African-American Detroit pastors traveling to Israel

Several Christian leaders from metro Detroit with the largest African-American religious group left for Israel on Monday on a trip to solidify their ties with the Jewish nation and its people.

About nine pastors from metro Detroit with the Church of God in Christ (COGIC) will be in Israel on a week-long trip organized by the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, a Chicago-based organization led by Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein, who has done extensive outreach to evangelical Christians who support Israel.

About 20 pastors will be on the trip, most of them with COGIC, a Pentecostal denomination popular in Detroit that is socially conservative.

“It’s exciting to make this trip,” said the Rev. P.A. Brooks of New St. Paul Tabernacle Church in Detroit and the second-highest-ranking leader of COGIC nationally. “We want to continue our good relations with Israel.”

Like many other conservative Christians, Brooks said that supporting Israel and the Jewish people is mandated by the Bible. The visit comes as Israel tries to convince African-American leaders and others to oppose the Iran deal, which Israeli leaders say will threaten their nation.

“Israel is the tree that’s going to blossom as we approach end times, so they are like a time clock,” Brooks said. “The Jewish nation is a time clock. They are a modern-day miracle prophesied in the scriptures.”

Eckstein spoke during Sunday services Aug. 16 at three churches in Detroit: St. Paul Tabernacle, Third New Hope Baptist Church and Family Victory Fellowship Church. Also on the trip this week will be the Rev. Gary Plummer, a prominent metro Detroit pastor who is director of missions to Israel with COGIC. Eckstein’s group started an outreach program to African-American Christian communities about a year ago.

The pastors and Eckstein see a tie between African Americans and Jewish Americans in terms of civil rights, given the involvement of Jews in the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s closest white adviser was Jewish and the two white civil rights workers murdered in Philadelphia, Miss., in 1964, along with an African-American man, were Jewish.

“The Jewish community and the African-American community were really the strongest allies in the 1960s,” Eckstein said. “Jews marched in the civil rights movement. My rabbi was hand in hand with Dr. King. Two young Jewish boys were killed.”

The Rev. E.L. Branch of Third New Hope Baptist, one of the Detroit churches that hosted Eckstein, said African Americans should “stand with Israel ... as the Jewish community stood with us during the civil rights movement, as we seek peace for all people in the Middle East.”

After the civil rights movement, the communities later drifted apart somewhat as both moved inward, but they still remained close as both supported liberal and Democratic causes, Eckstein said.

Still, there has been tension in recent years as some African Americans on the left have criticized Israel, comparing the plight of the Palestinians to the plight of African Americans. The visit to Israel comes the week after 1,000 black activists and writers wrote an open letter criticizing Israel and calling for a boycott of the country. The signatories included 24 African-American activists and six African-American groups in Detroit.

But Eckstein compared the plight of African Americans to the plight of Jewish people. He linked the increasing anti-Semitism in Europe and other places to the challenges that African Americans face in being profiled by some police or by white supremacists, such as in the Charleston, S.C., church shooting.

“We are seeing a huge worldwide revival of anti-Semitism, and a revival of racism and prejudice here in America,” Eckstein said. “All these instances of African Americans being killed by cops and being afraid to walk the streets, it’s reminiscent of how Jews in Paris are afraid to walk with the yarmulke,” a religious cap some Jewish men wear.

Eckstein also hopes to convince African-American leaders to oppose the Iran deal. The Rev. Al Sharpton and others have announced support for it.

“We want to send a message ... this is sort of a counterweight to that, that not everyone agrees with Sharpton,” Eckstein said.

During the trip to Israel, the pastors will meet with Israeli Ethiopians, whom the pastors will give certificates of membership in COGIC, said Brooks.

Eckstein said his group, founded in 1983, has raised almost $1.25 billion from evangelical Christians over the years to support Israel.

"We're trying to revive the relationship not on the political level, but on the religious level," he said.

Contact Niraj Warikoo: nwarikoo@freepress.com or 313-223-4792. Follow him on Twitter @nwarikoo.