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ELLIS ISLAND — In a scripture-laced address yesterday afternoon, Reverend Rich Cizik, Vice President for Governmental Affairs for the National Association of Evangelicals, announced a sweeping new initiative to house displaced Iraqi refugees of all faiths in the largest church facilities in the U.S., and among parishioners. The campaign, called “Operation Redemption,” is expected to kick off a wave of similar programs among other religious denominations.

“Do not forget to entertain strangers,” said Rev. Cizik, citing the Bible verse Hebrews 13:2 to a crowd of several hundred, “for by so doing some people have entertained angels without knowing it.” Flanked by pastors from some of the nation’s largest evangelic congregations, Cizik laid out details of the ambitious plans to reporters during a ceremony at the base of Ellis Island, off lower Manhattan. Cizik was joined by the pastor of a large Jersey City Iraqi Chaldean Christian congregation, Rabbi David M. Posner of New York’s Temple Emanu-El, and Imam Mohammad Shamsi Ali, leader of the Islamic Cultural Center, New York’s largest mosque.

“The Federal government has moved with painful sloth to succor the two million Iraqis cast into exile because of our warfare,” said Cizik, as he showed a graph displaying the distribution of Iraqi refugees throughout the Middle East. “Peace will let many return, yet the road to rebuild is a long one. It is for all these reasons that we announce a coordinated policy of sanctuary and asylum for Iraqi families of all faiths desiring to relocate to the homeland.”

Before the question and answer period, the press corps was treated to a performance by the Boys Choir of Harlem, who sang “Amazing Grace” and “Go Down Moses” while holding the American and Iraqi flags side by side, with a model of a single white dove in the middle. Angelina Jolie, a goodwill ambassador to the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees, gave a brief address via telecast applauding the Association’s commitment, and thanking them for doing what she called “God’s work.”

Although the Iraq refugee crisis has been dramatically underreported, including by the Times, it is called the largest refugee crisis in the world according to Refugees International, and is at least four times larger than that which resulted in the Palestinian diaspora in 1948. Beyond the more than two million Iraqis who fled to neighboring countries following the U.S. invasion in March of 2003, another 2.5 million have been displaced within Iraq.

The National Association of Evangelicals is the first major U.S. religious association to announce such a sweeping policy of material assistance for Iraqi refugees following the announcement of the U.S. withdrawal.

“Needless to say, we were shocked and surprised, but pleasantly so,” said António Guterres, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. “The international community has long been frustrated by the U.S. government’s unwillingness to accept a greater portion of refugees from this conflict of its own making. We hope this unprecedented commitment by one of America’s largest church groups will speed up the healing process that is desperately needed to sustain peace.”

Details of the initiative were outlined by Reverend Cizik, who said the Association would be committing over $700 million towards the campaign. The organization has asked members to increase the share of income they regularly give as “tithings” to the church from 10 percent to 15 percent to cover the costs of feeding, housing, and providing services to an estimated one million newly arrived Iraqi immigrants.

A number of large congregations have signed up under a “sister-city” framework in which they will feed, house, and provide job support and English classes for up to 1,000 families from a given Iraqi city. Left-leaning churches first forged sister-city relationships with towns, cities, and churches in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala, during the brutal Central American civil wars of the 1980s that pushed millions of political and economic refugees to relocate to the United States. This is the first known example of Evangelical churches adopting the model.

“Our church is going to have a lot of families from Karbala,” said Melanie Snickles, 17, of Bayside, Queens. “I didn’t really know where that was until our pastor showed us all on a map, but I think it’s going to be pretty cool. I already have a pen pal, a girl my age. Her name is Nour, and she lives with her family in Damascus. They’re going to stay at our church recreation center until we find them an apartment.”