91-year-old Margalit Zinati is the final guard of ancient Peki'in
Margalit, who was born in 1931, is the devoted daughter of Peki’in’s last holdout Jewish family (the town’s Jews fled during the Arab riots of the late 1930s, and only the Zinati family returned). Early on she decided not to marry, which would have meant leaving the village, and instead threw her lot in with her parents and remained in the town to care for them, guard the family plots and fields, and protect the holy places. Now, as Margalit’s age creeps past 90 with no children of her own, it seems the curtain will finally be drawn over this primeval Jewish community.
Although Peki’in is touted as a town of all four of Israel’s religions living in peaceful coexistence, today it’s primarily Druze territory — and while Margalit herself is considered an untouchable holy icon, there isn’t much tolerance for a renewed Jewish presence here. In recent years there have been attempts to reclaim a Jewish foothold in the ancient town, but harassment by the locals has consistently torpedoed those efforts.
Margalit, for her part, doesn’t focus on the gloomy predictions for the future. Every morning, as she’d done for as long as she can remember, she goes out of her little house with a broom in one hand and her walking stick in the other, and sweeps down the fallen branches and debris that have collected in the large courtyard around the ancient synagogue that is her watch, gathering up the mulberries that have fallen and washing them for the visitors that always show up later in the day.
For Margalit, there is no greater honor: for this ancient shul was originally the beis medrash of Rabi Yehoshua ben Chananyah. Rabi Yehoshua, one of the five main students of Rabi Yochanan Ben Zakai, was a Levi and served as a musician in the Beis Hamikdash. Escaping the destruction of Jerusalem along with Rabi Yochanan, he went on to serve as the av beis din in the Sanhedrin of Yavneh and later, as rosh yeshivah in Peki’in.
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