Prince William has been faith-hopping in Jerusalem’s Old City, deftly zipping between key sites of three Abrahamic religions, showing reverence for all three.
He lit a candle in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, at the place where Jesus is said to have been crucified, and saw the Holy Edicule, a shrine where Jesus is believed to have been buried. He knelt down at the Stone of the Anointing.
The Duke arrived at the church yesterday by foot, straight from a visit to the Western Wall, where he paid the the most significant homage to Jewish history ever seen by a British royal. There, he was surrounded by thousands of onlookers, but appeared to block out all the commotion for a moment of personal reflection.
He slid a written prayer between the cracks of the wall, among hundreds of others. Kensington Palace did not reveal what he wrote, but in the site guestbook he asked “the God of peace bless this region and all the world with peace.”
The Duke’s attention to religious sensitivities was so keen that he even took his first few steps away from the Wall walking backwards, a sign of deference to Judaism’s second holiest site that most Jews do not observe.
Before his visit to the Western Wall he had been at the nearby mount which is a major flashpoint in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Jews call it Temple Mount and refer to it as the holiest site in their faith, as the ancient Jewish temples stood there, while Muslims call it Haram esh-Sharif and pray there at the al-Aqsa Mosque.
Flip Florin, a Romanian Orthodox priest who was in the church during the visit, thought that Willian sent out a message of coexistence by going from religion to religion, and showing reverence for all three. He said that the Duke “chose to come here because of Jerusalem’s importance to Jews, Christians and Muslims, and he makes an important point by going between the sites one after another.”
The Duke’s first engagement of the day honoured the personal connection that he has to the multi-faith fabric of Jerusalem.
Bearing flowers, he went to the grave of his great grandmother Princess Alice of Battenberg, who saved Jews during the Holocaust and was designated Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem.
And so, in a moment that summed up the spirit of the day, the Church of England royal stood listening to the Russian Orthodox Archimandrite Roman praying for his great grandmother, who saved Jews, including a woman whose descendants Prince William met on Tuesday a few miles away.
Nathan Jeffay was reporting from Jerusalem, where he met Prince William
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