The Baron

A sunny day in December, as beautiful as a day can be. It is my first official day at my new job. I am leading a group of 36 of my Jewish peers from around the world, and we are exploring the vast and well kept Ramat HaNadiv Memorial Gardens National Park in Israel. Living 6 years in Israel, I have come across the name “Rothschild” more than once, as many streets and establishments bare the name. But it was not until today that I truly grasped the real vision and impact that the man behind the name had on this small country and the Jewish People for all of eternity.

Baron Edmond de Rothschild was raised and resided in France. He decided to invest his family’s vast fortune, accumulated through savvy banking over the previous century, in the forgotten province of the Ottoman Empire that over 2000 years ago had been known as the Kingdom of Israel. The pure scope of this man’s vision is hard to fathom given the circumstances in which he decided to make this great investment. In the words of Mark Twain upon his journey overland here in 1867:
“….. A desolate country whose soil is given over wholly to weeds… a silent mournful expanse…. a desolation…. we never saw a human being on the whole route…. hardly a tree or shrub anywhere. Even the olive tree and the cactus, those fast friends of a worthless soil, had almost deserted the country.” Clearly Baron Rothschild was up against much as he attempted to implement his vision of Jews returning to Zion, the Land of Israel. Statehood was still hardly on his mind. Rothschild was trying to build Jewish settlement.

Through massive land purchases he became known as “Father of the Yishuv,” the first Jewish settlements, Rishon Letzion, Zichron Yaakov, and Rosh Pina among them, which are now well established Israeli suburbs and towns. He brought agronomists, and other experts to aid and instruct the Jews escaping from Eastern Europe, who were mostly merchants, how to farm and how to develop the land. The Rothschilds left a legacy in Israel which included the reclamation of nearly 500,000 dunams of land and 30 settlements.

I stood stoically in front of the smoothed and shined black basalt rock headstone slab that marks the grave of Baron Edmond de Rothschild and his wife Adelaide. Located within the park, the tomb was cave like and a bit dark, but shining above the burial spot was a thick white limestone disk about the size of my head with a grand Magen David sculpted on the surface. This spectacular piece is actually an incredibly intact relic excavated in Jerusalem from the 2nd Temple Period. It was entombed with the Rothschilds as a dedication from the State of Israel to a man and a vision, and a symbol of the miraculous redemption of a nation after more than 2000 years of wandering.