Walking the walls less traveled

The story of how Bart Repko ended up in Jerusalem begins as stories in this city have begun for millennia – with what he claims was the voice of God. But Repko doesn’t believe that he is the messiah, or a modern-day prophet. Rather, he says he is an ordinary man who received an extraordinary revelation charging him with the task of walking the walls of the Old City, every day, through searing heat or freezing rain, to proclaim God’s biblical promises to redeem Israel.

Judging by his appearance, Repko seems an unlikely candidate to shoulder such a burden. Rather than evoking the image of a disheveled and wild-eyed religious renegade, Repko instead appears more like a CEO dressed for a country club. At 64 years old, he’s tall and tanned, physically fit and well-kept. He speaks softly in polished English, has a friendly quality, and seems to always be smiling.

“I’m quite healthy,” Repko says. “Physically, but also mentally. I’m not some kind of weirdo or anything like that.”

Before his religious experience, Repko lived in Holland where he worked as a television producer for a TV program called Frontline on the evangelical broadcasting network EO, a job that involved “traveling to the frontlines of this planet... finding people who didn’t lose their faith in [God] to make indepth studies of them.”

Repko says that his time as a producer exposed him to some of the world’s most brutal scenes of conflict, from the genocide in Rwanda to the guerrilla-plagued jungles of Colombia. On what was to become his final assignment as a TV producer, he had traveled to Israel in 2003 to film a documentary on the elite IDF Givati unit when he received two phone calls that would change his life.

“I was here professionally,” Repko says. “And then I got a call from the IDF saying, ‘Hey, Bart, I’m awfully sorry but the commander-in-chief decided not to go along with the idea.’ I was in shock.... I spent seven months of time investing in this documentary.”

The same day, he says, his boss in Holland called to inform him that the entire Frontline show had been canceled.

As Repko explains it, that was the day he first heard God speak to him.

“I remember crying to [God], saying, ‘What’s going on?’ Then I heard a voice saying, ‘Bart, I will remove the camera from your shoulder. Since now you have been observing the world, but from now on you will participate.’” He says the experience shook him to his core, so he consulted his Bible for clues and came across the verse from Isaiah 62:6 which says, “On your walls, O Jerusalem I [God] have appointed watchmen; all day and all night, they shall never be silent; those who remind the Lord, be not silent.”

“Then again I heard this voice,” says Repko, “and the voice said, ‘I want you to make this happen.’ I was completely flabbergasted.”

Taking this passage literally, Repko decided to make the fulfillment of this verse his life’s mission. He returned to Holland a few days later and over dinner he informed his wife, Joki, of his experience.

“After four days [in Israel] he came home and he asked me to go with him for dinner because he had to tell me something,” Joki says. “When he told me the whole story about what happened to him in Israel and how God spoke to him, I immediately felt peace in my heart.”

Despite being supportive of her husband, Joki says that it took time before they were finally ready to make the leap of faith into such a radically new life.

“I said we seriously have to check if it’s really what we have to do,” says Joki. “To go to Israel and leave everybody and the kids behind? So that was a [concern] in my heart. And fortunately Bart agreed. So we checked with friends and family and after two years we went.”

WHEN REPKO first arrived in Israel, he says that taking those first few steps toward realizing his mission wasn’t easy.

“I was very insecure,” he says. “I was looking around to see if tourists would see me or hear me. [In Holland] my reputation was very esteemed. I had a career, a profession, and suddenly I was finished with my reputation. And suddenly I was crying out on the walls saying to God, ‘Let me remind you!’” But Repko persisted, even amid the skeptical concerns of some of those close to him, and eventually he acquired a following.

Now, seven years later, he has become a permanent fixture in the Old City of Jerusalem, with vendors and residents stopping to greet him as “Watchman.” And his fame extends beyond the borders of the Old City.

Tourists travel from all over the world to join him on his “watchman activity,” which meets every morning (except Saturday) at the Jaffa Gate at 8:45. From there they walk up the narrow winding steps to the ancient ramparts of the Old City, Bibles in hand, ready to proclaim the word of God.

The activity is a spiritually-charged hybrid between religious touring and Bible study, where Repko and the participants read passages from the Old and New Testament, often prophetic in nature, and usually pertaining to the biblical connection between the Jewish people and the Land of Israel, and the Jews’ status as “the chosen people.”

“You, Jerusalem, Zion, will be called by a new name,” Repko says, paraphrasing from the passage in Isaiah 62. “You will become a crown of splendor. No longer will they call you deserted or name your land Israel desolate. But you will be called Hephzibah – my delight is in her – and your land Beulah, married, for the Lord will take delight in you.”

Repko stops reading to address the audience in his own words.

“And guys, we are not talking about the church....

This is not Deutschland, or Australia or Holland, this is Israel. We like to say that the church is the bride of choice, but you are mistaken! ...No guys, Israel is God’s bride of choice!” As Repko sermonizes, his face contorts and he gestures with his entire body. His audience punctuates his speech with the occasional “hallelujah,” or “amen,” which echo off the stone walls and through the streets. And as he continues, another theme emerges: the call for Christians to repent for their treatment of Jews throughout history.

“Read your history books, guys. Did we prepare the way for the Jewish people?” he asks. “No! We blew it! We blew it for 2,000 years. We invented the replacement theology. We were the Crusades. The Holocaust happened in Christian Europe. While this crazy Austrian housepainter killed every Jew in Europe, we were just singing our hymns.... That’s why we are standing up and saying, ‘Church! Wake up!’” REPKO’S ATTACK on replacement theology, which is the belief that Christianity superseded Judaism with the revelation of the New Testament, has earned him opponents within the Christian community, who view his ideas as radical. But Repko doesn’t pretend to be politically correct, and instead subscribes to what is commonly referred to as “dual-covenant theology,” a controversial belief system within the Christian community which recognizes God’s covenant with Abraham as recorded in the Bible, thereby exempting the Jewish people from the need to accept Jesus as the messiah, while still calling on the rest of the gentile world to adopt Christianity.

“Churches find it difficult, what I am doing,” Repko says, “because I am challenging them on the replacement theology, so I am a pain in the neck. But within the churches there are many individual believers who understand that things have to be changed. They understand the history and that their hands are stained with blood.”

And according to Repko, the number of those believers is growing.

When he first began walking the walls in 2006, Repko says that it was just him and a smattering of tourists and friends. Now, he says, his daily group sometimes totals more than 70 people. In the seven years since he started, he estimates that he’s led somewhere between 25,000 and 35,000 people on the watchman activity.

Repko says that the vast majority of them have been supportive of his message.

“It’s very exciting and inspiring,” says Melanie, a young woman visiting from Germany with her boyfriend, Friedbert. They have only been in Israel for two days, and this is already their second time on Repko’s tour.

“One can learn so much just by listening to him,” Melanie says. “He can really express what’s in his heart.”

Another man, a Christian from Houston, Texas, dressed in a plaid shirt and blue jeans with tzitzit (ritual fringes) attached to his belt loops, says that he’s been joining Repko on his walks for nearly two months.

“I just felt the call to come to Jerusalem and I couldn’t shake the drawing, so I came,” he says. “I didn’t know why, but maybe this is why.”

Though Repko says that most people on his tour are receptive to his message, he does admit that there have been some dissenters, mostly evangelist Christians who view proselytizing to Jews as a holy mission.

“When a nice evangelist comes and says ‘Stop this! They need Jesus!’ I tell them to stop. It makes me very upset,” Repko says.

“What I explain to them is that, ‘Guys, we “welcomed” the Jews for 2,000 years and look at the way we welcomed them. They hardly survived our house in Europe. Now Hashem gave them their own land, please let them decide for themselves. Are we still coming to their house and telling them how they should be?’” BECAUSE OF the sensitivity involved in communicating his message to a diverse range of opinionated people, Repko has instituted a very strict rule – prayer is not allowed on his tour.

“We pray, but not on the walls,” he says. “That may be a little strange... [but] I say ‘Don’t pray because you make them [the prayers] up!’ It may be beautiful, but I want to stick to the word. We read the word of God and just choose to remind Hashem of his promises.”

His strictness with respect to this rule is made evident toward the end of his tour when a bearded Christian man dressed in denim asks to say a few words, then launches into an improvised prayer to Yeshua, or Jesus, before Repko cuts him off with a wave of the hand.

“We don’t do that,” Repko says. “Do it in your prayer house, or the church, but here we do it in a different way... and I need to be stern, guys, because if I let it go more people will follow... and God told me not to. Not the Roman Christian way, we do it the Jewish biblical way.”

Another unusual aspect of his strategy is that Repko doesn’t charge for the watchman activity, and doesn’t even collect tips.

Even his website, NeverBeSilent.org, lacks a simple donate feature.

“We don’t do fund-raisers, we don’t send letters. We will never ask for money. You really need to be smart to find us.”

However, Repko says that enough people have found him and donated money to his cause that he is able to live “comfortably,” even without the traditional methods of fund-raising.

“To my surprise, people are supporting us, people who I don’t even know... so I consider it a heavenly, divine confirmation of what we do.”

Despite this confirmation, Repko says that he does sometimes have doubts.

“I’m a human being so I have my doubts, especially when I am criticized very strongly by leaders.... But it’s never longer than an hour. Then I start opening my Bible and I rejoice.”

ONE OF the more practical difficulties that Repko faces is with his status as a tourist, which forces him to leave the country every three months.

But in the end, he says, he doesn’t regret his circumstances.

“I’m grateful to do what I do. I don’t consider it a burden but a privilege.”

His wife, Joki, agrees with him, and has since found her own mission in Israel – helping the poor of the city of Sderot through the Christian organization Yad L’ami, which is run by a Dutch couple living in Israel.

“In Sderot, many people are traumatized because of the Kassam rockets and there are few jobs and no money for many people, and really the situation is very hard there,” Joki says.

“So we try to embrace them by giving them coupons, which are sponsored by families in Holland.”

Joki says she still likes to accompany her husband on his walks, and joined him every day for the first three years, but eventually found the activity to be both spiritually and physically demanding, causing her to seek her own path.

And though Bart also expresses the occasional weariness, he has no plans to retire any time soon. When asked how long he will keep up his mission, he produces a hearty laugh and says: “Until the Moshiach [the Messiah] comes.” •

Responding to a revelation urging him to walk the walls of the Old City, Bart Repko left his home in Holland and moved to Jerusalem, where he leads daily groups and practices an unconventional form of Christianity.