PRINCE EDWARD VISITS ISRAEL

HAARETZ:

Prince Edward, the Earl of Wessex and the youngest son of Queen Elizabeth, arrived in Israel on Wednesday, in the first royal visit here in more than a decade.

But despite his high-profile four-day tour, the Prince's visit has been categorized as "private," meaning that still no member of the British royal family has made an "official" visit to Israel.

Prince Edward ... is the third member of the British royal family to visit Israel. Both his father, Prince Philip the Duke of Edinburgh and his brother, Prince Charles, have made unofficial visits to Israel.

The Prince was invited by the Israel Youth Award organization, a self-development group for Jewish and Arab youth that is affiliated with the Duke of Edinburgh's Award International Association. ...

During his visit, the Prince will tour Yad Vashem, where a tree has been planted in honor of his grandmother Princess Alice of Greece, who was recognized as Righteous Among the Nations for sheltering a Jewish family in her Athens home during the Holocaust. He will also attend Shabbat dinner in Jerusalem with Chief Rabbi Yona Metzger.

I THINK HE LOOKS LIKE HER:












More on Alice:

The word "righteous" does not often arise these days in connection with the British royal family. But it was the key to an honor that PRINCE PHILIP, the husband of Queen Elizabeth II, received in Jerusalem yesterday in the name of his mother, the late Princess Alice of Greece.

Princess Alice, a British noblewoman who married Prince Andrew of Greece early in the century, was designated a "Righteous Gentile" by Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial organization in Jerusalem, for saving a Greek Jewish family from the Nazis during World War II. The princess, who died in 1969, at 84, helped several family members escape and hid others for more than a year at one of her residences in Athens.

Prince Philip received a medallion at Yad Vashem, then visited his mother's grave on the Mount of Olives.

Publishers Weekly:

A chain-smoking, nearly deaf princess who ministered to the sick in Greek hospitals and soup kitchens, was diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic at age 45, fancied herself a nun and sheltered a Jewish family during the Holocaust (for which she was posthumously given the title Righteous among the Nations, an honor Oskar Schindler also received), Alice is a biographer's dream.

Born under the watchful eye of her great-grandmother Queen Victoria in Windsor Castle in 1885, Alice married a Greek prince who was actually Danish, German and Russian. And while she was devoted to Greece, she and her royal in-laws were never fully accepted by their adopted subjects.

At age 84, she died in Buckingham Palace, where she lived at the end of her life at the behest of her youngest child and only son, Prince Philip, and his wife, Queen Elizabeth.

... Alice deserves to be known as more than just the queen's mother-in-law.

FASCINATING.