Tribute to Princess Alice
Britain’s Prince William visits Jerusalem tomb of honoured great-grandmother.
JERUSALEM: Britain’s Prince William made a pilgrimage to the Jerusalem tomb of his great-grandmother, Princess Alice, who was honoured by Israel for sheltering Jews in Nazi-occupied Greece during the Holocaust.
William is on the final day of his tour of Israel and the Palestinian Territories, the first official visit by a senior member of the British royal family to the areas.
Princess Alice of Battenberg and Greece, who was Queen Elizabeth’s mother-in-law, is buried in a crypt in the Russian Orthodox Church of Mary Magdalene on the Mount of Olives outside Jerusalem’s walled Old City.
A devout Christian, she died in London in 1969 and had asked to be buried in Jerusalem, next to her aunt, who like Alice had become a nun and founded a convent.
In 1993, the princess was named as one of the “righteous among the nations”, the highest honour Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial bestows on non-Jews, for hiding three members of the Cohen family in her palace in Athens during World War II.
William’s father, Prince Charles, and grandfather, Prince Philip, have visited her grave site near the Garden of Gethsemane, in an area Israel captured in the 1967 Middle East war.
Planting a tree at Yad Vashem in his mother’s honour in 1994, Prince Philip said: “I suspect that it never occurred to her that her action was in any way special.”
William met ancestors of the Cohen family at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s residence on Tuesday after visiting the memorial.
After paying tribute to Princess Alice, he visited the hilltop holy esplanade in Jerusalem housing the al-Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock and Judaism’s Western Wall below.