The mystery of Trump envoy's missing yarmulke
Israeli ultra-Orthodox became preoccupied with the faith of US envoy Jason Greenblatt after he made public appearances without a yarmulke.
US President Donald Trump’s representative for international negotiations, Jason Greenblatt, landed in Israel two weeks ago, on March 12. The religious and ultra-Orthodox sectors were surprised to see that Greenblatt, a yarmulke-wearing Orthodox Jew for all intents and purposes, attended public meetings with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, President Reuven Rivlin, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and other leaders without a yarmulke. The religious media in Israel wondered where it had gone.
Yonatan Dov Greenblatt, his Israeli name, has been a close associate of Trump’s for nearly two decades, working as a legal adviser for the Trump Group, and has his trust and confidence. Trump was once quoted as saying that the only kind of people he wanted counting his money were “little short guys that wear yarmulkes every day.” Greenblatt appeared to be among them.
Greenblatt, a graduate of the Har Etzion Yeshiva, a rabbinical college in the West Bank Elon Shvut settlement, later studied at Yeshiva University in New York. He is usually seen wearing a black yarmulke. In the Jewish religious world, a black yarmulke signifies that the person is ultra-Orthodox. If anyone thought that Greenblatt not wearing a yarmulke indicated that he had left religious Judaism, it became clear that this was definitely not the case after his second meeting with Netanyahu. At the end of the talk, Greenblatt organized a minyan, the quorum of 10 men required for prayer, for the Kaddish, the prayer ritual observed for a year after the death of a next of kin, to which he recruited Netanyahu and his staff.
In fact, a few days earlier, while en route to Israel, Greenblatt had posted a photo on his Twitter page taken at a synagogue in Germany and wrote, “Time for morning prayer at unexpected stop in Frankfurt. Pray for peace.”
