Newly elected Argentine president announces trip to US, Israel before taking office

By Laura Gamba

BOGOTA, Colombia (AA) - Argentina's president-elect Javier Milei has said that he will travel to the US and Israel before he assumes office on Dec. 10.

Milei said that his trip to the US will have “a spiritual connotation,” since he will travel to Miami and New York to visit his rabbi friends.

“From New York I will go to Israel — we have already been talking to the Israeli Ambassador in Argentina,” Milei said in a radio interview on early Monday.

Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen on Monday congratulated Milei on his victory in the runoff and invited him to visit Israel to "strengthen relations" between both countries and "inaugurate" the Argentine embassy in Jerusalem, which Milei promised to do during his electoral campaign.

The Israeli foreign minister accompanied his message with a photograph of Milei raising the Israeli flag among a large crowd as he did on several occasions during the last few months.

The new Argentine leader frequently studies Torah with a rabbi in Buenos Aires and has openly talked on several occasions about converting to Judaism, but has said he worries about Shabbat observance clashing with his presidential duties.

During the election campaign, Milei visited the “Ohel” in New York, a place that houses the tomb of Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, better known as “the Lubavitch Rebbe,” the seventh leader of the Hasidic dynasty who died in 1994. He was then seen wearing a kippah and with a copy of the Torah under his arm.

Milei decisively defeated Economy Minister Sergio Massa on Sunday, securing over 55% of the vote. The economist and former TV personality, who has earned comparisons to former US President Donald Trump, has vowed to dollarize the economy, shut the country's central bank and cut massive public spending in order to overcome a financial calamity that has the South American country immersed in one of the deepest economic crises in recent decades.