Opinion: Barack Obama visits Israel’s Holocaust museum

This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.

Barack Obama paid a solemn visit this morning to Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust museum, laying a white flower wreath on a memorial to Jews killed by the Nazis.

“Let our children come here and know this history so they can add their voices to proclaim never again,” Obama wrote in the Jerusalem museum’s guest book.

Obama’s second visit to the museum — his first was in 2006 — came after he met privately with Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak, the leader of the Labor Party, and Benjamin Netanyahu, leader of the Likud Party. Both are former prime ministers.

This afternoon, Obama will travel to Ramallah to meet with Palestinian leaders, then fly by helicopter to the southern Israeli town of Sderot, the target of frequent Palestinian rocket attacks fired from the Gaza Strip.

At the Jerusalem museum, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president wore a yarmulke for a brief ceremony before a flame commemorating those who died in Treblinka, Buchenwald and other Nazi concentration camps. Obama laid the wreath on a stone slab that covers the ashes of Holocaust victims.

--Michael Finnegan