By Felicia Schwartz
Israel’s minister for the Jewish diaspora defended President Trump from criticism related to the Pittsburgh shooting, calling it unfair and wrong to associate him with the weekend massacre.
The closeness between Israel’s conservative government and the Trump administration has exacerbated a rift between Israel and many American Jews, a majority of whom belong to liberal streams of Judaism, known as the Conservative and Reform movements.
Many American Jews have criticized Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government for its policies and for their official exclusion by the Israeli Rabbinate, which controls issues such as the governing of holy places and religious conversion.
“Any attempt to blame President Trump for this horrific attack is simply wrong and unfair,” the diaspora minister, Naftali Bennett, told The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday. “President Trump has shown to be a great friend of Israel and the Jewish people.”
Mr. Bennett traveled to the U.S. to offer support and assistance to America’s Jewish community after the mass shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue on Saturday, in which 11 people were killed.
Mr. Trump has been blamed for emboldening extremists with his rhetoric, and Pittsburgh officials and some American Jews had urged him to cancel a trip to Pittsburgh on Tuesday, where he visited the temple and a hospital.
Marchers in a public protest during the visit carried signs reading “No place for hate” and “We do bridges not walls.”
Some critics say Mr. Trump’s comments while in office, including blaming both sides last year for violence during a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, have contributed to an atmosphere in which anti-Semitic attacks in the U.S. are on the rise.
Trump administration officials have pushed back on the notion that Mr. Trump has stoked extremism. His aides have noted that his daughter, son-in-law and grandchildren are Jewish.
Mr. Netanyahu encouraged unity among the Jewish community in the wake of the shooting.
“Jews were killed in a synagogue. They were killed because they are Jews. The location was chosen because it is a synagogue. We must never forget that. We are one,” he said.
Mr. Trump is overwhelmingly popular in Israel, owing to policy decisions including moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem and declaring it Israel’s capital.
But such moves haven’t garnered similar favor with American Jews: 74% of American Jews plan to vote for Democrats in the coming midterm elections and 75% disapprove of Mr. Trump’s policies, according to a recent poll conducted by American polling firm the Mellman group on behalf of the nonpartisan Jewish Electorate Institute.
In an illustration of tensions between generally more liberal Jews in America and those in Israel, Israel’s Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi David Lau on Sunday referred to the site of the Pittsburgh shooting as “a place of prominent Jewish character,” rather than a synagogue, in an interview with Mashor Rikon, a right-wing Israeli weekly.
Ahead of Mr. Trump’s visit, more than 35,000 people signed an open letter to Mr. Trump from leaders of a Pittsburgh-based progressive Jewish group, which said the president wouldn’t be welcome unless he denounced white nationalism and stopped targeting minorities.
Other members of Pittsburgh’s Jewish community welcomed Mr. Trump, telling him in a letter that “your support of Israel and American Jewry is appreciated, especially in the face of the virulent anti-Semitism our community suffered just days ago.”
U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman said in Tel Aviv on Wednesday that Jews must not be divided by the Pittsburgh massacre. “We can never allow ourselves to be divided over the pointless exercise of assigning blame to anyone but the killer himself,” he said.
Mr. Trump said on Twitter Wednesday that he and his wife were treated very nicely during their Tuesday visit and that they didn’t see any protesters.
—Dov Lieber contributed to this article.
