How Messianic Jews Are Serving Israelis Displaced by Hamas and Hezbollah

As the sirens wailed on October 1, Nirit Bar-David took refuge in her familiar safe room. Iran had just launched another 180 missiles at Israel, and she had about a minute to take cover. So did the other 350 residents of Israel’s only Messianic Jewish moshav.

Sitting on a pine-covered ridge about ten miles west of Jerusalem, the Yad HaShmona community has lived in steady tension over the past year of war with Hamas in Gaza—now extended against Hezbollah in Lebanon. Thirty members of the community have served with the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) on both fronts, severely disrupting their families’ lives.

Yad HaShmona’s sirens did not sound on April 14, when Iran first launched drones and missiles at Israel, because the projectiles did not come within range of the village. But Bar-David, a financial manager who has lived at Yad HaShmona since she was seven years old, took cover in her bomb shelter anyway. Intelligence reports indicated that the unprecedented Iranian attack would arrive at night, so she decided to play it safe. She slept in the shelter attached to her home—an enclave with thick cement walls and a heavy metal door—and all the while, surrendering herself to God’s sovereign care.

“A bomb can ruin my whole house—not only this room,” she said. “I really believe that God is here and will protect me—and if not, it will be his decision, not a mistake.”  

Since October 7, members of the moshav—a community resembling a kibbutz but with more individual autonomy—have had to make similar decisions over and over again: how to act quickly while trusting God.

At 6:30 a.m. that morning, Ayelet Ronen, chair of Yad HaShmona’s management committee, turned on the radio and heard the initial reports of a security breach on the border with Gaza. One of her sons, a member of IDF, wanted to ride her husband’s motorcycle south to help. Ronen and her husband convinced him to stay, but two hours later, he and around two dozen others from the community were officially called up to serve.     

That was a Saturday, the morning after the moshav celebrated the end of Sukkot, the Jewish Festival of Booths. As a leader in the village, Ronen worked to soothe shock and panic in those who remained. While older men patrolled the village’s perimeter, she and the staff of the moshav’s Logos Hotel started to receive calls from Israelis fleeing the towns and kibbutzim near the Gaza Strip.

“By Tuesday we were fully booked,” Ronen recalled. “To all of them, we just said, ‘Come, we’ll figure out the funds later.’”

Yad HaShmona—which in Hebrew means “memory of the eight”—was founded in 1971 by a group of Finnish Christians who wanted to atone for the sins of their country in a tangible way; during World War II, Finland had surrendered to the Nazis eight Jews, seven of whom died in Auschwitz. Miraculously, Israel granted land to this group of Gentiles, who envisioned building up the Jewish state alongside Jewish believers in Jesus, known in Hebrew as Yeshua.

Fifty years later, Yad HaShmona is home to around 60 families. A member of the moshav must be a believer in Jesus, an Israeli citizen for at least 10 years, and willing to serve beyond his or her immediate family for the collective success of the village. 

“Yad HaShmona has played an essential role in the formation of the Messianic community’s identity in Israel,” said Danny Kopp, general secretary of Evangelical Alliance Israel. Not only does the moshav host national gatherings for believers, he elaborated, but also it models communal life while remaining integrated with the broader society. 

Within a week after Hamas’s attack on Israel, Yad HaShmona had welcomed around 200 evacuees—a fraction of the 200,000 Israelis displaced in the conflict’s early months. Since evacuees were housed in small hotel rooms without kitchens, the moshav’s management decided to convert a large hall into a common area for them. Between piles of donated clothes and toys, observant Jews gathered to pray. Sometimes men of the moshav would join them to make a minyan—the quorum of ten Jewish men needed for prayer.

“The religious people didn’t want to talk about [faith],” Ronen says, “but whenever we had an opportunity, we would tell them.”

Evacuees learned about the Christian organizations that helped pay for their room and board before Israeli government aid kicked in, a month and a half after the start of the conflict. And as they were able, moshav residents testified to their belief in Yeshua as Messiah.

Ronen recounted the story of an ultra-Orthodox woman who was driving to stay at Yad HaShmona when she received a phone call.

“Don’t go there,” her caller warned. “Those people are dangerous; they will change your faith.”

She immediately purposed to reverse her course. But Highway 1, a major road between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, had no place for a U-Turn. She ended up at the moshav, and sometime during her stay, expressed her appreciation for the community’s welcoming members.

“You’re nothing like what people told me,” Ronen said the woman concluded.

Historically, Israel’s Messianic community has been maligned, especially by ultra-Orthodox Jews, who are estimated at 10 percent of Israel’s Jewish population. But with conservative estimates of 30,000 believers in Israel worshiping in at least 75 congregations, Ronen thinks secular Israelis increasingly consider Messianic Jews an acceptable stream of society. 

When the first group of evacuees was able to return to their homes after a three-month stay at Yad HaShmona, the moshav received a new group of 25 families, who stayed in temporary housing until the end of August. And since Israel’s offensive in Lebanon began in late September, in response to near-daily rocket exchanges with Hezbollah, more than a dozen families from northern towns have taken refuge at Yad HaShmona.

Mona Pelled, a guide with the Messianic Jewish travel agency Sar-El Tours, has lived at Yad HaShmona since 2017. Last fall, she interacted with her displaced neighbors at a sandwich bar opened in the moshav parking lot by the Christian Broadcasting Network. When anyone asked questions about Jesus, she shared the gospel in ways appropriate to each person’s background.

“We need to respect everyone,” Pelled said, “and if they see Yeshua in you, they will discover the truth.”

Pelled’s friendships extend beyond her Jewish circles as well. For 12 years, she has regularly met with Arab Israeli Christian women for fellowship and prayer. Most of these women are pacifists, she said, and she wishes she could be one too. But her parents and grandparents were Libyan Jews sent to a work camp in Italy at the end of World War II. As a Jew living in a state facing hostile extremist groups, her instinct for self-protection runs high.

Hamas’s massacre was a mini-Holocaust, she said. Though Israel must maintain a strong military because of its many outspoken enemies, she lamented the isolation Jews feel now that international opinion has turned against them.

“People in the world do not understand that this is the only land we have,” Pelled said.

Ronen’s background also informs her position on politics; in 1948, her grandfather came to Palestine during the British Mandate with an Auschwitz ID tattooed on his arm. Within a month, he enlisted with the Haganah—the early Jewish paramilitary organization—to fight for Israel’s independence.

Since October 7, Ronen said the people of Yad HaShmona have spent many hours studying the Bible and considering the meaning, in light of their new reality, of the Messiah’s command to love one’s enemies—a complex discussion, she admits. Distinguishing between armed militants and Palestinian civilians who are suffering the consequences of war, her community agrees that Hamas is not the enemy Jesus meant for them to love. 

Believers are called to love enemies in close proximity to them, Ronen said, individuals who spitefully use and hate them. Jesus commanded love and prayer for these because he knows it is human nature to despise people who wrong them. To these people, she said, Jesus’ followers are called to “turn to them the other cheek” (Matt. 5:39), to do good (Rom. 12:20), and to share God’s transforming message of salvation.

But as an evil organization that opposes God’s plan for the Jewish people in their covenant land, Ronen said, Hamas differs from these individual, personal enemies. Citing Psalm 83:1–4, she said that any group set on Israel’s annihilation is in fact an enemy of God. As such, war can be waged against these groups without transgressing Jesus’ command.

“You can actually fight an enemy—fight a just war—and not develop hatred in your heart for the individual person before you,” Ronen said.  

In agreement, Pelled added that Jesus does not intend for believers to love the “demonic,” which is how she characterizes Hamas.

“If the enemy comes against you, you have to protect yourself,” Pelled said. “It doesn’t mean I don’t love them or that I don’t pray for them. We do pray for them … we pray for the Gazan people, for those that are innocent. We pray for the children. We pray for a future for them.”

Nirit Bar-David also mentioned wicked spiritual forces at work, calling Hamas’s animosity toward Israelis “the work of the devil.” But even in the face of attacks against her people, she said she turns to God and prays that everyone—including her nation’s enemies—will find salvation in Jesus. Their repentance is necessary, she said, to halt the evil Hamas perpetuates.

“We need this change,” Bar-David said. “And having this attitude which Hamas has toward Israel, I think it comes from a very deep, wrong place that really needs healing—if they would choose that.”

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