It was Dec. 15, 2023, and a small Jewish Sabbath dinner was being held at a hotel in Phoenix, near Turning Point USA’s annual AmericaFest.

More than two months earlier, Hamas had invaded Israel, murdering approximately 1,200 people, and taking 251 others hostage.

Rabbi Pesach Wolicki, who lives in Israel, helped organize the dinner, which Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk joined. The two spoke about the importance of the Jewish Sabbath, or “Shabbat” in Hebrew, which Kirk, an Evangelical Christian, somewhat observed by shutting off his phone between sundown on Friday and sundown on Saturday.

Wolicki and Kirk would encounter each other again on a group call the day before Kirk was assassinated.

Kirk was known for campus tours where he would debate students on a wide range of topics. Among those topics was Israel, which had been seeing a hostile reception on campuses across the United States, especially in the aftermath of Oct. 7, 2023.

Ahead of his appearance before a crowd on campus in Utah, he had set up a mock session of questions on Israel. At the time, Kirk, a longtime defender of Israel, was facing criticism from his Jewish connections and fans for giving a platform to Tucker Carlson, who had staked out an anti-Israel position.

“He would get asked more questions about Israel than any other topic by far, and it drove him nuts. He hated that because the way he put it was, ‘I’m not an expert on Israel. That’s not the topic I want to talk about. I come to the campuses to talk about America,’” Wolicki told The Epoch Times. “And he would get bombarded with questions about Israel.” Citing Kirk’s producers, Wolicki said about half the questions that Kirk got on campus tours were about Israel.

Kirk created a WhatsApp group that had fewer than 10 people, including Wolicki. He named the group “Saving Civilization.”

“I hadn’t spoken to him since that first time I met him, but the reason he reached out to me to add me to the WhatsApp group, there were people in his circle who knew me, so it didn’t come totally out of the blue,” Wolicki said in a video interview on Aug. 21.

The group also consisted of one of his producers “and some other people,” according to Wolicki, who declined to disclose who else took part in the chat.

One of the conversations concerned a narrative during the war in Gaza that Israel was starving the Gazans and that there was not enough food going into the Hamas-controlled area—an accusation Wolicki called a “hoax.” When Kirk suggested that Israel should surge assistance into Gaza, Wolicki said that was what Israel had been doing. Kirk told Wolicki to prove that it was a hoax.

Wolicki did his research, with statistics refuting the starvation claims, writing a 4,000-word article for the Gatestone Institute, a non-partisan think tank. He shared his findings with Kirk, who became convinced the claims were a hoax and went on his show to criticize them. Wolicki appeared on that August episode.

“He tweeted out that segment and got slammed by all the anti-Israel voices on the right for buying into Jewish propaganda, and he got attacked. And the American Conservative, run by Curt Mills and that gang, those Buchananites, they wrote an article attacking Charlie Kirk for that segment … [and] his relationship to me,” Wolicki said.

The article, Wolicki said, “tells you how triggered they were by Charlie’s relationship to me and the fact that Charlie was taking a strong pro-Israel position on an issue.”

Wolicki mentioned an eight-page letter Kirk wrote to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in May, giving advice on how Israel can improve its messaging amid the Jewish state coming under fire worldwide. The Epoch Times has reached out to Netanyahu’s office for comment.

A Quinnipiac poll released a month after Kirk sent the letter to Netanyahu found that 64 percent of Republicans said their sympathies lay with the Israelis—a 14-point decrease from the previous year. Support for Israel among Democrats was at just 12 percent—an 18-point drop from 2024. Six in 10 Democrats sympathized with the Palestinians, compared with 7 percent of Republicans.

The Final Call

A few weeks before Kirk was to kick off a campus tour that started on Sept. 10, 2025, at Utah Valley University in Orem, his office asked Wolicki to join Kirk on a Zoom call about Israel the day before the tour.

Kirk wanted the call to be the day before because, due to fast-moving developments, he wanted any information about Israel to be as current as possible. Kirk’s office gave Wolicki a list of the 20 most frequently asked questions Kirk was likely to get about Israel, so he could prepare talking points for him. Wolicki also addressed other issues related to the news of the day surrounding Israel.

In addition to Wolicki, there were five other people on the call including conservative commentator Josh Hammer. Hammer, a contributor to The Epoch Times, declined to be interviewed for this story.

Wolicki said the hour-and-a-half call consisted of walking through the questions Kirk’s staff prepared for the rabbi.

As “the conversation flowed in and out” and “went on tangents, like any normal conversation talking about things,” Wolicki would share the argumentation on some of the talking points and Kirk would say whether he was comfortable saying something a certain way.

“This is how he prepared for those famous campus things where he’s got all this information and arguments at his fingertips,” Wolicki said. “It’s because of a lot of prep. He would prep on every issue he expected to be asked about.”

During the Sept. 9 call, Kirk was in “debate mode” and the participants on the call put on a mock debate so he could be prepared for any pushback he might encounter from questioners, according to Wolicki.

“It was gaming out interactions that he would have on campus about Israel,” he said. “It was a very cordial call.”

One of the issues discussed was U.S. assistance to Israel.

“Most pro-Israel people will talk about what America gains from the aid, and I think that’s a losing argument. Charlie agreed with me because if you tell a MAGA young person who doesn’t want their money going to Israel that ‘no, no, no, don’t worry, your tax, your money’s not going to Israel. It’s going to the military-industrial complex instead,’ that doesn’t make them feel better,” said Wolicki.

Wolicki and Kirk agreed that Israel should no longer get aid from the United States.

Wolicki recalled that Kirk “was in a good mood” and “excited to get out on the road.”

It would be the last time the two men spoke.

During the Utah Valley University event, a gunman opened fire, killing Kirk. Kirk was 31 years old.

When he heard the news of Kirk’s death, Wolicki was in a pastor’s office in Buffalo, New York. He was scheduled to be a guest speaker at a church that evening.

Wolicki said his reaction was “shock and disbelief.”

“The first place my mind went to after, kind of, it hitting me that he was killed was that it would lead to more fracturing of the MAGA coalition because Charlie was so critical to keeping that coalition together,” he said.

“I would argue that in the MAGA coalition, he was probably the single most important person holding that coalition together.”

Tyler Robinson, 23, has been charged with Kirk’s murder. He has pleaded not guilty.