Flowers & a prayer for great grandma ... a true war hero
William’s pilgrimage to Princess Alice tomb in Jerusalem
His visit has made history and created relationships that will last a lifetime PALACE SOURCE ON WILLIAM’S TOUR OF THE MIDDLE EAST
PRINCE William pays his respects in Jerusalem at the tomb of his great-grandmother Princess Alice of Battenberg.
During the Second World War she hid Jews in her palace in Nazioccupied Greece to save them from the Holocaust.
William laid flowers and prayed yesterday in the crypt of the Russian Orthodox Church of Mary Magdalene where Alice is buried.
The head of the Russian Ecclesiastical Mission in Jerusalem – Archimandrite Roman, Father Roman – welcomed William to the site and said later the prince found the visit “profoundly moving”.
The church is on the Mount of Olives near the garden of Gethsemane. William, on the last day of his historic tour of the region, also went to the most sacred site accessible to Jews – the Western Wall in Jerusalem’s Old City.
Wearing a kippah skull cap, he placed a written prayer on a folded piece of paper into a crack in the wall, held his right hand against the stone and spent around a minute in quiet contemplation.
A palace source said: “William’s visit to the Middle East has not only made history, it has created memories and relationships that will last a lifetime.”
Alice was the Duke of Edinburgh’s mother. After marrying, she used the title Princess Andrew of Greece and Denmark.
She died at Buckingham Palace in 1969 aged 84 and asked to be buried in Jerusalem next to her aunt Elizabeth.
Alice’s war heroics led in 1993 to her being declared Righteous Among the Nations the top honour Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial bestows on non-Jews.