Kidron, Israel

Kidron belongs to the Brenner Regional Council and is affiliated with Tenu'at ha-Moshavim.[1] It lies north of Gedera in the Rehovot region of the Coastal Plain.[1][2] The community's documented history links Yugoslav Jewish immigration and survivor resettlement with its later role as the site of Israel's oldest food forest, where courses, volunteer activities, and ecological experiments are conducted.[4][5]

Reference works date Kidron's founding to 1949 and identify Yugoslavian immigrants as its founders.[1][3] A United States Holocaust Memorial Museum catalog, however, dates a group portrait of Jewish survivors from Yugoslavia at the new agricultural settlement to 1948. The catalog states that Marko Spitzer, who immigrated with his family in December 1948, was instrumental in establishing the moshav.[4]

Kidron's name preserves the Greek form Kedron. An Encyclopaedia Judaica entry connects that form to the ancient town Kedron mentioned in I Maccabees, presenting the historical identification as a scholarly conclusion.[2] Holocaust survivor Shela Altaraz later recalled going to Kidron because Yugoslavs lived there. She stayed with the Solomon family, whom she knew from Pristina, for three and a half months when she had nowhere else to go.[6]

Kidron had a recorded population of 560 in 1968.[3] Its listed population on December 31, 2004, was 1,067.[1] Yugoslav immigrants formed the founding community, and survivor records and testimony document continued personal ties among Jews from Yugoslavia in the settlement's early years.[4][6]

The Kidron food forest was established in 2011 by Hadas Meital Hochberg on land previously occupied by her father's 17-dunam peach orchard.[5] After encountering food forests in the United States, Hochberg returned to Israel and formed a study group with Saar Ostreicher. When her father decided to uproot the orchard, she persuaded him to make the land available for the project.[5]

The project's practical beginning was linked to a course taught on the site by Itai Hauben, an Israeli instructor then living in Costa Rica who had experience with food forests and ecological farms.[5] The former orchard's agricultural water allocation remained available, and a program operated by Israel's Ministry of Agriculture and the Jewish National Fund supplied olives, figs, carobs, walnuts, and other trees.[5]

The site hosts permaculture courses, volunteer work, and mud-building experiments. Tours and workshops were its principal source of income.[5] The forest's success led Hochberg, her brother Nimrod, Yuval Leibovitz, and Michal Eldar-Leibreich to establish Reforest in 2019 to advance food forests in Israel.[5]

Kidron's food forest resembles a combination of an orchard and a tropical forest, with diverse edible plantings.[5] Its water-conservation system uses the liman technique, in which artificial earth mounds in dry streambeds capture floodwater. The work helps infiltrate thousands of cubic meters of runoff into groundwater each year.[5]

Hochberg and Ostreicher also produced flour from the fruit of Prosopis alba at the site. The flour was described as slightly sweet and nutritious.[7]