TEL AVIV – Vice President Mike Pence and his wife on Tuesday visited the Western Wall in Jerusalem’s Old City a few hours before he was due to leave the country.
Pence, who said a prayer and placed a note in the wall, said he felt “inspired” to be there.
The site was closed off for four hours to accommodate Pence and his delegation, which included U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman and President Donald Trump’s special Mideast envoy Jason Greenblatt.
Before taking a moment to pray, Pence and his wife Karen received a short explanation regarding Jewish historical ties to the site, which is one of Judaism’s holiest.
He then uttered some Scripture in a special tent erected for the occasion. After touching the stones of the wall for a brief moment, Pence received a stone menorah from Western Wall officials.
In the past year, both U.S. Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley and President Donald Trump broke from the unofficial American policy of not visiting the site.
On Sunday, Pence gave a landmark address at the Knesset in which he vowed the Trump administration would relocate the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem by the end of 2019, called on the Palestinians to return to negotiations and pledged that unless it was “fixed,” his country would scrap the “disastrous” Iran nuclear deal.