The Weizmann College for Jewish Children

To the child from the bazaars of India or the kasbah of Algiers the desert must be a strange forbidding place. To the cave-child from the pit-dwellings of Libya plant­ing a tree must seem a mystic ritual.

But here they are—boys and girls from Cochin-India, from the Yemen, from Moroc­co, Algeria, Libya, Iraq, China and Persia—the Children of Israel in-gathered from the ends of the earth. When they look out of their classroom window at the Weizmann Agricultural College in the Negev at the yel­low wastes which stretch to the horizon and beyond, they must surely ask themselves whether this is the journey’s end on the road of 2,000 years of tribulation. The answer impressed upon them by their teachers is that it is not and that the road leads not from, but into, the wilderness.

“But if, along that road you will plant your trees and, in the thirsty desert, water those trees,” they are told, “then the chil­dren of the future will walk in the shade.”

The in-gathered children of The Dispersal, the Oriental Jews and the Occidental Jews, slant-eyed from China, blue-eyed from Paris, are brought together in this college to be trained in desert-recovery. Their ages are from thirteen to sixteen and the courses last three years. Mixed with the newcomers are children from the older settlements.

The Weizmann College is a pleasant place, architecturally ultra-modern and startlingly out-of-place when seen against the desert vista. It is nine miles from Beer­sheba in the Northern Negev. And as the tough chaps who are struggling with the Southern Negev (where they are lucky if they get 4 inches of rain a year) will tell you “The Northern Negev isn’t really desert at all”. . .

So I did not waste much sympathy on those youngsters, looking out of their class­room window at that tawny desert. It is their land of opportunity. They will be pioneers . . . and extend the horizons of cultivation. And the symbol of all they are trying to do is the tree. . . . The people who make deserts cut down trees. The people who recover deserts plant trees. To those children and the elders who set them their example, the desert is not a dead place. It is land which is ailing, needing a tonic in the form of water, needing clothing in the form of vegetation. Above all needing nursing back to health.

Nearby the Weizmann College, which is at Tifra ,is the Gilat Plant Research Station, a branch of the Agricultural Research Station at Rehovot. There in the desert soil they are testing grasses, shrubs, and forage-plants from all over the world. The Food and Agricultural Organisation of the United Nations has provided 500 different types of grasses, from six continents. From this kind of research and international help will come the revival of the pastures and the re-vegetation of the naked lands. But often the sick desert, moribund for centur­ies does not even need re-seeding. It just needs a period of convalescence in order to be restored to health.