Bush’s Israel visit includes the spiritual

President Bush speaks freely about the importance of religion in his life. He also has made it clear that he does not favor playing the tourist.

On Friday, the spiritual side won out.

After two days of meetings with Israeli and Palestinian leaders, Bush took the day to focus on the horrors of the past -- as well as the joy delivered by his religion, brought to life during a walk through remnants of its earliest days.

On a five-hour emotional excursion, the president visited Yad Vashem, Israel’s memorial to the 6 million victims of the Holocaust. Then, walking where Jesus is said to have tended his ministry, he stood on the shores of the Sea of Galilee in northern Israel, nearly within sight of Lebanon and Syria.

As the day went on, his countenance lifted from grim and teary to a cheery demeanor that brought peels of giggles from a group of nuns.

“An amazing experience,” the president said of his walk atop Mt. Eremos, where Jesus is believed to have delivered his Sermon on the Mount.

After his visit to the Holocaust memorial, he expressed himself in much the same language he uses when he talks about Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.

“I would hope as many people in the world would come to this place. It would be a sobering reminder that evil exists, and a call that when we find evil we must resist,” he said.

Bush walked through several chambers at Yad Vashem, among them a memorial to the 1.5 million children who died in the Holocaust and the Hall of Names, a conical room that evokes the interior of a smokestack, its walls covered with photographs of 600 victims.

Among the photos are images of five children and a young woman, a teenage boy on a motorcycle, a man in a navy uniform, a boy of perhaps 6 and an old man with a white beard.

Beneath the photos are hundreds of binders containing the accounts of survivors and relatives of victims. Bush stood at the room’s entrance, his expression almost a grimace, lips clenched, mouth turned down at the sides as a guide spoke quietly.

The president, who visited Yad Vashem in 1998 on his only previous trip to Israel, spent two minutes in the room and was accompanied by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and President Shimon Peres.

In the Hall of Remembrance, two Marines carried a wreath of red and cream gerbera daisies to a stone slab covering victims’ ashes taken from six camps. The president, wearing a yarmulke, bent to adjust the wreath on the stone.

Later, the memorial’s chairman, Avner Shalev, said the president’s eyes grew moist twice during the tour, and that he asked Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice why the U.S. had not bombed Auschwitz during World War II to stop the slaughter.

Rice, who accompanied him on the tour, told reporters aboard Air Force One, as Bush flew to Kuwait to continue his eight-day tour of the Middle East and Persian Gulf, that she and the president talked about various explanations for not targeting the train tracks that had led to the Nazi camp in Poland.

At the Sea of Galilee, he walked onto a pier accompanied by two Franciscan friars and pointed south over the waters on which, according to the biblical account, Jesus walked.

The friars opened a Bible to pages marked with what looked like yellow Post-Its and read passages about the very place the president was standing.

Reading from notes of a conversation with Bush, White House Press Secretary Dana Perino said he found it “awe- inspiring to walk where Jesus lived and preached.”

Recalling the account of Jesus’ calming the seas, she said, “He was reminded of how prayer helps him and has helped him calm rough seas in his life and certainly in the White House.”

james.gerstenzang @latimes.com