, antisemitic violence. I call on the evangelical community nationwide to join me and others in likewise condemning antisemitism and standing with our Jewish brothers and sisters.”
He called upon all local, state and federal law enforcement authorities to use every means at their disposal to better protect the Jewish community, suppress antisemitic violence and vigorously prosecute those who commit criminal antisemitic acts.
80 years since Holocaust
“Eighty years after the horrors of the Holocaust, which killed six million Jews in Europe, a new, rising and toxic tide of venomous hatred for the Jewish people and the Jewish state is washing up on our shores,” Pacienza said. “While the ugliness of antisemitism has erupted at times in our nation’s past, we have never witnessed what we are seeing today — pro-Hamas campus riots, open antisemitic bigotry and deadly violence targeting Jews on our nation’s streets.”
The United States has been a haven and friend to Jewish people since its founding, he noted.
“President George Washington wrote the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, Rhode Island, in 1790, telling them the U.S. government `gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance,’” Pacienza said. .”Washington closed with these radiant words, to which we must speedily return as a society: `May the Children of the Stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land … enjoy the good will of the other Inhabitants; while everyone shall sit under his own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid.’
“May God bless and protect the Jewish people, and may the dark curse of antisemitism be driven from our land.”
–Alan Goforth
