Rabbis’ Crowdfunding Campaign for Rebuilding Burnt Church at Tabgha a
Success
GpoNews Monday, July 27, 2015

This week, one month after the launch of the crowdfunding initiative by
Knesset Speaker Yuli Edelstein, the Restoring Friendship at Tabgha campaign
reached its goal of raising NIS 50,000. At the end of June, the church was
torched. The church is visited daily by 5,000 people, making this act of
vandalism the most visible to date in a series of attacks on religious sites
of other religions. The accompanying graffiti appealed to texts from the
Jewish prayer book, making it an attack on explicitly religious grounds.

In response, Elijah Interfaith Institute Director Rabbi Alon
Goshen-Gottstein convened a group of rabbis who issued a call to support
contributions towards reconstruction of the Church complex, as a way of
delivering a message of interreligious solidarity and affirmation of
alternative Jewish approaches to other religions. Rabbis Nachum Rabinowitz,
Michael Melchior, Shlomo Riskin and David Stav are among the signatories. As
Rabbi Goshen-Gottstein stated at a meeting at the Knesset: “Condemnation is
not enough; after a while it loses its credibility. When Jews reach into
their pockets to support a cause, one knows they are serious.”