My quest to create my own olive oil to light our menorah
“You see that building,” said Tamar, pointing to a squat, ‘60s-style house, as we walked through the grounds of the kibbutz. “That’s the Children’s House where I grew up. Now it’s just a kindergarten.”
We paused for a moment, picturing Tamar as a little girl, living there among her peers — learning, playing, and sleeping by their side — while her parents inhabited a bungalow five minutes away.
Then we hurried on toward our destination: the olive trees. They were the reason we’d woken up at five a.m. to drive all the way to Kibbutz Mesilot in the Beit She’an Valley.
Tamar was my neighbor in Ramat Beit Shemesh; she’d made the journey from secular kibbutznik to frum suburban mommy. When Tamar told me she gets olive oil from her father, who picks and presses it himself, I saw an opportunity. For years I’d wanted to produce my own oil from the beautiful and abundant olive trees that surround me here in Eretz Yisrael.
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