Wednesday 13 July 2022 05:57 PM Biden hugs two Holocaust survivors as he wraps first afternoon in Israel trends now

President Joe Biden wrapped up his first afternoon in Israel by spending time with two American Holocaust survivors at Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial. 

Both Rina Quint and Gita Sikovich immigrated to the U.S. after surviving Nazi leader Adolf Hitler's concentration camps.  

Yad Vashem is Israel's official memorial to the victims of the Holocaust.

While there, Biden rekindled the Eternal Flame and laid a wreath on a slab under which ashes of Holocaust victims from the extermination camps are buried.

Biden sported a traditional yarmulke for the ceremony Wednesday afternoon in Jerusalem, Isreal.  

The Ankor Children's Choir sang an Cantor Shmuel Berlad recited El Maleh Rachamim, a Jewish prayer for those who died Holocaust.

Quint, 86, was just 10 years old when she arrived in the United States after World War II.

'I didn't have a home until then, my whole family perished, and in the U.S., I was adopted by a wonderful family,' she told YnetNews, a local Israeli news outlet.

'I'm very lucky to meet the president, it is a real closure. When I arrived, I was a scared little girl and I didn't know how to read or write. Now, I'm meeting the most important person in the world, it's pretty amazing.'

Quint was born in December 1935 as Freida Lichtenstein in the city of Piotrkow Tribunalski, Poland.

Her mother and two brothers were murdered in October 1942 in the Treblinka extermination camp. 

Quint was deported with her father, who later died. 

She had to pretend to be a boy to survive.

Sikovich, 95, was born in 1927 in the town of Khust on the Carpathian Mountains in what is now Ukraine.

She told YnetNews she was 'very excited' to meet the president.

She and her family were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in 1944. After five months, Sikovich and her sister Helen were transferred to various labor camps and eventually released. 

She and her sister were reunited with their older sister and mother. 

The family later moved to the United States.

Biden's trip to the Holocaust memorial follows a tour of Israel's new Iron Dome and Iron Beam Air Defense Systems. 

He fist-bumped Israeli leaders as he arrived Wednesday afternoon in Tel Aviv after the White House was forced to confirm Israeli media reports that said the U.S. president would limit shaking hands during his first trip to the Middle East. 

The White House said it was an uptick in COVID cases - and not forthcoming interactions with the controversial Saudi crown prince - that triggered the decision to limit Biden shaking hands. 

And so upon his arrival at the Ben Gurion Airport, Biden went down the line of Israel's leaders - including President Isaac Herzog, caretaker Prime Minister Yair Lapid and alternate Prime Minister Naftali Bennett - and gave them each a fist pound, though Bennett got an additional shoulder rub. 

'This is both a historic visit and a deeply personal one,' Lapid said at the arrival ceremony, where he spoke of the 'need to renew a strong global coalition that will stop the Iranian nuclear problem.' 

Biden said it was a an honor to visit the 'independent Jewish state state of Israel,' calling the U.S. relationship with the nation 'deeper and stronger, in my view, than it's ever been.'   

'We reaffirm the unshakable commitment to United States-Israel security, including partnering with Israel on the most cutting-edge defense systems in the world,' Biden said. 

He also reaffirmed U.S. support for a two-state solution, though he admitted it 'isn't in the near term.' 

After Biden's remarks, the president became more handsy with the leaders, shaking Bennett's hand and then gripping the hand of former Israeli Prime Minister and opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu for several seconds.