About two dozen members of the city’s Jewish community gathered to watch the ceremony, and Obama greeted them afterward. Taking his extended hand, a woman told him, “It’s the only Jewish state we have and we trust you.”
Last week in his speech at the State Department, Obama called for Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations to begin based on the boundaries that existed on the eve of the June 1967 Arab-Israeli War.
He made clear a final agreement over territory would likely include land exchanges to accommodate Israeli settlements in the West Bank. But his proposal angered Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who called those prewar lines “indefensible.”
“I will always be there for Israel,” Obama told the woman.
To a man in a kipa, the Jewish skullcap, Obama also said, “We will always be there,” another likely reference to U.S. support for Israel. “I promise.”
The White House said the visit to the memorial, which concluded with a group photograph of Obama with the Jewish audience, had been planned well before the State Department speech. Obama promised to get the photo to all of those in it with him.
The exchange at the historic site of Jewish persecution began a presidential visit meant in part to mend relations with Central and Eastern Europe, a region that has great affection for the United States for its role in World War II and anti-Soviet position in the following decades.
But some of the region’s leaders worry that Obama, in his eagerness to “reset” relations with Russia, has placed Russian interests above their own. Obama met Friday evening with the leaders of 18 European nations, the majority of them from Central and Eastern Europe, to assure them of his commitment to their security.
Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, the National Security Council’s senior director for European affairs, said the purpose of the leaders’ dinner was “finishing the unfinished business of Europe in the post-Cold War era.”
She said Obama also wanted to hear from the leaders — here for a summit of their own — about the democratic transitions that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall, in light of the uprisings challenging long-standing autocracies in North Africa and the Middle East.
“These countries that moved along towards democracy at the end of the Cold War have great experience to share with those countries that have not yet made that transition,” Sherwood-Randall told reporters.
Obama arrived here from Deauville, France, where the Group of Eight summit concluded Friday with a call to encourage democratic reform in North Africa and the Middle East.
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