Prince Philip, The Duke of Edinburgh, is Queen Elizabeth’s husband and their son is Prince Charles. Philip’s mother was Princess Alice of Battenberg. She was Greek by marriage. After marrying Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark (he was simultaneously prince of two different European countries), Princess Alice of Battenberg spent much of her life in Greece.
In 1967, Alice moved to London to live in Buckingham Palace with her son, Philip, and daughter-in-law, Queen Elizabeth, the present queen of Britain. When Princess Alice of Battenberg died in 1969, her body was interred in a crypt at Windsor Castle. But in 1988, honoring a wish she had expressed before her death, she was transferred to the crypt at the Convent of Saint Mary Magdalene in Gethsemane on Jerusalem’s Mount of Olives.
During the Nazi occupation of Greece, Princess Alice of Battenberg hid in her palace a Jewish woman and two of her children from the Nazis for 13 months.
Prince Philip’s mother Princess Alice of Battenberg was posthumously recognized by Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial as a “Righteous Among the Nations” and by the British government as a “Hero of the Holocaust.”
In 1994, Prince Philip visited Israel, for the first and last time, for a ceremony to mark his mother’s valor. Prior to the ceremony, Philip, accompanied by his sister Princess Sophie, visited the crypt where his mother’s coffin lies. At the ceremony at Yad Vashem, Prince Philip accepted the Righteous Among the Nations award, planted a maple tree in her memory along the Avenue of the Righteous Among Nations, which commemorates gentiles who saved Jews during the Holocaust. “God brings everything we do to judgment,” the prince wrote in the visitors’ book at Yad Vashem.
The British Royal family never visits Israel now. A British government source claims that “The Royal family can’t really go there [Israel] because in Israel so much politics is caught up in the land itself that it’s best to avoid those complications altogether by not going there.”
Prince Charles, the son of Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip attended Shimon Peres’ funeral, on September 30th, 2016. He wore a kippah-skullcap with the royal emblem embroidered on it.
The official visit to Israel by this British Royal, gave Prince Charles an opportunity to stop at the Mount of Olives and visit, for the first time, the site of his grandmother’s burial.
Now, Queen Elizabeth can do the same, honor her mother-in-law’s grave with a visit, followed by all the British Royals. This would be a royal gesture.
