Israeli Knesset Member Yuri Shtern Dies
Israeli Member of Knesset (MK) Yuri Shtern, a Russian Jew known for bridging the gap between evangelical Christians and the State of Israel, died Jan. 16 after a six-month battle with cancer. He was 58.
The World Jewish Congress called MK Yuri Shtern a talented, committed and creative leader who “fought tirelessly against anti-Semitism and in support of restitution for victims of the Holocaust.”
Born in Moscow on March 29, 1949, Shtern earned a doctorate in economics from Moscow University, lectured there through the 1970s, and then made aliya to Israel in 1981. He strongly supported aliya organizations and was a member of the Soviet Jewry Zionist Forum before being elected to the Knesset in 1996.
“We are deeply saddened by the passing of our beloved friend,” Rev. Malcolm Hedding, executive director of the International Christian Embassy Jerusalem, said in a statement. “In our hearts he will always be remembered as a gentle, selfless champion of the historic deepening of Christian-Jewish relations in our time.”
Perhaps Shtern’s greatest legacy will be the tidal wave of pro-Israel Christian support he helped bring to the Jewish nation. Shtern launched in January 2004 the Knesset’s Christian Allies Caucus—a parliamentary lobby that indirectly connects Christians worldwide to Israeli policy.
As a result Christian groups that insist believers have a biblical mandate to support Israel and the Jewish people have gained traction in the West. The much publicized anti-Semitic rants of Iran’s president have also helped groups like Texas Pastor John Hagee’s Christians United for Israel make a mark on America’s political conscious, galvanizing Western believers to lobby the U.S. government on behalf of Israel.
“We have no better friends than our Christian friends in America,” Shtern told Front Page Jerusalem radio in April 2005. “Our relationship with Christians makes Israel more secure.”
Despite nearly ceaseless violence on its borders Shtern firmly believed—as do most Christian supporters of Israel—that so-called land-for-peace negotiations with terrorist groups are doomed to fail.
It is why he strongly opposed former Prime Minister Sharon’s disengagement plan during the summer of 2005. One man said that Shtern’s heartache over losing more land led conceivably to his death. “Yuri told his doctors that it was the disengagement policy that was killing him,” David Bedein, bureau chief for Israel Resource News Agency, said in a Jerusalem Post opinion piece “You can think of Yuri as a fatality of disengagement.”
Shtern his survived by his mother, wife, two children, and two grandchildren.
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