Today the WOFI group visited Sde Eliahu, a religious kibbutz located near Beit She’an. We began the tour by learning the historical and social background of the kibbutz. Sarah, our tour guide who made Aliyah from Chicago when she was young, explained how the kibbutz was originally founded by German Jews in the 1930s. She explained how they believed in a strict and traditional way of life by telling us an anecdote about how they received the nickname “Yekkes” because they came to Israel dressed in suits. Sde Eliahu is one of seventeen religious kibbutzim in the country and one of the few that has yet to privatize. Everything in the kibbutz is still communal. The kibbutz also stays true to the original purpose of kibbutzim in Israel; to be an agriculturally focused community. However, this does not mean that the kibbutz is solely an old fashioned community.
The innovativeness of their style of farming amazed me. In 1974, Sde Eliahu became the first community is Israel to practice organic farming. Sarah told us that the rest of the kibbutzim community thought they were crazy and that it would never work but Sde Eliahu persisted and created a successful organic agricultural industry. The kibbutz is able to produce six out of seven of the native species (crops) of Israel as well as several others. They manage to do this organically by implementing a variety of different methods that act in place of pesticides. We learned that they strategically organized the crops so that certain plants that are susceptible to pests are surrounded by crops that repel them. Also, the kibbutz developed a different system to keep the rodent population down. They realized that every organism has its natural predator. Therefore, if you increase the population of the predator (rodent-eating mice), the population of the prey should decrease. The kibbutznicks set up houses for two predatory birds: the barn owl which hunts during the night and the kestrel which hunts during the day. The only problem to this system was that the Jordan is near this kibbutz and when the barn owls would fly to Jordan, the farmers there would kill them. In Jordanian folklore, the barn owl with its white wings and face is a symbol of the evil eye and must be eradicated. Instead of letting the situation escalade, the members of Sde Eliahu decided to invite Jordanian farmers to their kibbutz and educate them on the benefits of the predatory birds. The cooperation between Israelis and Jordanians shows how there is hope for peace in the Middle East.
To be continued in the WOFI magazine…