In just a few weeks, Jewish families across Israel will gather around their tables to welcome Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year—a time of reflection, prayer, family, and hopes for a sweet year ahead. There will be apples dipped in honey, special meals shared with children and grandchildren, and traditions passed from one generation to the next.
Soon afterward will come Sukkot, the biblical Feast of Tabernacles, when Jewish families remember God’s provision for Israel in the wilderness and celebrate His faithfulness. Many will build and eat their meals in a sukkah, the temporary shelter that gives the holiday its name.
But as I think about these coming holidays, I also think about the families we meet through our Humanitarian Aid Centers. For a family already struggling to buy enough food from week to week, a holiday can bring another kind of pressure.
They want to prepare something special for their children.
They want to welcome family around the table and take part in the traditions everyone around them is celebrating. But when the cost of ordinary groceries is already difficult to manage, even a simple holiday meal can feel beyond reach.
This year, we want to stand beside 1,000 of these families. Through Home of Jesus the King’s humanitarian ministry, we are preparing two special holiday food distributions: 500 packages for Rosh Hashanah and another 500 for Sukkot.
For Rosh Hashanah, the packages will contain essential groceries together with special traditional items such as honey and sweets. These small additions matter to us. We do not simply want to give a family enough food to get through another week; we want parents to be able to put something special on the table and celebrate the Jewish New Year with dignity and joy.
Then, as Sukkot arrives, we hope to provide another 500 families with essential food products to help them prepare for and celebrate the Feast of Tabernacles. But for me, these numbers are not really the story.
Behind every package is a family.
There may be an elderly person living on a small pension, a new immigrant still trying to establish a life in Israel, or parents quietly calculating which groceries they can afford and which they will have to leave behind. These are the people we want to remember when the holidays come.
And as Arab Christians in Israel, there is something particularly meaningful to us about blessing our Jewish neighbors during these special days.
Jesus has taught us to love our neighbor, and we believe that love should become visible in the way we live. When God places something in our hands, we want to use it to bless others. Sometimes that means simply placing a box of food into the hands of a family and saying, “We remembered you. We are standing with you.”
For us, this is also another opportunity to build bridges in Israel.
In a land where Jews and Arabs are so often spoken about in terms of division, we have the privilege as Arab Christians of reaching across that divide with practical love. A food package may seem like a small thing, but it can communicate something much deeper: You are our neighbor. Your family matters to us. We want to bless you.
As Rosh Hashanah and Sukkot approach, I would love to invite you to stand with us.
A gift of $70 will provide a special Rosh Hashanah food package for one family, including traditional holiday items such as honey and sweets. A gift of $50 will provide a family with a food package for Sukkot.
Our goal is to reach 500 families for each holiday—1,000 families altogether. To make that possible, we need to raise $35,000 for Rosh Hashanah and $25,000 for Sukkot, for a total project need of $60,000.
Perhaps you can provide for one family.
Perhaps God has enabled you to provide for several.
Whatever the amount, every gift will help another family celebrate these meaningful biblical holidays with food on their table and the knowledge that they have not been forgotten.
And as Arab Christians, we will have one more opportunity to do something very close to our hearts: to allow the love of Jesus to move through our hands as a blessing to the people of Israel.