Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Fast Forward

Jared Kushner And Ivanka Trump To Attend Jerusalem Embassy Opening

WASHINGTON (JTA) — The official White House delegation for the opening of the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem will include President Trump’s daughter Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner, as well as Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin.

Kushner heads up the team seeking to restart Israeli-Palestinian talks. Other members of his team — Jason Greenblatt, the lead negotiator, and David Friedman, the U.S. ambassador to Israel — will also be present for the ceremony on May 14, the 70th  anniversary of Israel’s founding according to the Gregorian calendar.

Those five members of the delegation are Jewish.

Deputy Secretary of State John Sullivan completes the delegation and will lead the team, the White House said in a statement released Monday.

Trump had considered attending the embassy opening. The president has said he is proud of his Dec. 6 announcement on the relocation of the embassy from Tel Aviv. The move has led the Palestinians to abandon Kushner’s efforts to revive talks, at least temporarily.

Israel’s embassy in Washington, D.C., is planning its annual Independence Day party for the same day. The embassy party usually takes place on or near the Hebrew calendar anniversary of Israel’s 1948 independence, which this year was on April 19.

The new embassy grounds, on land in western Jerusalem but bordering eastern Jerusalem, are temporary. There are plans to build a permanent embassy, but it might take up to 10 years.

Ahead of the move, the U.S. Embassy’s twitter handle changed Monday to @usembassyjlm from @usembassytlv.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Explore

Most Popular

In Case You Missed It

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.