NAHALAL

aerial view of Nahalal, courtesy Wikipedia

Nahalal is a moshav in northern Israel, just south of the Nahal Shimron and roughly 9 miles west of Nazareth. It is governed by the Jezreel Valley Regional Council. In 2019 it had a population of 930.

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.