(Photo By: Nir Shmul)
By: Naama Barak - March 4, 2021
Have you ever wondered who produced your artisanal olive oil or your locally produced cheese and wine?
Chances are that you’re imagining gruff men toiling away in dusty groves or inspecting huge oak barrels. And while that may be the case many times, it most certainly hasn’t always been that way in Israel, for women were just as much pioneers as men in pre-state Israel and in its early days.
Rachel Yanait Ben-Zvi, for example, was not only the wife of Israel’s second president, Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, but also an avid agronomist who taught Jerusalem women how to grow vegetables, milk cows and make cheese. Hana Meisel, meanwhile, was Israel’s first female agronomist and a renowned feminist who established an agricultural school for women in the country’s north. And throughout Israeli kibbutzim, women could be found working the land alongside their male counterparts.
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