After the Sonesta Hotel in Nashville reneged on housing as many as 400 attendees of the upcoming Israel Summit planned for next week, financial adviser and radio personality Dave Ramsey stepped forward to offer accommodations and welcome even more guests.
The Israel Guys, HaYovel, Israel365 and Keep God’s Land are sponsoring an inaugural event called The Israel Summit with a schedule of events running from May 20 to May 22. In the week before the event, the hotel, citing safety concerns, caved to pressure from anti-Israel activists and bowed out of its contract.
Israel365 reported that the hotel consulted with local police who “were concerned that the hotel, their guests, local businesses and attendees to the Israel Summit would be in physical danger due to the threatening nature of the calls and messages they received.”
Joshua Waller, a host of the Israel Guys podcast, told The Daily Wire that “Dave Ramsey reached out and said, ‘You’re going to have it at my place, and we’re going to take this event to a whole new level and make it 10 times what it was before.’”
The summit will now move from Nashville to nearby Franklin, Tenn., where Ramsey Solutions is headquartered. “All of the details have come together, and the event is skyrocketing in numbers,” said Waller.
He described how the news attention had caused “the stage that we had planned for our Israeli friends” to grow “so much bigger than we could have ever dreamed of.”
Speakers include Knesset member Ohad Tal; former Rep. Michelle Bachmann (R-Minn.); author, journalist and JNS columnist Caroline Glick; international spokesperson for the Jewish community of Hebron Yishai Fleisher; National Religious Broadcasters president Troy Miller; the Land of Israel Network’s Rabbis Jeremy Gimpel and Ari Abramowitz; Israel365 CEO Rabbi Tuly Weisz; and more. The summit also includes a concert featuring Israeli musician Yair Levi, a veteran of the Israeli Defense Forces’ Shayetet 13 unit, Israel’s equivalent to the Navy SEALs.
A statement from his company, Ramsey Solutions, said it was “proud to stand beside our friends from Israel by providing them a safe place to hold their event as our gift to them.”