Rabbi Meir Soloveichik Makes It To Trump’s Twitter Cover Photo

Donald Trump’s new Twitter cover photo featuring Rabbi Meir Yaakov Soloveichik at the White House Hanukkah reception Image by Screenshot

By Nathan Guttman December 8, 2017

Rabbi Meir Soloveichik is well known in Jewish circles.

But the scion of the great Soloveichik Orthodox rabbinical lineage who is currently the rabbi of New York’s Congregation Shearith Israel, America’s oldest synagogue, will now be exposed to a much larger audience. In fact, more than 44 million people around the world will get a chance to see him as they open Donald Trump’s Twitter page for the daily presidential tweets.

Soloveichik led the menorah lighting ceremony during Trump’s White House Hanukkah reception Thursday night. And although the president struggled to pronounce his name, telling the crowd: “You think that’s an easy one? It’s not,” the president must have been impressed by the young rabbi and the ceremony.

On Friday morning, Trump decided to highlight the event by making it his twitter cover photo. And so, at least until the next change, the official twitter account of the President of the United States features a rabbi, a Jewish Holocaust survivor, and the president’s Jewish daughter, son-in-law and grandchildren, participating in a Hanukkah celebration.

Contact Nathan Guttman at [email protected] or on Twitter @nathanguttman

Nathan Guttman, staff writer, was the Forward’s Washington bureau chief. He joined the staff in 2006 after serving for five years as Washington correspondent for the Israeli dailies Haaretz and The Jerusalem Post. In Israel, he was the features editor for Ha’aretz and chief editor of Channel 1 TV evening news. He was born in Canada and grew up in Israel. He is a graduate of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.

Now more than ever, American Jews need independent news they can trust, with reporting driven by truth, not ideology. We serve you, not any ideological agenda.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.

Readers like you make it all possible. We’ve started our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we need 1,800 readers like you to step up to support the Forward by April 21. Members of the Forward board are even matching the first 1,000 gifts, up to $70,000.

This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism, because every dollar goes twice as far.

— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO