Skip to footer

A goat farmer, lured by the green Galilee

Avi Yankelevitch, who runs an eco-tourist goat farm in the Galilee, comes from an archetypal Israeli pioneer family – European Jews, enchanted by the land they feel called on to work.

|
Evan Bryant
Avi Yankelevitch pours hot goat milk through a strainer. His daughter, Hadar Barkai, turns the milk into rich cheese for the meals she provides for hikers on the Jesus Trail, which passes near their village of Ilaniya in the Galilee region of Israel.

| Ilaniya, Israel

Avi Yankelevitch, a burly goat farmer, shows us the way to our yurt and then whips out his pocketknife to cut a passion fruit straight off the bush. He offers it to us on the palm of his thick, weathered hand. 

He and his family never intended to be farmers. 

If it wasn't for David Ben Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister – somewhat akin to George Washington in Israeli terms – they probably never would have ended up in the rural village of Ilaniya, located on the Sea of Galilee, halfway between the hills of Nazareth and Capernaum.

But while Mr. Yankelevitch’s mother, a Romanian immigrant, was working as a housekeeper for the Israeli president in Jerusalem in the early days of Israel’s existence, she had the opportunity to meet Mr. Ben Gurion.

Why in the world was she living in Jerusalem, the prime minister asked. He encouraged her to move to the beautiful village where he had worked as a farm laborer in the 1920s as one of those early Zionists who cultivated not only the land, but the new ideal of the Jew as a tan, strong pioneer.

“She couldn’t refuse, and here we are,” says Mr. Yankelevitch. 

He got his start in farming by growing carnations, and once had the largest goat farm in the country, with 120 goats, but had to close it in the 1980s because farm banks collapsed. 

Today, he runs an eco-lodge and organic goat farm –  named “Yaroz Az,” which has the double meaning of green goat and intense green – with his daughter, Hadar Barkai, and her husband. They started the initiative when they heard that an Israeli entrepreneur and his American hiking buddy were launching the Jesus Trail, aimed at bringing pilgrims into the countryside where Jesus walked and not just to a select few places where the tour buses unload. The idea was to help boost small businesses, and thus help the Galilee’s depressed rural economy gain new life.

“We hope that the Jesus Trail will develop and it will be like El Camino de Santiago in Spain,” says Yankelevitch, referring to The Way of St. James, a major Christian pilgrimage route. 

For more on the Jesus Trail and Yarok Az, read here.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to A goat farmer, lured by the green Galilee
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Middle-East/Olive-Press/2013/0412/A-goat-farmer-lured-by-the-green-Galilee
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe