Mr Israel Goldstein, tears rolling into his beard, lay face down for an hour yesterday morning on the grave of his son Baruch, while chaos ruled around him. Israeli troops tore out the lamps that had illuminated the grave, smashed a stand where prayer books and memorial candles in his son's honour had been stored, ripped out the decorative paving surrounding the burial site, which stands in an elegant park on the edge of the West Bank settlement of Kiryat Arba.
As the bulldozing and drilling continued, dozens of the dead man's admirers pushed and shoved and screamed a relentless stream of abuse, calling the soldiers scum, telling them they should be ashamed of themselves and their uniforms, and pledging to wreak equivalent destruction at the grave of the assassinated prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin.
Shouting through his tears, Mr Goldstein pronounced his son "a righteous man" - a hero whose sanctity in death was now being shamefully destroyed. Even after the soldiers and the bulldozers had gone, the black Hebrew lettering in the marble slab on his grave still confirmed his holiness: "The saintly doctor" Goldstein, it reads, "who gave up his soul for his people, his Torah, his land."
In his father's version of events, Baruch Goldstein saved untold numbers of Jews from a massacre being planned against them in February, 1994, by the reviled Arabs of Hebron. In the version described by eyewitness and confirmed by a subsequent Israeli commission of inquiry, Goldstein stole into the Cave of the Patriarchs in central Hebron, the burial site of Abraham, holy to Jews and Muslims alike, and opened fire, indiscriminately and unprovoked, pumping dozens of bullets into the backs of rows of Palestinians at prayer, killing 29 of them before he was overpowered and beaten to death.
Condemned by the vast majority of Israelis, Goldstein's actions were lauded by a tiny proportion of right-wing extremists - one of whom was Yigal Amir, who assassinated Mr Rabin in November, 1995.
"Half of the stain has been removed," said Mr Ran Cohen, the Israeli Knesset member who led the lengthy political and legal campaign to tear down the shrine Goldstein's supporters had erected around the grave. Mr Cohen is now pressing on with efforts to have the "other half" - the heroic inscription on the gravestone - removed also.
A prime target for the rightwing extremists, Mr Cohen has had his car torched and was yesterday assigned a bodyguard.
Security was also stepped up at Mr Rabin's grave and at the memorial in the prime minister's honour in the Tel Aviv square where Amir gunned him down.
Goldstein's family had appealed to the Israeli Supreme Court to block yesterday's dismantling of the tomb - in vain. The same court yesterday also rejected an appeal against the release by Israel of 26 more Palestinian prisoners - at least one of whom had participated in the killing of an Israeli. The appeal was filed by relatives of victims of Palestinian violence, protesting against the freeing of convicts with "Jewish blood on their hands".