Over centuries of persecution and viewing history “from the bottom,” most Jews have a healthy sense of criticism when it comes to celebrity, which is regularly reinforced by anti-Semitic statements issuing from the most unlikely people. The recent death of the United Kingdom’s prince Philip is different.
While Philip might have been, as Buckingham Palace likes to put it in hindsight, “authentically himself,” making off-the-cuff ethnic and racial statements deemed universally offensive, Jews are more likely to look back with respect and sadness on the passing of the queen’s consort. Philip’s mother princess Alice, wife of the Greek prince, rescued a Jewish family–the widow of Greek member of parliament Khaimaki Cohen and two of their five children–and hid them in her basement in Athens during the Nazi occupation.
The good deed might never have to come to light if not for a request from a member of the Cohen family to the Jerusalem municipality to name a street after princess Alice. Yad Vashem got involved, checked the facts and awarded the title of Righteous Gentile to the late princess. Prince Philip and his sister Sophia attended the awards ceremony and planted a tree at Yad Vashem in honor of their mother.
Strangely enough, Alice was reburied at the Orthodox Church of Mary Magdalene on the Mount of Olives in 1988, two years after her death but several years before being awarded the Yad Vashem title in 1993. This was reportedly done at her own request.
On the Jewish scale of values, one could say prince Philip came from a very good family, and deeds say so much more than words.
