Bush, Rice at Yad Vashem

       US President George W. Bush was accompanied by US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, President Shimon Peres, and Yad Vashem chairman Yosef (Tommy) Lapid. The American president and Israel's leaders then heard a rabbi chant a special version of El Malei Rahamim [Oh G-d, Full of Mercy], the Jewish prayer for the dead, used on Holocaust remembrance ceremonies. Wearing a yarmulke, Bush placed a red-white-and-blue wreath on a stone slab that covers ashes of Holocaust victims taken from six extermination camps. He also lit a torch memorializing the victims. Bush was visibly moved during his hour-long tour of the site, said Yad Vashem's chairman, Avner Shalev. "Twice, I saw tears well up in his eyes," Shalev said. At one point, Bush viewed aerial photos of the Auschwitz death camp taken during the war by US forces and called Rice over to discuss why the American government under Roosevelt had decided against bombing the site, Shalev said. Rice explained that at the time the US did not think such a move would halt the extermination of the Jews. Shalev said on Army Radio that he "reiterated my own explanation: They did not want to deviate from the war's objective, didn't want to be seen as if they were fighting for the Jews. "Bush then paused for a moment to think, then said to me 'We should have bombed it,' " Shalev added. In the memorial's visitors' book, the president wrote simply, "God bless Israel, George Bush." Shalev presented Bush with illustrations of the Bible drawn by the Jewish artist Carol Deutsch, who perished in the Holocaust. Following his visit to Yad Vashem, Bush is expected to visit two of Christianity's holiest sites. The first is Capernaum, where Jesus of Nazareth met five of his apostles, and the second is the Church of the Beatitudes near the Kinneret, on a hilltop where Jesus is believed to have given the Sermon on the Mount, outlining the basic tenets of the Christian faith. Several Galilee roads will be closed between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. because of the presidential motorcade. In the early afternoon, Bush will leave for Ben Gurion Intenrational Airport, from which, after a brief ceremony, he will take off to Kuwait aboard Air Force One. (12,19)