Rally for Pollard
Rally for PollardHezki Ezra

Signs of support for Jonathan Pollard’s release continue full pace as United States President Barack Obama prepares to land in Israel. On Wednesday morning the town of Karmei Tzur in Judea named a new neighborhood for Pollard.

The neighborhood will be called Tzur Yonatan.

Gush Etzion regional council head Davidi Perl was at the celebration in honor of the new neighborhood, as was MK Shuli Moalem (Bayit Yehudi).

“We are all part of the struggle to bring Jonathan Pollard to Israel,” Perl said. “We all pray for him each Sabbath, and we reached the conclusion that now, as President Obama is here, we must raise our voices and tell him, ‘Let Jonathan come home.’”

More than 200,000 people have signed a petition calling on Obama to free Pollard, and Israel’s leaders are expected to call for his release as well. On Tuesday Obama received an emotional appeal on Pollard’s behalf from Gilad Shalit and another former captive.

On Wednesday yet another appeal for Pollard came from a women’s group that supports the Kever Rachel (Rachel’s Tomb) in Bethlehem.

The group noted that Obama would be visiting Bethlehem, Rachel’s burial place, and that according to Jewish tradition the biblical matriarch elicited a divine promise that the Jews would return to their land after exile. “We call on you in this letter to be part of the fulfillment of the divine promise to Rachel and the Jewish people: free Jonathan Pollard,” they wrote.

The group also called on Obama to glance out his window at Rachel’s Tomb as he passed by and to note the high walls around the complex “and think about the absurdity, and the humiliation – how Jews who come to pray and to cry to their mother at Rachel’s Tomb, one of the holiest places to the Jewish people, located just 361 meters from Jerusalem, are not safe despite the walls and fences, and are attacked daily with rocks and Molotov cocktails.”

“We ask you to appeal to the Palestinians in Bethlehem and all of Israel to immediately stop this war on the Jews and to start really thinking about peace,” they said.