Over 70 heads of state and senior governmental officials from around the world were in Jerusalem Friday for the official state funeral of former President Shimon Peres. The ceremony on Mount Herzl began at 9:30 AM with a series of eulogies by Israeli and US officials, Peres’s children and author Amos Oz. At noon, Peres was interred next to former prime ministers Yitzhak Rabin and Yitzhak Shamir in a section of the cemetery reserved for Great Leaders of the Nation.

Shimon Peres was the face of the Israel that the world wants to see: Warm and wise, a believer in the essential good of humanity. I’ll greatly miss Shimon Peres. I’d like to live in that better world that he believed, to his dying day, is out there to be attained.