Bush visits Israel's Holocaust memorial

US president George Bush arrived at Israel’s official Holocaust memorial today, visiting exhibits that detail the Nazi extermination of European Jews.

The Yad Vashem memorial was closed to the public and under heavy guard, with soldiers standing on top of some of the site’s monuments and a police helicopter and surveillance blimp hovering in the air overhead.

It was Mr Bush’s second visit to the Holocaust memorial, a regular stop on the visits of foreign dignitaries. His first was in 1998, as governor of Texas. The last US president to visit was Bill Clinton in 1994.

Mr Bush was accompanied on his tour by a small party that included secretary of state Condoleezza Rice and Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert.

At the compound, overlooking a forest on Jerusalem’s outskirts, Bush will also visit the Museum of Holocaust Art and the Children’s Memorial and lay a wreath in the Hall of Remembrance.

Yad Vashem’s director, Avner Shalev, will present Mr Bush with illustrations of the Bible drawn by Jewish artist Carol Deutsch, who perished in the Holocaust.

Mr Deutsch created the works while in hiding from the Nazis in Belgium. He was informed upon, and died in 1944 in the Buchenwald camp.

After the war, his daughter Ingrid discovered that the Nazis had confiscated their furniture and valuables, but had left behind a single item: a meticulously-crafted wooden box adorned with a Star of David and a seven-branched menorah, containing a collection of 99 of the artist’s illustrations of biblical scenes.

The originals are on display at Yad Vashem. The memorial recently decided to produce a special series of 500 replicas, the first of which was to be presented to Mr Bush.

Debbie Deutsch-Berman, a Yad Vashem employee whose grandfather was Mr Deutch’s brother, said she was proud that Mr Bush would be given her relative’s artwork.

“These are not just his paintings, they are his legacy, and the fact that they survived shows that as much as our enemies tried to destroy the ideas that these paintings embody, they failed,” she said.

Later, Bush will wrap up his three-day visit to Israel and the Palestinian territories with a visit to Christian holy sites in Galilee before departing for Kuwait, the next stop on his Middle East tour.