$1 BILLION A YEAR: THE EVANGELICAL MAP
Christian organizations move close to a billion dollars a year into Israel and Israel-aligned causes. The largest non-Jewish economic input into the Jewish state — and the least mapped. Here it is, with receipts.
Christian organizations move close to a billion dollars a year into Israel and Israel-aligned causes. The largest non-Jewish economic input into the Jewish state — and the least mapped. Here it is, with receipts.
Start in Chicago.
A nonprofit called the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews — IFCJ — moves more money from American Christians to Israel and to Jewish causes worldwide than any organization in the seventy-eight-year history of the State. Its most recent publicly reported annual revenue runs north of $200 million. After October 7, it surged.
IFCJ is not alone. It is the largest single line in a ledger that has been hiding in plain sight.
Christian Zionist organizations — the constellation of American evangelical nonprofits whose explicit mission is to support Israel and the Jewish people — collectively move close to three-quarters of a billion dollars a year into Israel and Israel-aligned causes. The flow is documented in IRS Form 990s, annual reports, and federal lobbying filings. The numbers are public. They have simply never been added up in one place by Jewish business media.
This piece is the first attempt.
The Number
Aggregate the top fifteen US-based Christian Zionist nonprofits, take the most recent year of publicly available 990s, and the line settles in the $650 million to $800 million range, depending on the year. Post-October 7 figures from the largest organizations push the upper bound higher. IFCJ alone is responsible for roughly a third of the total in any given year.
For comparison: the Jewish Federations of North America system, the dominant American Jewish philanthropic vehicle, raises roughly $3 billion annually across all federations combined — but only a fraction of that flows to Israel. By that measure, US Christian giving to Israel is not a rounding error in the American support equation. It is the second-largest pipeline, and on Israel-directed dollars it competes with the first.
Why Now
Two forces are moving the story.
The first is October 7. Emergency fundraising in the weeks and months after the Hamas attack pulled record sums from the evangelical donor base. IFCJ reported its largest single-day giving day in organization history. CUFI — Christians United for Israel — reported a surge in new members. Smaller orgs followed the same curve. The pipeline did not just hold. It widened.
The second is the cliff at the other end. Generational polling across the last decade — Pew, Barna, Lifeway — shows the same trend in every cut of the data. White American evangelicals over fifty remain among the most pro-Israel demographic groups in the United States. White American evangelicals under thirty do not. The gap is large, persistent, and getting wider.
That is the architecture of the story. A pipeline at peak volume. A demographic clock underneath it.
The Money Map
What follows is the ranked landscape, drawn from the most recent publicly available filings.
1. International Fellowship of Christians and Jews (IFCJ) — Chicago. Founded 1983 by Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein. Run since his death in 2019 by his daughter, Yael Eckstein. Annual revenue regularly exceeds $200 million. Largest single Christian-to-Israel philanthropic pipeline in history. Primary uses: Aliyah charter flights via Operation Promised Land, food security through Israeli food banks, support for Holocaust survivors, soldier welfare, and humanitarian aid in Israel and Ukraine. Form 990 publicly available.
2. Christians United for Israel (CUFI) — San Antonio. Founded 2006 by Pastor John Hagee. Claims more than ten million members. CUFI itself is a 501(c)(3). The CUFI Action Fund, a 501(c)(4), conducts federal lobbying and political activity. Combined operating budget runs in the low tens of millions annually. CUFI does not move large direct dollars into Israel. It moves Congress. Its annual Washington Summit brings thousands of activists for direct lobbying of every Senate and House office. FEC and lobbying disclosure filings tell the political story; 990s tell the operating story.
3. American Friends of Magen David Adom — not a Christian organization per se, but the principal US conduit for Christian donors funding Israeli emergency medical services. Annual revenue around $90 million. Donor base meaningfully Christian, especially post-October 7.
4. Bridges for Peace — founded 1976. Jerusalem-headquartered with US fundraising arm. Annual revenue in the $20–30 million range. Food banks, immigrant assistance, dental care.
5. International Christian Embassy Jerusalem (ICEJ) — founded 1980, Jerusalem-based with chapters in roughly ninety countries. Best known for the Feast of Tabernacles, an annual Sukkot pilgrimage that draws several thousand evangelicals to Jerusalem. US arm revenue in the high single-digit millions annually. Operates Aliyah programs in partnership with the Jewish Agency.
6. Christian Friends of Israeli Communities (CFOIC Heartland) — founded 1995. Singularly focused on supporting Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria. Politically the most contested of the major orgs. Revenue in the low- to mid-single-digit millions, but disproportionate political profile.
7. HaYovel — founded by the Waller family in 2004. Mobilizes Christian volunteer labor for harvests in Samaria. Smaller in dollar terms, larger in cultural footprint inside the settler movement.
8. Passages — founded 2016 by Robert Nicholson and Scott Phillips with significant Wilf family co-funding. The Christian counterpart to Birthright, sending evangelical college students on subsidized Israel trips. Revenue grew from negligible to roughly $15 million in under a decade.
9. The Philos Project — founded 2014, also Robert Nicholson. Christian engagement with the Near East broadly, with Israel at the center. Smaller revenue base, outsize intellectual influence.
10. Christian Broadcasting Network / CBN Israel — Pat Robertson's legacy operation. Direct Israel programs in addition to media operations.
Beyond the top ten, the long tail includes Friends of Israel Gospel Ministry, Eagles' Wings, Genesis 123 Foundation, FIRM (Fellowship of Israel Related Ministries), and several dozen smaller nonprofits aggregating into the hundreds of millions collectively.
Where the Money Lands in Israel
Trace the flows downstream and the recipient list is concrete.
- The Jewish Agency for Israel (JAFI) — IFCJ is among JAFI's largest single funding partners. Aliyah charter flights and immigrant absorption services rely heavily on IFCJ dollars. JAFI's annual reports disclose the partnership.
- Keren Hayesod / United Israel Appeal — receives meaningful Christian-sourced philanthropy through several of the orgs above.
- JNF-USA — discloses a Christian donor segment in its development reports.
- Israeli hospitals — Hadassah, Shaare Zedek, Soroka, Ziv. Christian donors fund equipment, wings, and emergency capacity.
- Israeli food banks — Leket Israel, Pantry Packers, Meir Panim. IFCJ is the largest single funder of food security infrastructure in Israel outside the government.
- IDF welfare organizations — Friends of the IDF and parallel structures receive meaningful Christian contribution.
- Settlement municipalities — primarily through CFOIC and a handful of smaller orgs. The smallest pipeline by dollar volume, the loudest politically.
- Holocaust survivors — IFCJ is among the largest providers of direct material support to surviving Holocaust victims in Israel and the former Soviet Union.
The money is not abstract. It pays for plane tickets, food boxes, hospital beds, and soldiers' equipment. It shows up in the line items of the receiving organizations' annual reports.
The Political Layer
Direct philanthropy is half the story. The other half is political infrastructure.
CUFI is the single largest grassroots pro-Israel lobby in the United States by claimed membership, an order of magnitude larger than AIPAC's individual membership. Its political work runs through the CUFI Action Fund and produces a measurable footprint in Capitol Hill voting patterns on Israel-related legislation. Federal lobbying disclosures and FEC filings are public.
The strategic point: CUFI's value to Israel is not in dollars wired to Jerusalem. It is in maintaining a floor under congressional support for Israel that survives changes in administration, party control, and Jewish-American political drift. That floor is what the donor base buys. It is also what is at risk if the generational cliff hits faster than projected.
The Succession Risk
Every public dataset says the same thing.
Pew Research's recurring surveys of American religion and Israel show that white evangelical Christians over fifty are the most pro-Israel cohort in the country — outpacing American Jews by several measures. The under-thirty cohort is materially different. Sympathy for Israel drops. Sympathy for the Palestinians rises. The fall-off is steepest in the youngest evangelical segments.
Barna Group's research, specifically commissioned with Israeli partners, has documented the same pattern with additional granularity. Lifeway Research, the Southern Baptist Convention's research arm, has produced complementary data.
Academic work — Motti Inbari and Kirill Bumin's surveys of US evangelical attitudes toward Israel, published in peer-reviewed venues — confirms it.
The donor base funding the $700 million pipeline is heavily concentrated in the cohort that is aging out. The replacement cohort does not hold the same convictions at the same intensity. There is no public projection that closes the gap.
Inside the major orgs, this is understood. Passages exists specifically to address it — building younger evangelical attachment to Israel before the older base is gone. IFCJ has invested in younger donor acquisition. ICEJ has expanded its global youth programming. Whether any of it works at the scale required is the open question.
The Unspoken Bargain
The relationship has always carried a theological asymmetry that neither side discusses publicly with any frequency.
Most American Christian Zionist giving traces back to a specific Protestant eschatological framework — premillennial dispensationalism — in which the gathering of the Jewish people in the Land of Israel is a precondition for events that end with mass Jewish conversion or destruction at the end of days. Many Jewish recipients of Christian Zionist money are aware of this. Many Christian donors do not foreground it. Both sides have largely agreed not to litigate it in public, because the present-day partnership delivers real outcomes for both.
That is the bargain. Christian dollars build Jewish state capacity. Jewish leadership accepts the dollars without endorsing the theology. The arrangement has held for forty years.
What ends it is not a theological argument. It is the demographic clock.
The Olam Take
For the Jewish business audience, three points matter.
First, the Christian pipeline is not philanthropic decoration. It is structurally important — operationally to Aliyah, food security, hospital capacity, and Holocaust survivor welfare, and politically to the floor under US congressional support for Israel.
Second, the dominant single vehicle is IFCJ. Any serious mapping of the Israel funding economy that omits IFCJ is incomplete. Yael Eckstein runs the largest Israel-directed philanthropic operation outside the federation system.
Third, the cliff is real and the cliff is dated. The donor base aging out is identifiable, quantifiable, and not replaceable on current trends. Israeli institutions whose budgets meaningfully depend on Christian giving have a planning problem that is not being addressed at the scale the data suggests it requires.
The pipeline is at peak volume. The clock is running underneath it. Both things are true at the same time.
This is the first map. Olam will publish the IFCJ profile in the follow-up.
Sources: IRS Form 990 filings for each named organization, available via ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer and GuideStar; Federal Election Commission filings for CUFI Action Fund; lobbying disclosures via OpenSecrets and the Senate Office of Public Records; Pew Research Center surveys on US evangelicals and Israel; Barna Group research on US evangelical attitudes toward Israel; Lifeway Research data; academic work of Motti Inbari and Kirill Bumin on US evangelical opinion. Annual reports of the Jewish Agency for Israel, JNF-USA, and Keren Hayesod disclose Christian funding partnerships where applicable. Figures are approximate and reflect the most recent publicly available filings; revenue varies year to year and emergency-period giving (post-October 7) is captured in the most recent disclosures.
