aerial view of Nahalal, courtesy Wikipedia |
Nahalal is best known for
its general layout, as designed by Richard Kauffmann: slightly oval, similar to a spoke wheel with its
public buildings at the "hub" and individual plots of agricultural
land radiating from it like spokes with symmetrically placed roads creating
eight equal sectors, an inner ring of residential buildings, and an outer ring
road.
During Biblical times, Nahalal
was allotted to the tribe of Zvulun but designated a Levitical city belonging
to the Merari clan. Among the archaeological artifacts found in the area, was
an ancient Jewish inscription of the word "Sabbath" written on a rock.
In the Talmud (tj, Meg. 1:1, 70a), Nahalal is identified with Mahalol, which
corresponds to the present-day Arab settlement of Ma’alul. In 1850, explorer
Rabbi Yehoseph Schwarz visited the area and definitely identified this
settlement with the Biblical Nahalal.
In 1921, the land was sold
by the Sursock family of Beirut, to the Zionist, Palestine Land Development
Company, soon to transfer ownership to the Jewish National Fund. Nahalal’s founders immigrated to Palestine from Eastern Europe as part of the Second and Third Aliyah between 1904 and 1914, at the end of Ottoman rule.
They saw that the allotted land contained small rivulets which transformed the
plain into marshes that attracted malaria-spreading mosquitoes.
Heeding the warnings of experts, such as Dr. Hillel Yaffe, the Jewish pioneers temporarily settled on a nearby hill, near Ma'lul. The swamps
were drained and the pioneers, eventually, came down from the hill and divided
the former swampland into 80 equal parcels, 75 to the members and 5 to the Nahalal agricultural school. They had a
somewhat different ideology from the socialist kibbutz model where everything
was collectively owned. Thus, Nahalal became the first moshav ovdim (workers' cooperative
agricultural settlement) in Mandatory
Palestine where individual farms were privately owned.
In 1929, a Girls' Agricultural Training Farm was
established at Nahalal by Hana Meisel of the Women's International Zionist Organization, and in the 1940s it became a co-educational farming
school of the Youth
Aliyah movement.
More water became
available in the 1930s from the *Mekorot regional
network and deep wells were drilled in the vicinity. Farming then became more
intensive, fruit orchards were added, and existing branches expanded. The main
farming branches, aside from the fruit orchards, were dairy cattle, poultry, flowers,
and field crops.
Other major sites in
Nahalal include: the Cheese with Ephrat
culinary school; Nahalal High School; the Galilee International Management Institute; the public pool; the Bet Haam cultural center; Danieli Olive Oil grocery store; Lavido Cosmetics;
and Nahalal Junction.
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