Bnei Binyamin movement and the founding of the city of Netanya

In the early twenties of the twentieth century, young people from the veteran moshavim established an organization called the Benjamin of Benjamin Edmond de Rothschild. Its prominent leaders were Oved Ben-Ami and Gad from the Petach Tikvah and Alexander Aharonson synagogues in Zichron Yaakov. Its purpose was to help interested farmers to establish new colonies. Since they had no chance of using the national funds, since they preferred to help the cooperative settlements, they established their own bank. Its purpose is to provide the settlers with loans for this purpose. The secretary of the organization was Oved Ben Ami. In 1928 he initiated the establishment of a moshav for young settlers in the Sharon area, which suited the orchards. The initiators chose the designated name for the new settlement - Netanya - in the hope of receiving a generous grant from the rich Zionist canteen from the United States. To their chagrin, the man did not meet their expectations, yet he nevertheless won his name in the new colony. While searching the area for purchase, they arrived via a middleman to the sheikh of the small village Umm Khaled, west of Beit Lid. The place was far from any settlement and had no access.

At the end of 1928, the first 1,400 dunams were purchased from the land of the village. The first payment was given by the Bank of Binyamin, which took over the responsibility for financing the first stage of the settlement and for raising money from the settlers. The first goal was to recruit about 50 farmers in the old moshavot. And each of them will receive 25 dunam of citrus orchards and pay for them in installments. The settlers gathered from ancient moshavot from all over the country: from the Galilee, Samaria and the Judean Shephelah, and were a typical section of the Hebrew peasantry.

The Bnei Binyamin movement established a branch in Kfar Tavor. Six families from Kfar Tavor were among the first settlers in Netanya. These were: Yitzhak Meller and his wife Esther, daughter of Dvora and Yaakov Gorky; Zvi Pajkowicz and his wife Leah, the daughter of Frida and Shlomo Goldman; Yechiel Goldenberg; Chnina Cohen; Eliezer Gorky and his wife Shulamit, daughter of Rachel and Zalman Cohen, and Michael Shenkar and his wife Rivka, daughter of Badra and David Tzafira. Here is the story of the immigration to the land. In the middle of January 1929, Yitzhak Meller left that morning for a field in Kfar Tavor. In the afternoon he returned to the settlement. But he entered the yard with the animals, heard shouts from the end of the street: "Yitzhak, they call you from Tel Aviv." In those days there was one phone call with the mukhtar Dov Hershkowitz. With boots covered with half a ton of mud, Maler galloped like a horse to Hershkovitz, took the receiver in his hand. In his excitement he did not know what to put in his ear, and what to put in his mouth. The whole colony heard the conversation with Tel Aviv. He told Ben-Ami's worker from the Benyamin Center to shout loudly. Ben-Ami informed him that he had to come with his friends from Kfar Tavor,

Yitzhak Meller began organizing the group of candidates for the settlement of Netanya among the farmers' sons in the colony. One lacked work animals, the other a dowry of a few pounds. Ten days later, the convoy was ready to leave. It was Saturday night. Every village in Tabor was on wheels. Help them fill sacks of straw and barley and load them on the wagons. They filled their bags with loaves of bread so they would not starve on the way. In the wake of the waking, the entire village left the six farmers. They reached Afula, and all the way it was raining heavily. For two days they hid with the beasts from the rain in the shed near Afula. On the evening of the third day the rain stopped, and with darkness they harnessed the animals and continued their journey. Finally they reached Tul Karm. In the center of town a mob gathered around them. And he began to read in Arabic: "Yehud! Yehud!" [= Jews! Jews!] Meller wanted to reach a resident of Tulkarm named Abu Ali, who was a policeman in Tiberias during the Turks, and was a son of his father Moshe, who was the mukhtar of Kfar Tabor for twenty years. Yitzhak Meller paid one boy a shilling to show him Abu Ali's house. They came to the house. Abu Ali opened the door for him, and they embraced. Yitzhak Meller told him he was hungry. So Abu Ali made a great table. At the end of the meal, Meller said he was waiting for him from the village of Kfar Tavor in the market square. So Abu Ali immediately took a large tray with pitas and some delicacies and went out to the market square. Abu Ali finally gave us a guide to Umm Khaled, but Meller saw that he was getting us into the mud. So he freed him from the burden of transportation.

Meller recalls the way they used to travel to Jaffa, Ramle and El-Arish during the First World War. The group traveled the same way until it reached Qalqiliya. The group overtook an egg, crossed railroad tracks, and reached sand. Before sundown on Friday evening the members of the group arrived at the village of Tira. Again they were surrounded by a hostile rabble. Therefore, Meller suggested staying overnight in the field and not in the village so that they would not be harmed. Yitzhak Meller started looking for a man who would agree to guide them in the fields to Umm Khaled for three shillings. An Arab approached him with a black mustache and burning eyes. He first asked to go to his house to get a delivery. But Meller did not agree. So they quickly got on the wagons and continued the journey. They drove through fields of grain until they reached a deep wadi, and it was impossible to pass through it. Therefore, the members of the group took hoes and built a battery of sand. So they went on all night.

On Saturday afternoon, the group arrived at the outskirts of Umm Khaled. When they arrived a heavy hail descended. As the members of the group descend from the wagons, a Jewish young man, holding a kettle, comes toward them from the hill. He offered them tea. The man was Moshe Shaked, digging wells from Petah Tikva. He dug the first well in Netanya in February 1929. The settlers who came from Kfar Tavor were the ones who plowed the first plowing. They, as noted, brought with them mules and plowing equipment.

I also have some connection to the founding of Netanya. Jerusalem Segal, my great-grandfather, and Natan Axelrod, one of the fathers of the Israeli film industry, had a photography studio called Moledet. The studio produced documentary films. When the time came for the cornerstone of the new settlement, members of the Bnei Binyamin Association approached Jerusalem Segal and asked him to commemorate the event in the film. The film depicted a tent camp, the beginning of the building, and a deep grove for planting orchards. To take the film, Segal traveled from Tel Aviv, where he lived, to Netanya in a taxi for more than two hours. The taxi traveled in deep sands on a rough road, passing through several Arab villages and many empty areas.

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