Rebels in the Holy Land, The Story of Mazkeret Batya

This is crossposted on Israel Blogger as, Mazkeret Batya Founders were Real Pioneers.

Rebels in the Holy Land - Mazkeret Batya - An Early Battleground for the Soul of Israel may not be hot off the press, but I'm glad I was given the book to review.

The fascinating story of the early years of the town Mazkeret Batya is told to us by Sam Finkel in Rebels in the Holy Land. Not only did I learn the history of that very special town, but I discovered so much of what I had never known about the history of settlement in the Land of Israel before Herzl and Zionism.

Finkel begins his tale in Europe with a visionary Jewish writer named  Yechiel Brill, who was the prime mover for the enterprise of bringing ten simple Jewish farmers from Europe to build a farming community in the Holy Land.  Brill was a journalist who taught himself Hebrew and then established a Hebrew language newspaper, Levanon. Just that could put him in History Books, but he made history, too. He did the fundraising, recruiting, organizing, mentoring and more for the establishment of Mazkeret Batya, originally called Ekron.

As I read  Rebels in the Holy Land, I felt that I was reading an adventure story, a mystery. This is not a dry history book. The writing is clear, and as you can see the illustrations and graphics are phenomenal, without a doubt. It can almost qualify as a "coffee table book," because you can just pick it up, open randomly and read a page or two. Each section can stand on its own.

The farmers who agreed to Brill's visionary idea of a Jewish farming community in the Land of Israel were simple people. They were neither intellectuals nor wealthy, but they were sincerely Gd fearing. They insisted on following the Torah Laws and the rabbis, even when their financial supporter, Baron Edmond de Rothschild, and his administrators demanded otherwise. Reading of the battle of wills that went on during their first Shmitta, Sabbatical Year, was painful for me. The farmers of Ekron, which had been renamed Mazkeret Batya by the Baron in memory of his mother, feared and respected Gd more than their wealthy patron and his anti-religious administrators.

Those of you who are more knowledgeable about that era in history may not be all that surprised, but for me Rebels in the Holy Land was full of new discoveries.

I highly recommend Rebels in the Holy Land for yourself and as gifts for others of all ages. It's the most readable history book I've ever come across.

Specifications

• ITEM #: 6710
• Dimensions: 6x9
• ISBN: 978-1-59826-861-4
• Weight: 2.8400 lbs
• Binding: Hard Cover / 471 pages
• Published by: Distributed by Feldheim

We Israelis Have It So Easy Now Compared to The First Aliyah

This isn't a book review, because I haven't yet finished reading the book. I'm writing first impressions on the historic period.

I've just begun reading Rebels in the Holy Land, by Sam Finkel, which is about the "First Aliyah." The First Aliyah, which took place in the late nineteenth 19th century, predated the more well-known secular aliyah to kibbutzim which is called the Second Aliyah. That was with the advent of political Zionism which began in earnest after World War One.

The First Aliyah was mostly religious Jews from Eastern Europe and paved the way for those who established kibbutzim and all olim, immigrants to Israel, including myself who came to Israel in 1970 and even those who arrive now.

Considering that I've only read a couple of chapters of Rebels in the Holy Land, I'm just in awe of those amazing and daring pioneers. It wasn't just the difficult physical conditions here in the Holy Land. Communication was almost impossible, and what there was took ages. The Ottoman Turks were if anything even more anti-Jewish than the British who occupied the Land after them. Poverty, disease and terrorism were rampant.  But still, almost incomprehensibly, there were idealistic Jews who were willing to brave it all and build new lives as farmers in the Holy Land.

Barely a dozen Jews left their families to start a farming community in the Holy Land. The plan was to send for their families after their farms could sustain them all. Promised financial support fizzled even before they left, but they didn't back out.

This group went on to establish the town of Mazkeret Batya which exists until this day. I don't think that I've ever been there, but I do know people who live there.

It's hard to put myself in the mind of people who lived a century before my own. Their aliyah to establish a farming community in the Holy Land was close to a hundred years before my own aliyah. In some ways, it was difficult enough in 1970, when there were few phone lines in Israel, and calling overseas was prohibitively expensive. Such calls were reserved for special occasions only. And at least we had the option to send letters airmail, which generally took five to ten days between Israel and New York. Mail at the time of the First Aliya could take months or get lost at sea.

Finkel tells us of how there wasn't enough money, the constant begging for more, the distances the potential olim had to walk carrying their belongings. Yes, all that they had with them was a bag. Today people can't imagine making a move without shipping enormous quantities of possessions. But those pioneers owned little. They were very much like the Jews who fled Egypt with Moses.

By the time we came to Israel, modern medicine was the standard, and most of the "third world" diseases, which had been rampant here, had been eradicated. Young people and today's olim compare my conditions to today and are horrified at how we lived. Much has changed in the last half century, but I think the previous century saw even more radical change.

Gd willing I'll be blogging more about Rebels in the Holy Land, so stay tuned.