JTA — A major Jerusalem soccer team made an unusual announcement last week: It would give a new cafe free advertising on players’ uniforms for the coming season.

Cafe Basimta was facing harassment from Haredi Orthodox protesters who wanted it to close on Shabbat, and Hapoel Jerusalem said it wanted to send the message that Jerusalem is “an open and diverse city, where there is room for everyone.”

But on Tuesday, Hapoel Jerusalem reversed course and retracted the offer, after learning via an inquiry from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that Cafe Basimta is an official project of Jews for Jesus.

“Our original intention was simply to support a small business that was being denied its freedom of operation, and we still believe in that principle,” club spokesperson Matan Avrina told JTA. “However, we also realized that this specific story is more complex than we initially knew.”

For the secular Israelis who have flocked to Cafe Basimta in response to the protests, too, the revelation of the cafe’s ties to a Christian missionary organization is complicating what had seemed like a simple skirmish in the city’s culture war over businesses open on the Jewish day of rest.

“I don’t know if it changes my desire to drink their coffee, but it definitely complicates things,” Gabriel, an American studying in Jerusalem for the year, told JTA on Saturday from the cafe’s long line after learning about the Jews for Jesus connection, as protesters yelled. “It’s one layer deeper than I thought.”

Others say the cafe’s Christian character is irrelevant to their defense of Cafe Basimta.

“I understand they hate Jews for Jesus, and I understand what they hate them for,” said Jerusalem’s deputy mayor Adir Schwartz, who is a prominent defender of the city’s secular sector, in an interview. “My father was a rabbi abroad, and I get that they feel they are protecting Jewish continuity. But this is about belonging in our shared city.”

Yoel Ben David, the cafe’s operator as well as Jews for Jesus’s top official in Jerusalem, says the twin culture wars have been good for business.

“Even though financially it’s great, me and the staff, we don’t love it,” he told JTA from his cafe on Saturday. “We’d all love it to just chill out.”

At first, the tensions over Cafe Basimta seemed straightforward: In a city where 46% of Jews are Haredi, or ultra-Orthodox, and only 13% identify as secular, the inverse of Israel as a whole, here was a rare cafe willing to flout religious authorities and open on Shabbat. A handful of such cafes dot the city, but others have given up on Shabbat hours in the past over pressure from religious authorities.

Cafe Basimta, which means “cafe in the alley,” opened at the end of May in the Nahlaot neighborhood of central Jerusalem. The name refers to the neighborhood’s 19th-century stone dwellings toppling into one another along tiny streets. Decades ago a center of the city’s bohemian culture, Nahlaot is now increasingly Haredi and there are few if any establishments open on Shabbat.

On July 4, the first........

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