2000 Jewish-planted Vine Saplings Cut in Shiloh Bloc

At the Achiyah Vineyards, in the Shiloh Bloc.

Between 8 to 9 dunams.

Some 2000 vine saplings cut at the base.

Ten of thousands of shekels in immediate financial loss as well as the future wine.

The clip from HaKol HaYehudi:-

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When British Soldiers Enjoyed Grapes of Eretz-Yisrael

Source

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Vineyards Will Nevertheless Be Planted and Not Plucked Up

Have you ever read Amos' prophecy?  This one, 9:13-15 -

Behold, the days come, saith the LORD...And I will turn the captivity of My people Israel, and they shall build the waste cities, and inhabit them; and they shall plant vineyards, and drink the wine thereof; they shall also make gardens, and eat the fruit of them. And I will plant them upon their land, and they shall no more be plucked up out of their land which I have given them, saith the LORD thy God.

Some Arabs near us don't take too kindly to those words because on Saturday, our Shabbat, some four dunams of saplings were damaged (pictures here in this Hebrew site) at the vineyards of Achiyah.  Up to a thousand were uprooted and a large section of the sophisticated irrigation system was destroyed.  It will take some three years to restore the damage.

But it will be restored.  For we have decided to replant ourselves in our land and with help, all will be restored: Jewish agriculture, Jewish sopvereignty, Jewish morality.


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Hayovel in the Vineyards

A video slideshow of the great work being done by HaYovel, led by Tommy Waller and family:



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The Vineyard Was Redeemed

Miriam Tzachi, who I know well, snapped this photo in the Shiloh vineyards in the redeeming ceremony I blogged previously:



Here are some more at the Hebrew INN site.


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You're Invited to a Redeeming Ceremony

Another "redeeming of a vineyard" ceremony is taking place as announced:-



Based on these verses in Leviticus 19:

23 And when ye shall come into the land, and shall have planted all manner of trees for food, then ye shall count the fruit thereof as forbidden; three years shall it be as forbidden unto you; it shall not be eaten. 24 And in the fourth year all the fruit thereof shall be holy, for giving praise unto the LORD. 25 But in the fifth year may ye eat of the fruit thereof, that it may yield unto you more richly the increase thereof: I am the LORD your God.

a ceremony in which the vineyard has its sanctity transferred in the fourth year so the crops can be used is performed.

And as the poster informs us, this Wednesday at 4 PM, you're invited to the vineyards of Shiloh to participate in the ceremony sponsored by Meshek Achiyah which produces olive oil and as well owns vineyards.


See also in Hebrew.


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Shiloh Valley Vineyards

Wines from Shiloh and Benjamin Region

It's in Hebrew, but the pictures for those who don't understand are great in any case.

It is a clip, some five minutes long, from a TV news report on the wine grown and produced in Shiloh vineyards and others in the Benjamin Region.

Menachem Horowitz is the reporter and he first shows up at Givat Harel's vineyards and talks with Shibi Drori and then visits the Shiloh winery with its manager, continues on to the the Psagot winery and talks with Yaakov Berg and later, interviews Amnon Weiss, an owner of a wine-producing firm, and then talks with the owner of a very non-Kosher restaurant in Tel Aviv who sells the wine to his customers.

Nice shots of the hills I live in, the vineyards I see and even the wine I drink, when I can afford it.

Here's the clip.

The Vineyard Redemption/Inauguration Video Clips

Follow up to this:

A Vineyard Inauguration at Shiloh

This week's reading portion is Shoftim in Deuteronomy and verse 6 in Chapter 19 reads:

And what man is there who has planted a vineyard, and has not [yet] redeemed it? Let him go and return to his house, lest he die in the war, and another man redeem it.		ו. וּמִי הָאִישׁ אֲשֶׁר נָטַע כֶּרֶם וְלֹא חִלְּלוֹ יֵלֵךְ וְיָשֹׁב לְבֵיתוֹ פֶּן יָמוּת בַּמִּלְחָמָה וְאִישׁ אַחֵר יְחַלְּלֶנּוּ:
And the commentary (here) explains: [And what man is there that has planted a vineyard,] and has not [yet] redeemed it: Heb. וְלֹא חִלְּלוֹ. He has not redeemed the vineyard in the fourth year [of its growth], for the fruits [of the fourth year] have to be eaten in Jerusalem or redeemed [by exchanging them] for money, and to eat [food purchased with] the money in Jerusalem.

The actual commandment is here:

Not to eat the fruit of a tree for three years from the time it was planted (Lev. 19:23).

Well, at Shiloh this morning, the inauguration ceremony was conducted at the two dunam vineyard owned by a resident of Toronto.

The pictures:

Shiloh Bloc Vineyards

Last month I blogged about a BBC story on vineyards and wine production out by us. Well, let's get up close. here's a snap from the area of Keidah:

and here's a brief clip driving by another vineyard nearby:

BBC Discovers Yesha Wines - L'Chayim!

Tim Franks of the BBC has a report on the vineyards and the wines of Yesha.

Of course, Yesh Din pops up, and there's even this photo-map of my home area there:



and here, pics #3 & #4, are the real vineyards.

Some highlights:

Settler vineyards take root in West Bank

The climate is perfect, the soil just right, the grapes just so. But the occupied West Bank is not obvious wine country...This is land which Israel conquered 42 years ago. But the Jews who have settled the West Bank will tell you their roots in this land lie much deeper.

Yaakov Berg, a fresh-faced wine enthusiast in his 30s, lives in
a small shack in the hilltop settlement of Psagot, which abuts the Palestinian city of Ramallah...A short drive away lies his own winery. Opened only a few weeks ago, it is the swankiest in the West Bank.

"The wine is the main thing," he said, amid a tower of oak barrels. "But also we think it's very important to explain to people: listen, we are here, back. And part of that is that we work the land again."

...the Settlers' Council has grand plans for the Psagot winery. The Council is talking about building as many as 20 holiday homes around the winery. Wine-making, the Council's General secretary, Pinchas Wallerstein, says, "is some kind of new development... a new way to settle people in the area, even more permanently than mobile houses".

...One of the outposts, Rehelim, is home to another boutique
winery...Erez Ben Saadon labels and stories his Tura wine in a small, strip-lit concrete shed. His vineyards lie in majestic undulating sweeps at a settlement nearby.

Passionate about his job, he kisses the budding grapes in an emotional flourish. And his passion extends to his view of US
President Barack Obama's demand that settlement activity stop.

"We're a democratic state," he says. "The only democratic state in the Middle East. And I think the most un-democratic thing happening today is the American administration trying to force us into doing things that go against our own election results."

...on a swish roof terrace, at an evening tasting for Erez Ben Saadon's wine [in Tel Aviv], the praise gushes. "The Merlot is
excellent," says Shai Segev, wine critic for the Yediot Ahranot newspaper. Mr Segev says its provenance is unimportant as "wine and politics don't mix".

But Israel's leading wine critic, Daniel Rogov, says there are domestic and overseas consumers who "simply won't" buy the wine because it comes from the occupied West Bank. In contrast, he says, there are others who lean more towards the "right-wing, Orthodox Jewish side, who will hunt out these wines
precisely because they come from there".

Mr Rogov describes himself as a "peacenik". He refuses to travel to the West Bank, but will review its wine, if it is brought to him inside Israel. Year on year, he says, the wine from the occupied territories is not just increasing in quality, but quantity.

...The scale of the project is evident as you drive around the West Bank past hill-sides marked with newly cleared swathes of land. By the settlement of Har Beracha, 10 hectares are due to be planted with vineyards within the next two months.

As Shivi Dror, another West Bank winemaker, put it: "When we
take over 100 dunams (10 hectares) of land with a single vineyard, it's the same amount of land that 200 houses would cover."

...Ibrahim Shabana owns a grocery store in the village of Sinjel. He says settlers are growing grapes on land which has been in his family for more than 100 years. All that is left for him are a few, straggly vines of his own, on a small, uneven field. "I feel hopeless," he says. He says that he cannot fight the settlers, for fear of violence or arrest by the police, "while the settlers get off free".

For their part, settlers argue that claims of intimidation or theft are often made by Palestinians and seldom proven.

The Israeli human rights group Yesh Din has begun to track the spread of the vineyards. It says the settlers' insistence that they are only planting vines on state-owned land is simply not true.

On a road overlooking the West Bank vineyards close to the
settlement of Shilo, the group's energetic Land Projects
Coordinator, Dror Etkes, unfurls a map on the baking hot bonnet of his car.

It is, he says, just one illustration of how vineyards take over land beyond what even Israel says are the authorised boundaries of the settlements, across privately owned Palestinian land.

In a statement, the Civil Administration, the Israeli authority which oversees the West Bank, confirmed that the information on the map is correct.

Mr Etkes says that dealing with this issue should be a matter for the Israeli authorities, not the American administration.

And in late May, I visited with Yaakov at his winery with the employees of the Begin Center:




P.S. And here is my 'vineyard', of grapes for eating: 1 & 2. I hope the crop is great this year.

Today's Visit to Tel Shiloh

For those following this blog you know that I am very involved with Tel Shiloh, the archeological mound where the village of Shiloh existed with the Tabernacle, etc.

And you know that two years ago there was a major excavation involving the discovery of a new basilica. And that the digs were extended to the west where Roman structures have been found.

Well, here's a new view, looking south:



I don't know if you noticed what interested me. Here's a close look:



More about those later.

Well, that was enough of the past. Let's see something from the present and future.

Let's look at some new vineyards that will be producing Shiloh wine soon:



UPDATE

Those two unique looking stones are:

lintels dating from the Roman period, in secondary use in a Moslem structure.

say two people Ruchama and Rachel who wrote to me,.