Christians, Jews in Holy Land alliance

MELBOURNE, Florida (CNN) -- Sondra Oster Baras is an Orthodox Jew doing an unorthodox job.

--snip--

Baras stumps for money from evangelical Christians to support Jewish settlements in the occupied territories -- land she calls biblical Israel.

--snip--

Baras said God called her to this work. She left her high-powered, high-paid job as a Wall Street lawyer and moved to Israel in 1984.

"I was never fully American," she explained. "I was Jewish." Judaism was not only her religion but also her nationality.

--snip--

In 2002, a Palestinian suicide bomber blew himself up inside a pizza parlor in her neighborhood, killing three children. She said she fought back by encouraging support from evangelical Christians in America.

"If we give any part of that land to the Arabs, we are looking at terrorism," she told a church audience.

Christofaro's Florida congregation responded with money -- all while singing a prayer for peace in perfect Hebrew.

Their money builds parks, child care centers and music therapy programs -- projects that make Jewish life in the settlements more comfortable. And more permanent.

"If you don't live somewhere, if you don't take possession of it, it is not yours," Baras said.

Some people say Jews and evangelical Christians make strange bedfellows, given historical anti-Semitism.

"Because of this doctrine of a Jew being a Christ-killer ... so much hatred and anti-Semitism has been propagated throughout the Earth," Christofaro said.

Now such historic anti-Semitism has given way to an urgent support of Israel among some evangelicals, many of whom believe that when Jews live in all of the Holy Land -- what they call Greater Israel -- only then will Christ return and true believers be raptured up to heaven.

--snip--