According to the Jerusalem Post, several people who happened to be at Obama's unannounced, predawn appearance Thursday scrambled to find his missive among the many inserted in the wall. One man who grabbed a scrap of paper was disappointed to discover that it had been written in Spanish, the English-language Post reported.
Millions of people visit the 2,000-year-old wall each year, and many leave written prayers between its wide beige stones. Rabbi Rabinovitz and his team pull out the scraps of paper to make room for more, but do not read them. Jewish law considers the prayers to be holy texts and forbids their destruction; twice a year they are buried in containers on the Mount of Olives.
The tradition has been adopted by members of many faiths. Although visitors to the wall have included such celebrities as Madonna and Leonardo DiCaprio, voyeurism is rare. In one of the few known cases, a military reporter snatched a prayer deposited into the wall by the late Defense Minister Moshe Dayan just after Israel had seized the holy site from Jordan during the 1967 Middle East War.
Guy Mashiach, an Israeli attorney, said Obama probably knew what would happen to his prayer.
"Obama is intelligent enough to understand that in Israel, nothing remains private, discreet and secret for more than a few hours," he wrote to an online network hosted by the Haaretz newspaper's website. "Obama didn't fall into the trap of asking for John McCain's disappearance. [He] penned a remarkably beautiful note, as though he had known the note would go directly to one of the more tabloid-like papers."
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boudreaux@latimes.com
Times staff writer Michael Finnegan in London and Batsheva Sobelman of The Times' Jerusalem bureau contributed to this report.
