That was more than enough time for critics and supporters to ask what exactly Trump was doing. On white-supremacist forums, Trump was cheered for apparently declaring his solidarity through not-so-subtle code.
"The evangelicals will listen to his pro-Israel statements, while we will listen to his signals," wrote Andrew Anglin in the Daily Stormer, a racist site named after Julius Streicher's notorious Nazi tabloid. "By pushing this into the media, the Jews bring to the public the fact that yes, the majority of Hilary's [sic] donors are filthy Jew terrorists."
When asked about his support from white supremacists, Trump has typically - if belatedly, and under media pressure - renounced it and then criticised the media for not giving him more credit for the renunciation.
"I rejected them so strongly and so harshly, and then people say he didn't reject them fast enough," Trump told the conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt last month. "Between Facebook and Twitter, we have over 20 million people. I rejected them on Twitter."
Trump's campaign did not answer questions about the image, the decision to delete it or the decision to promote a new version. The Republican Jewish Coalition also did not respond to a request for comment.
On CNN's State of the Union, Corey Lewandowski, Trump's former campaign manager who is now a paid political analyst, blamed the controversy on "political correctness run amok" and members of the #NeverTrump movement who wanted to hurt the candidate.
"This is a simple star," Lewandowski said. "It's the same star that sheriff's departments across the country use, all over the place, to represent law enforcement."
But the skepticism of Trump critics was rooted in months of similar blunders. In November 2015, he tweeted a chart of bogus crime data from the fictional "Crime Statistics Bureau," which wildly overstated how many white people were killed by black people.
Charles Johnson, proprietor of the blog Little Green Footballs, traced the image to a Twitter user whose biographic information suggested that "we should have listened to the Austrian chap with the little moustache," a reference to Adolf Hitler.
In January, Trump retweeted a meme of a destitute-looking former GOP presidential candidate Jeb Bush and a comment in February about his rallies from @WhiteGenocideTM, an account that lists its location as "Jewmerica". In April, he retweeted a compliment from an innocuous-looking follower named Jason Bergkamp; a reporter from Fusion quickly discovered that Bergkamp had also praised Hitler.
"Trump support in the white-supremacist world is unprecedented," said Richard Cohen, president of the Southern Poverty Law Center. "The typical white-supremacist opinion of politicians is 'a pox on both their houses.' No one deserves their trust. But in Trump, they've found a champion."
On the campaign trail, Trump has repeatedly paid tribute to Israel and proudly noted that his daughter Ivanka is a convert to Judaism. But the ADL's Greenblatt, disturbed by the pattern of anti-Semitic support for Trump, wanted to hear more.
"I'd like to see Donald Trump reject these people with clarity and precision, the same way he rejected the other Republican candidates and the way that he has rejected folks on the Democratic side," Greenblatt said on Sunday.
"On the day after the passing of Elie Wiesel, arguably one of the most important moral figures of the 20th century, there is a chance for him to speak with similar clarity about what is in bounds and out of bounds. And the time is now."
Later Sunday afternoon, Trump responded to Wiesel's death. "On Saturday a great man, Elie Wiesel, passed away," he tweeted. "The world is a better place because of him and his belief that good can triumph over evil!"
