Monday, February 12, 2007

Mikve Yisrael and more

Sunday we went on a tiyul (trip) with our ulpan to visit the first agricultural school in Israel, Mikve Yisrael. The land was bought in 1869 by Isaac Netter a French Jew. He saw how cramped the Jews were living in Jaffa, and wanted to provide a healthy outdoor environment and learning experience for some of them. He was given permission by the Turkish Sultan to buy the land that was located between some small Arab villages. The founding of this school had a catalytic effect on Jewish settlement in Palestine.
The main buildings of the agricultural school built in 1870, a synagogue, a workshop, kitchens, classrooms, etc. were designed with expertise provided by the Templars, a group of religious German Christians who had settled in Palestine and were building their own settlements. These original buildings have thick stone walls (1-2 meters) and are still in use today.
Remember that this was long before Tel Aviv was established (1909; although the Jewish suburbs of Jaffa, Neve Tsedek and Neve Shalom, were founded in the 1880's), and at that time there were only sand dunes north of Mikve Yisrael. But, later the city began to grow and now the urban conglomeration of Tel Aviv and its highrises are very clearly visible from the agricultural school. The Tel Aviv municipality has in the past tried to take over the school to use its agricultural land for development, but that has been resisted, and now it is one of the few remaining protected green patches around Tel Aviv. Its famous palm tree-lined entrance can be seen from the main Tel Aviv-Jerusalem road (route 1) just after leaving Tel Aviv.
When people say that Jews have no right to this land it makes me angry, because not only do we have the ancient biblical history and the legal rights, from the Balfour Declaration (1917) to the UN recognition (1948), but we also have the concrete evidence of re-settlement (1860- today) that brought this God-forsaken country into the 21st century. Remember, that in 1870 Los Angeles was a small village, London and Paris had about 1 million inhabitants, oil had not been discovered, and Palestine was an obscure poor and sparsely populated region of the Turkish Empire.
Mikve Yisrael also had the first wine cellars in Palestine, they were dug deep below the surface, and we went into them. They are quite impressive. They earned a place in Israeli history because they were used for secret training of the Haganah and weapons secretly made in the workshops were stored there and shipped in wine crates to the Jewish settlements all over the country. They were used in the anti-Jewish riots in 1922, 1929 and 1936, as well as the war in 1948. In each case, one of the causes of the Arab riots were untrue rumors started by the political-religious Muslim elite that the "Jews were destroying the Mosques in Jerusalem." Nothing changes!
From Mikve Yisrael we drove to Rehovot and visited the Weizmann Institute. Since I worked there for several years this was not novel for me. They showed a film at the Visitors Center narrated by Topol. Then we visited the home of Chaim and Vera Weizmann. Since Weizmann was very wealthy from all his patents, including several that greatly helped the British during WWI, he hired a famous Bauhaus architect, Eric Mendelsohn, to design his house and it was built in 1936. It is a magnificent house, and the decor and interiors are very fine. As the first President of Israel people thought that Weizmann should live in a nice house, but it was private until he died and gifted it to the State. What a contrast between the luxury and refinement of Weizmann's house and the hut of Ben Gurion in Sde Boker.
After this visit and some lunch, we visited an unusual, relatively new (3 years) museum on the outskirts of Rehovot. It is the Minkoff Museum of the first Jewish-owned Orange Grove in Palestine. It was founded in 1904 and the founder Zalman Minkoff came from Odessa. Jaffa oranges were grown along the coast where the water table was just below the surface. But, this was the first time that a well was dug and a mechanical pump was used to bring up the water required for irrigation and other uses. Most of the Minkoff compound was in ruins, since the orange-growing industry has been decimated by modern developments. I remember in 1964, when we lived in Rehovot, walking through the pardessim (orchards) on the campus of the Weizmann Institute picking oranges as I went. Now there are no more orchards, the space has been taken up by modern science buildings. Nearby is Kiryat Weizmann, a huge biotechnology park, where large buildings are blossoming.
Those who wanted to establish the museum before the orange industry in Rehovot is forgotten about were looking for funds and invited groups to visit. Among them was a man named Francis Minkov from Switzerland. He said he would return home and find out if he was a relative of the founder, and it turned out that he was a nephew. So he gave a large sum of money to found the Museum, and this was used to rebuild the compound as it had been in 1904, with a two story house (very unusual in those days) and renovation of the well. It is a huge, very deep and very wide well, very impressive to see, and they have installed a contemporary Victoriam style pump, that now pumps the water used to grow the trees. They produce all citrus fruits as well as nuts, etc. Hence it is believed that the Hebrew word for orchard "pardess," gave rise to the English word for "paradise."
It was interesting how the culture of each of the Jews who founded these sites influenced their choices. Netter built a long tree-lined avenue, reminscent of France, Minkoff built a large pair of gates for his orchard, reminiscent of Odessa, and Weizmann built a house designed by an architect in the modern German manner.
During our visit we were given a pamphlet from the "Council for Restoration and Conservation of Historic Sites in Israel," that has its headquarters in Mikve Yisrael. They have restored about 20 sites, mostly buildings of historic value all over the country, dating from 1860-1940. They are saving our modern heritage.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home