Agur, Israel

Agur lies in the Southern Judean Foothills, among the settlements that flank the HaElah Valley and look toward the Etzion Bloc in the Hebron Mountains.[2][4] Administratively, it belongs to the Jerusalem District and the Mateh Yehuda Regional Council; its locality code is 794.[1][5] Its settlement affiliation is Tenu'at ha-Moshavim.[4]

Agur was established in 1950.[1] After the War of Independence, agricultural settlements were rapidly established across the wider Jerusalem Corridor.[2]

A Jerusalem Post commentary traces the moshav’s name to the Arab village of Ajur, which existed there until 1948, and describes Agur as a settlement near Beit Shemesh inhabited mostly by Kurdish Jews.[6] The commentary recounts that Kurdish Jewish settlers struggled to earn a living and that, in January 1955, the Jewish Agency sent two young tractor drivers to help plow their fields; both stayed in the moshav.[6]

Agur had 331 inhabitants on December 31, 2004.[4] Its population was 540 in 2020 and 552 in 2021.[5][1] The 2021 population figures classified 546 residents as Jewish and six as Arab.[1]

Agur resident Naim Eliyahu formed the Kurdish band “Naim and Naima” with his wife.[3] Born in Koysinjaq in northern Iraq, he came to Israel with his family in 1951 and served in the air force.[3] As a boy, he studied with a local Jewish teacher; he later claimed to have learned all of the Talmud by the age of six.[3] He also sang a Kurdish folk song at a Kurdish Jewish gathering.[3]

Caves at the moshav appear in photographs captioned “Caves at Moshav Agor, named as the Flies Caves.”[7] The photographic catalog for Agur contains seven photographs and uses the spelling “Agor” in these captions.[7]

The Jerusalem Post commentary gives an account of Ajur’s depopulation during the War of Independence: it says Givati troops occupied a house southeast of the village and fired toward it, mostly into the air, prompting panic and mass flight.[6] It also describes demolition of village houses in the early 1950s and in 1964, and the brief postwar use of the house’s downstairs rooms as a school.[6] These details rest on that single commentary rather than independent corroboration in the material available here.[6]

The same commentary recounts a visit by a descendant of the al-Azza family to the family’s former house near Agur, where his mother had been born; it quotes him saying, “This is my house!”[6]