Where Trump walked: Holy Land sites loom large on itinerary

When US President Donald Trump lands at Ben Gurion International Airport in Tel Aviv to visit Israel and the West Bank, he will not only hold talks with Israeli and Palestinian leaders, but also visit key sites religious and national sites, many of them freighted with meaning.

Church of the Holy Sepulchre

Located in the Old City of Jerusalem, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre contains a 19th-century shrine built on the site where tradition says Jesus was buried and resurrected.

The ornate shrine recently underwent a $3.7 million renovation that restored its stones to their original reddish-yellow and reinforced the heavily visited site.

The church draws tens of thousands of Christian pilgrims for the “Holy Fire” ceremony, the highlight of the Eastern Christian calendar, which takes place on the eve of Orthodox Easter.

One of Christianity’s holiest sites, the church is shared by six denominations: the Greek Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Armenian Orthodox, Egyptian Copts, Syrian Orthodox and Ethiopian Orthodox.

The Western Wall

The Western Wall is the last remnant of the supporting wall of the Second Temple, built by King Herod and destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE.

The holiest site where Jews can pray, the Western Wall is located in the Old City, which Israel captured during the 1967 Six Day War and later annexed.

It is situated below the Al-Aqsa mosque compound, Islam’s third holiest site, which is known in Judaism as the Temple Mount.

Prayer at the Western Wall adheres to Orthodox Jewish practice, which is gender-segregated Jewish prayer, and is administered by the ultra-Orthodox Rabbi Shmuel Rabinovitz, who will accompany Trump on his visit there.

Trump will be the first sitting US president to visit the site, where it is customary to place notes containing prayers and requests between the stones.

The White House reportedly refused to allow Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to join Trump at the site, known in Hebrew as the Kotel, although Trump said in an interview with Israel Hayom daily on Thursday that he had not ruled out the possibility of Netanyahu joining him at the Western Wall.

Israel sees all of Jerusalem as its undivided capital, while the Palestinians view East Jerusalem as the capital of their future state.

When Trump’s envoy to Israel David Friedman arrived to take up his position this month, his first act was to visit the Western Wall, where he prayed and kissed the ancient stones.

Yad Vashem

Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial museum, perched on a forested hillside in western Jerusalem, is among the world’s foremost Holocaust education, documentation and research centers.

The vast complex includes a variety of monuments, archives and displays, including the Hall of Names with its cone structure featuring pictures of Holocaust victims, and the Garden of the Righteous Among the Nations, where thousands of trees are dedicated to non-Jews who saved Jews during the Holocaust.

Dignitaries and celebrities visiting Israel nearly always find the time for Yad Vashem, which is the second-most visited site in Israel after the Western Wall.

Yad Vashem recently urged White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer to visit its website after he said that unlike the Syrian regime, Adolf Hitler did not use chemical weapons. Spicer later apologized for his “insensitive” remarks.

More than six million predominantly European Jews were killed during the Nazi genocide in World War II, many of them by poisonous gas.

Israel Museum

Not far from Yad Vashem is the Israel Museum, where Trump is set to deliver a speech, after the more exotic location of the desert fortress Masada was ruled out.

The museum boasts a collection of nearly 500,000 objects of art and archaeology, ancient and modern, including the Dead Sea Scrolls which date back more than two millennia and include some of the earliest texts from the Bible.

In 2013, then-president Barack Obama viewed the Dead Sea Scrolls at the museum in a move seen as a nod to the ancient roots of the Jewish state.

Bethlehem

Trump is also due to meet Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank city of Bethlehem.

It is the “little town” where Christians believe Jesus Christ was born and it attracts thousands of pilgrims at Christmas.

Located just 10 kilometers (six miles) from Jerusalem, it is the site of the Church of the Nativity, which contains an underground cave where Christians believe Mary gave birth to Jesus.

Times of Israel staff contributed to this report.