His wife, a well-known philanthropist, left a number of works from the collection to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection and the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, where her husband was a founding trustee.

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Mr. Carpenter's architectural design work includes the facade of the new 7 World Trade Center tower in New York and the renovation of the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, completed in 2010.

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Obama was miles away in Jerusalem at the time, preparing to visit the Israel Museum.

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Obama also visited Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial and museum in Jerusalem, and traveled to Sderot, a town in southern Israel that had suffered from missiles fired from inside the nearby Gaza Strip.

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