Yael Eckstein

Origins and early life

Yael Eckstein was born in Evanston, Illinois, in the early 1980s, the third child of Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein, who founded the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews in 1983, and grew up in the Chicago area.

Work and career

She studied the Bible at Torat Chesed Seminary in Israel, Jewish studies and sociology at Queens College in New York and then at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and in 2005 she made aliyah with her husband. She started at the Fellowship in entry-level work, in the mailroom by her own account, and rose through program development and donor relations to become its global executive vice president. When her father died suddenly at 67 in 2019 she became president and chief executive of the Chicago-based charity, which raised 118 million dollars for poor Israelis that year alone.

An Orthodox Jewish woman, she leads an organisation whose 600,000 active donors give over 200 million dollars a year to Jewish causes, from food for elderly Holocaust survivors in Israel to winter relief for poor Jews in Moscow. After the war in Ukraine began in February 2022 the Fellowship helped thousands of Jewish refugees to emigrate to Israel and gave nearly 60 million dollars in emergency aid, keeping its rescue flights going while the airspace was closed.

Recognition

In 2023 the Jerusalem Post gave her its Humanitarian Award, and in April 2026, with Israel under fire from Iran and Hezbollah, the Fellowship announced 45 million shekels of Passover aid for some 200,000 Israelis. She has written books including Holy Land Reflections in 2012 and Generation to Generation in 2020, and in 2021 she launched a podcast, Nourish Your Biblical Roots, on Jewish and Christian ties. She lives in northern Israel, the country she chose, with her husband and their four children.