Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Breaking News

Barcelona Soccer Star Lionel Messi Visits Western Wall on ‘Peace Tour’

Popular Argentinian soccer star Lionel Messi visited the Western Wall in Jerusalem and met with Israeli leaders.

Messi was in Israel with the Spanish soccer team Football Club Barcelona as part of the team’s “Peace Tour,” which included hosting skills clinics and games with Israeli and Palestinian children in order to promote peace.

The Barcelona team arrived Saturday and traveled to the West Bank to meet with Palestinian leaders and children.

On Sunday, the team donned yarmulkes to visit the Western Wall. While in Jerusalem they posed for a group photo with Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat. The team also met at the President´s Residence in Jerusalem with Israeli President Shimon Peres and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

“It’s a great honor to host Barcelona in a holy city like Jerusalem, with this visit a dream come true for Israeli and Palestinian children. They have two dreams: To score in Camp Nou (FC Barcelona’s soccer stadium) and peace between the two sides. Messi, Xavi, Iniesta and the rest of the players, I hope you teach us the tiki-taka style so that we learn how to score a goal for peace,” Peres said.

One month ago Messi sent a message to the Argentinian Maccabia team. “Very good luck to all of the team members participating in the games in Israel,” said Messi in a prerecorded video, aired in a farewell ceremony held in Buenos Aires.

Messi also participated in 2011 in a campaign for justice and memory of the victims of the 1994 AMIA Jewish center bombing.

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.

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.