JERUSALEM — Obama administration officials have made it clear that the top agenda item for the president’s visit here this week is to win the hearts of the Israeli people. He has a lot of work to do.

“I don’t trust him so much,” Rachel Burger, 65, said Sunday between errands at a Jerusalem mall.

“Deep inside, I think, he doesn’t like us,” said Moshe Haim, an Iranian immigrant who drives a taxi in Tel Aviv.

“People don’t get the love from Obama,” said Rabbi Levi Weiman-Kelman, who leads the left-leaning Reform congregation Kol Haneshama and worked on a video encouraging American-Israelis to support the president’s re-election last fall. “Bush and Clinton and Carter, these guys all had such a deep religious passion about this place, and Obama doesn’t convey that,” he added.

“He’s a cool customer,” said Rabbi Weiman-Kelman.

Though Israeli and American leaders of various political stripes insist that security, economic and intelligence cooperation between the two nations has never been closer or stronger, the personal, more emotional element of the relationship has been largely empty over the last four years.