Over the past few years, harvesting olives on Sukkot with KKL-JNF has become part of the holiday tradition. On Tuesday, October 10, over a thousand people were at Tel Hadid, picking and pickling olives to take home and eat in just a few short weeks.
This year, KKL-JNF’s annual Sukkot olive harvest celebrations took place in Lavi Forest in the north, at KKL-JNF’s Gilat nursery in the Western Negev and at the Tel Hadid olive plantation in Ben Shemen Forest near Modi’in. In the 1950s, olive trees were planted by KKL-JNF in Tel Hadid, a hill that was the site of a Jewish settlement dating back to the biblical time of Joshua, and was later settled by the Hasmoneans. Today one can see a panoramic view of Greater Tel Aviv from the hilltop.
Upon arrival at the site, visitors received an explanation about how to harvest olives without hurting the trees, after which everyone went to the olive groves, where they filled the KKL-JNF distributed plastic jars with freshly picked olives. Some of the children and even a few adults climbed the sturdy branches to the treetops, where most of the olives were to be found. After picking the olives, the next stage was banging them with wooden sticks on boards in order to decrease some of their bitterness. The final stage – soaking the olives in salt water and pickling them until they are ready to eat – is done at home.
Itzik from Rishon Letziyon was picking olives with his three children, Tamar, Daniel and Shiran. "We like outings that are connected to nature and the earth, which is why we always check what KKL-JNF has to offer when it’s holiday season. It’s fascinating for the children to experience the entire process of making olives, from picking them to eating them a few weeks later.” Shiran, a fifth-grader, added that she very much prefers olive picking and being in nature “to hanging out in shopping malls, which gets boring and leaves you feeling tired.”
The Kaufmann and Yitzhak families from Givat Shmuel agreed. “The children are learning about olives by actually doing it themselves rather than just hearing someone talk about it,” said Naama Yitzhak. “It’s very creative, kudos to KKL-JNF for organizing this activity.”
According to Mira Zer, KKL-JNF’s Public Relations and Community Coordinator for the Lowlands and Coastal Plain, over 1,000 people from Israel’s central region took part in this year’s celebrations at Tel Hadid, which included, in addition to picking olives, various arts and crafts stations for children and their families, such as making Simhat Torah flags from recycled materials, painting pine cones, seeing a live demonstration of how KKL-JNF’s fire-fighting trucks work, and more. One very special new activity was inviting everyone to help paint a large mural depicting KKL-JNF’s forests, using outdated paints donated by the Nirlat company. KKL-JNF Volunteer Coordinator Yael Banin explained that the idea was to use recycled materials as much as possible, so that the financial and environmental cost of this activity was negligible. “The positive energy it created was amazing,” Yael said, “and we hope to organize similar activities elsewhere in the future.”
Omer, Gideon and Zohar, who live in Holon, were picking olives with their father Itamar. “We are big fans of KKL-JNF holiday activities,” Itamar said. “We love hiking and being outdoors. The main thing is that we actually managed to fill up our jar, so everyone will be going home quite happy and satisfied.”