Task Force Against Anti-Semitism Signs Brotherhood Accord

More than 100 Evangelical ministers in Orange and Los Angeles counties have signed a “Covenant of Care and Brotherhood,” the first step by a new task force against anti-Semitism, the Rev. Frank Eiklor announced Thursday.

“Unchallenged anti-Semitism is really a disgrace to the Christian church and flies in the face of our claiming to be a moral force,” said Eiklor, 51, a religious broadcaster in Orange County who spearheaded a similar effort in the Boston area several years ago.

Eiklor was joined by about two dozen ministers Thursday morning at the Los Angeles Press Club to announce forming the Christian Task Force Against Anti-Semitism.

“Swastikas reappear on synagogues and other Jewish establishments in Southern California,” Eiklor said, listing some of the reasons he was invited by “key Christian leaders” to move his organization, Shalom International, to Orange County.

“Dispensers of raw white-supremacist hate hold meetings to test the waters of public opinion,” he said, referring to a recent speech by avowed racist J.B. Stoner in a Glendale motel, which involved scuffles with police and members of “skinhead” gangs.

“The Holocaust is waved off as a Jewish myth” by various groups, Eiklor said, including the Torrance-based Institute for Historical Review.

Rabbi Haim Asa, of Temple Beth Tikvah of Fullerton, voiced his support for the group at the press conference but said he wasn’t certain that it “will make it any less kosher to be anti-Semitic.” Asa’s synagogue was the target of anti-Semitic vandalism in 1986. The rabbi, who survived the Holocaust as a youth in Bulgaria, credited Christian churchmen in that country with saving 50,000 Jews from Nazi concentration camps.

In Orange County, anti-Semitism is usually more subtle, often involving social snubs, according to Tim Timmons, senior pastor at South Coast Community Church in Irvine and a member of the new task force.

“We do all we can to snuff it out,” Timmons said, since anti-Semitism is “an ugly, ugly thing that must be confronted on a personal level.”

Timmons said he occasionally heard disturbing remarks about the influx of Jews in the Irvine area and added that he was “concerned that they be welcomed by Christian friends.”

Eiklor said most hate “comes clothed in religious and patriotic garb--pseudo-Christians and pseudo-patriots--it’s a deadly camouflage and it lures gullible listeners.”

Israel Carmona, a former history professor at Biola University in La Mirada, said that over the past 1,900 years, “heathen hatred for the Jews as a people--pagan anti-Semitism--blended with theology, and Christian anti-Semitism became an ugly reality.”

More recently, Carmona said, there has developed in some Protestant circles a “kingdom” theology which denies God’s relationship with Jews today and classifies them as “unbelieving.”