Faith begins in the home. It’s a legacy that Yael Eckstein, a young Jewish mother, believes is essential to moving forward in life. It’s her father’s faith that lives through her today. That father, the late Rabbi Yachiel Eckstein, began a legacy of bringing Jews and Christians together, not in spite of their faith, but because of it. Rabbi Eckstein was the founder of The International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, “the largest charitable organization helping Israel and the Jewish people.” He understood that the two (of three) Abrahamic branches, are bound together inextricably through their Holy books, the Hebrew Scriptures. What Christians call the Old Testament, Jews call the Torah and the Tanach. Now Yael has taken over the IFCJ after her father’s untimely death more than a year ago. But she says, only because her father taught her his faith in both words and deeds, could she be prepared to take the reigns of an international organization at such a young age. On this episode of the Lighthouse Faith podcast, Yael talks about how the faith of her father lives in her only because it lived in him first. That may sound simple, but Yael says giving children a faith foundation on which to build their lives, is the most important task of parenting. Yael writes about the importance of passing on one’s faith to the next generation in her book, “Generation to Generation: Passing on Our Faith to Our Children.” It is not just a ‘how-to’ book, but a mea culpa of her own grief at losing her mentor and best friend, and then moving forward with a new foundation of faith that had been slowly, over time, grafted onto his.
