This guest post by Roberta Elliott & Charles Wantman is part of a series of posts by participants in NIF’s 2014 Study Tour.
If I didn’t know better, I would have thought we’d all signed up for a culinary tour of Israel. We started out last week in the Mahane Yehuda market cheese tasting and went into Shabbat fortified with olive oil, wine and chocolate. But as New Israel Fund has deftly managed our study tour, our food forays were as much metaphors as they were realities.
Friday started with a visit from Aviram Goldin, whose organization Bustan Nof Meshutaf (Meeting Point for a Shared Vision) was started in the early 2000s after he moved to the Galilee and realized it was not an idyllic Israeli province, but an area fraught with constant tension between Israeli Jews and Arabs. He and his wife bought a plot of land and planted an olive grove because they wanted to create and share an environment and way of life that has existed for centuries in the north of Israel. To do that and to honor their son, who was killed in a terrorist attack, he started Bustan, which is a mini-version of Seeds of Peace, where Israeli Jewish and Arab youth come together and work on projects. He brought with us the fruit of his labors – inspirational stories and fresh, organic olive oil, whose sales support his vision and projects.
After hearing from Anat Hoffman, see below, we left for the Judean Hills, where we visited the Katlav Winery in Nes Harim. There we met vintner Yossi Yittach, one of several Kurdi Jews that we’ve met on the trip, who told his story. Briefly, he was a successful architect, who left the business to return to his roots in the Judean Hills, where he decided to grow grapes and produce fine wines. His mother’s family came from the border between Morocco and Algeria, where Jews produced wine, but in secret, because it was forbidden for the greater Muslim population to drink wine. He has replicated some of their techniques in the Judean Hills, where he produces a line of red wines, including port. He told us that if you start in the Golan Heights and head south, sampling wines throughout Israel – at Zichron Yaakov, Akko, Rishon LeZion, the Judean Hills, the Negev and Arava – no two wines will ever taste the same. In fact, you will be sampling the Babel of tastes that is Israel, representing each of its diverse and distinctive populations.
Before we returned to Jerusalem for Shabbat, we stopped at Kibbutz Tzuba, founded in 1948 by members of the Palmach, the strike force of the Hagannah, Israel’s pre-state army. Although so many kibbutzim did not fare well in the switch from agrarian socialism to industrialism, Tzuba’s transition was most successful. Where the communal effort once centered around a poultry house, dairy, apple and cotton orchards, a windshield factory and carpentry shop, today Tzuba’s economy is thriving, boasting a children’s amusement park, a vineyard, a furniture factory, a guesthouse, and a highly successful bulletproof glass division. We visited the kibbutz’s newest addition, a chocolate factory. For more than an hour, 15 adults played like kids, making chocolate candies and joking that we were engaged in a co-existence workshop between dark and white chocolate… a sweet way to enter Shabbat!
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And now as promised, “back to the future” with Anat Hoffman in Jerusalem. Earlier in the morning Anat met us at the hotel and brought her modern day message of pursuing human rights and women’s rights in the ancient and modern capital of Israel. If there is anything missing from Anat’s work or her presentation, it certainly is not energy. She is a dynamo, both in terms of what she does and the way she speaks.
We learned that she was a champion swimmer, both in Israel and afterward in the United States where she attended UCLA. And as she clearly did as an athlete, she also finds a way to win as a civil rights activist. She is known all over the world as the person who led the creation of Women of the Wall in 1988 as a way to gain equal religious rights with men at the Kotel. Neither harassment nor arrest have stopped her or her colleagues from doggedly pursuing their goals for the past 26 years.
Her purpose in coming to the United States to study was to learn about Judaism and Jewish values – something that was hidden in day-to-day life in Israel. One of the central messages she conveyed to us was the lack of awareness in the Israeli public at large of the connection between civil rights and Jewish values. In the early development of the state there was a “mechitza” deliberately inserted by the pioneers between Judaism and nation-building, and the impact of that artificial separation persists to this day. Social action is seen as entirely separate from Jewish values, and in that respect the environment in Israel is quite different from that of most Jewish communities in the United States.
Anat and the Women of the Wall are resisting a contemporary attempt (war on women?) of the religious right in Israel to construct a re-invigorated “Jim Crow” environment in Israel where women are forced to the back of the bus, both figuratively and literally. These women and “non-women” are extraordinarily creative and committed. Anat believes they are succeeding, citing progress not only at the Kotel but in the fact that the monopoly of the orthodox over religious life in Israel is cracking. There are now more than 100 non-orthodox religious communities in the country, and the number is growing. It is her belief that “the empire will fall” because of the work of women.