Board Spotlight
Josh Rubel is a member of the Or Hadash Board, currently serving as Israel Coordinator.
Hello Or Hadash! I’ve just completed a work visit to Israel after a delightful set of flights on Turkish Airlines. For those of you planning a trip, I highly recommend including Turkish Airlines….The service is great, the planes from ATL to IST are new, and the layover in IST is convenient and full of good things to see, hear, and taste!
My name is Josh Rubel and I recently joined our synagogue board with a focus on connecting Israel with our Kehila. It’s an amazing opportunity to explore our Israel relationship and share some resources for those who may want to explore their own personal connections to the people, the geography, and the history of Israel. My intent is to stay on the culture and the people topic areas as we already have so much coverage of the political in the news and through other channels in our community. And, I’m a resource for anyone planning a trip – don’t hesitate to reach out if you have any questions -
jshrbl@gmail.com is the best way to get me.
I will update this space on a regular cadence (quarterly I hope) and will try to serve up useful tidbits, cultural pieces, and some hopeful news. For this initial entry, I’d like to share a story of cultural sharing that may provide a modicum of hope for how people can relate to people in a positive, virtuous cycle sort of engagement. My company (MDClone.com) hosted a customer event in Israel the last week of June. We invited people from around the world and saw a wide variety of attendees. As part of the visit we hosted a ”get to know Israel” desert adventure with a trip to the Machtesh Ramon with various outdoor activities (I’m now proficient with bow and arrow – look out!). In the afternoon and evening we had a chance to meet two very interesting people with a fascinating relationship with the place they live and work.
We had an amazing hour with a Bedouin historian named Ibrahim. It was touching to hear his story of multiple generational shift from intensive pastoralism to modern living as an Israeli citizen. As someone who maintains a herd with his tribe and family, he is deeply connected to the land. He walks it often and it sustains his livelihood. Available water and food for his herd are daily pressures. He summed up his family’s transition by saying - “For my grandfather, a disaster was drought or an outbreak of disease in the herd. For my children, a disaster is no wifi.”
The group we assembled from Canada, Europe, India, and the US was a little confused with Ibrahim. Many asked questions trying to understand the political context and his affiliations. For example - are the Bedouin “Arabs”? “ What’s it like living under Israeli rule”? etc…Ibrahim answered them all patiently. He is an Israeli citizen, a part of a tribe, a herd owner, and an educator. He served as a tracker in the IDF and he went to school at Ben Gurion University in Beer Sheba, and yes, he is an Arab. He runs a jeep tourism business on the side, has a growing family including new grandchildren and speaks great English. It struck me that his story is similar to other hustling, successful Israeli stories. Give a creative, energetic person some resources, and great things can happen. He’s a part of the fabric that makes Israel so interesting.
The next person we met was Eran Raz (aka Nana) who founded the Nana Estate Vineyards. He learned viticulture in the Judaean Hills and Golan and in 2007, he and his wife Shachar had the crazy idea to build a vineyard in the high desert of the Negev. He found and bought land in the Upper Zin River area. The Zin River has the distinction of not having any water most years. When a river has no water, it’s a good sign you may be in a desert. The landscape tells the story well… All brown and rocky, very hot in the day and cold at night with no vegetation in sight. Imagine – a vineyard in this sort of extreme landscape? When I think of prime Vineyard land, I think of Napa moisture from the Pacific, the verdant Willamette Valley, the lush rolling hills of the French countryside.
Well… Eran knows a lot about grapes. And he knows a lot about soils and weather too. He wanted very small, flavor packed grapes for wine production. He thought with just a little bit of water, he could build unique flavor packed grapes based on the Negev’s aridity and rapid day/night temperature shifts. Recent advances in desalination have added considerably to Israel’s water supply and they gave Eran the little bit of water he needed. Despite multiple false starts with equipment and timing, he built his drip irrigation system and planted his first acre of vines in 2007. Fast forward a couple of years, his 1 acre was productive so he expanded with the help of other families to acres 2 and 3. By 2013, Nana Estate Vineyard was supplying Granache, Syrah, Petite Syrah, and other grape varieties to all the major wineries in Israel. In 2019, with 25 (25!) acres planted, they began making their own wine branded as “Nana”. Again – give creative, driven people some resources and great things can happen.
Check out the beauty of the setting on their site – www.nanawines.com. Full disclosure, I have no connection to the vineyard and I’m not a reputable source for “good” wines. I’m simply relaying that sunset in the desert at a marvelous vineyard carved with effort, expertise, and vision is a remarkable experience. We had a chance to ask Eran some questions and one in the group asked him what the risks and challenges were year over year. His response – “I worry about picking the next variety and the weather mostly. My kids worry about the wifi.” Good to know so much connects us!