APA – President Isaac Herzog was formally sworn in as the eleventh president of Israel on Wednesday at the Knesset, replacing Reuven Rivlin, APA reports citing the Jerusalem Post.
Herzog was sworn in using the same Bible used to swear in his father, Israel’s sixth day president, Chaim Herzog. The Bible belonged to the new president’s grandmother Sarah in Glasgow. Her husband, Israel’s future chief rabbi, Isaac Halevy Herzog, who took it to Europe to rescue Jewish children from orphanages and monasteries after the Holocaust.
Upon accepting the presidency, Herzog pledged to “lower the tone, reduce the flames, and calm things down” in Israel, despite the many divides in the Jewish, democratic state.
