Planting hope in Samaria: A journey through vineyards, springs, and ancient history

We heard Jeremiah’s words three times on this trip: on Har Kabir, at Tura Winery, on Har Bracha (Mount Gerizim), and in a stone cellar beneath an organic farm at Givot Olam. Each time, the person quoting the verse was standing next to a vineyard planted within the last 25 years.

I write about healing tourism: places in Israel where people can heal the soul and refresh the body; places that can hold a couple, a family, or a group that has been through something hard. This time I brought my own family.

My wife Adi, our sons Lavie and Eitam, and I spent two days in Samaria, the Shomron, to see what the region offers a family that needs rest and open space. Since most people know Samaria only from headlines, I set myself one rule: listen to the people who live here, and let them tell the story of their land in their own words.

Two guides showed us the way. Lilian Zaitman from the tourism department of the Samaria Regional Council has lived in Kedumim for 44 years. Baruch Odeser, a field coordinator for the Council, has been guiding here for more than 15 years.

Twenty years ago, Baruch said, people in these communities drove out to work in the morning and came home only to sleep. Then local leaders saw that farming and tourism could carry the region, and wineries, farm shops, and coffee carts began to take root.

“What I have learned in Samaria is that agriculture and culinary culture are the path to bring outsiders from all walks of life and create meaningful connections,” Lilian told us. Almost every stop proved her right.

Every good journey needs a base, and ours sat atop a mountain. Kabir Winery, on Har Kabir in Elon Moreh, close to 800 meters above sea level, brings a visitor center, a working winery, a dairy restaurant, and couples’ zimmers (guesthouses) together in a relatively large complex.

You park once, unpack once, and spend your days driving out to springs, farms, lookouts, and wineries. In the evening you return to vineyards, a cool mountain wind, and real quiet.

The zimmers are usually meant for couples: two dome-tent suites, each with its own jacuzzi or tub, a kitchenette with an espresso machine, and a private garden facing the vines. The complex is wheelchair accessible and ready for Shabbat-observant guests, with a synagogue a short walk away.

We had dinner at the winery’s kosher dairy restaurant, and the next morning a buffet breakfast, both built on fresh local produce and served on a wide terrace that overlooks the vineyards and down to the valley that reaches Nablus. On Fridays, from 9:00 a.m. to 1:30 p.m., the restaurant serves a rich brunch. We were not the only ones impressed.

On one Israeli booking site, every review of the zimmers gives a perfect score. One guest wrote that the Friday meal at the winery “would not shame a five-star hotel,” and another praised both the food and the hosts’ warmth and patience.

The complex is the life’s work of Itamar Weiss and his wife, Chani. They came to Elon Moreh 26 years ago as newlyweds. Itamar studied in yeshiva, but he wanted to connect people to the land the way his late grandfather had farmed it. When I asked what the mountain looked like when they arrived, he answered without hesitation.

“This mountain was bare. We came to no house, no tree, no vineyard, and no garden,” he said. “Today this mountain blossoms. We build houses and plant vineyards.”

They started with what they had. “We started small, with seven dunams. We took our wedding savings and put them straight into the ground,” Itamar said. “When I planted those vines, I knew I was starting to create a path that connects agriculture, wine and tourism.”

With his friend Eliab and a third partner, he now farms more than 150 dunams of wine grapes, plus table grapes in the Emek Tirza valley.

About the zimmers, he is clear: “My cabins are built specifically for a couple to come, disconnect, and recharge.”

The mountain itself is the main attraction. From the ridge, you look straight down into Emek Tirza, about 100 meters below sea level, a drop of roughly 900 meters, the sharpest change in height in the country. Kabir’s jeep and EasyRider tours cover it in about 15 minutes, past old stone terraces and wine presses cut into the rock thousands of years ago.

Nearby, a short, family-friendly trail of about 600 meters leads to the Mitzpe Kabir lookout and its ancient oaks.

Itamar hosts guests from all over Israel and abroad, including American groups several times a week, and he refuses to let Samaria be defined by hardship.

“There is a mistaken idea that if we talk about how hard things are, it will bring something good. It doesn’t,” he said. “The reality here is the exact opposite. It is pastoral, peaceful, and joyful. When people hear ‘Samaria,’ I want them to feel what they feel when they hear ‘the Golan.’”

More than 95% of his guests, he told us, leave saying they wish they could live there.

Our first morning began further west, with breakfast at Atelier Florin, a new coffee cart and patisserie in Elei Zahav. It is named for the owner’s grandmother, whose portrait hangs inside and whose love of beauty and food shaped every hand-painted corner. Three months earlier, the plot was bare.

“Before this, there was nothing here, absolutely nothing,” we were told. Every Sunday, the team makes all of its dough from scratch.

Over coffee and homemade rich muffins, a regional representative explained how land is handled in western Samaria. It falls into three kinds, he said: survey land, state land, and private land. “Where it is private land, we obviously do not touch.”

A few minutes away, at Peduel, we stood on Mirpeset HaMedina, the Balcony of the State. Tel Aviv’s towers, Rosh Ha’ayin and, on a clear day, Hadera and Haifa University spread out below, while planes slid toward Ben-Gurion Airport. A visitor center with a glass-walled hall is rising over the ridge.

“Wellness arrives here naturally,” our host said. “It is a huge word, but here each person feels its unique qualities organically, through the crisp air, the open horizon, and the quiet space.”

Below, at the Byzantine ruins of Deir Qala, bereaved families and Duvdevan veterans build wooden benches in memory of friends who loved these hills.

Driving on toward Rehelim, Lilian told us how Professor Shivi Drori of Ariel University, founder of Gvaot Winery, studied ancient grape seeds to revive the region’s biblical grape.

“There used to be so many vineyards here,” she said. “Later, when the Muslims arrived and didn’t drink wine, they took out all the vines and planted olives. But Shivi succeeded in reaching the biblical grape.”

Ariel’s medical school, named for Dr. Moshe Leiter, a graduate who fell in Gaza, now has a rehabilitation department, so patients no longer have to travel all the way to Sheba Medical Center, Tel Hashomer.

Tura Winery: From an army tent to the world

Vered Ben Sa’adon was born in Holland. Her father’s mother survived the Holocaust. After her family converted and made aliyah, they laid roots in Kochav Hashahar, next door to the family of Erez, the man she would marry. She was 19, and he was 21. Like Itamar and Chani, they put their wedding money into the ground and bought 20 dunams of vines on Har Bracha.

After four years of orlah, when Jewish law forbids harvesting, wines made from their grapes won international awards. Then boycotts came, and outside wineries stopped buying grapes from Samaria. So Erez studied winemaking and became Tura’s winemaker, while Vered took over sales abroad and created her “Roza” rosé, named for her Dutch birth name.

Tura began in Rehelim inside an army shelter tent, curved like Noah’s Ark, with four barrels and 1,200 bottles. Today it makes nearly 280,000 bottles a year and exports half – to the United States, Europe, Dubai, and Australia. At 850 meters, the vines fight fog, heat, frost, and rocky soil.

“There is a saying that when the vine suffers, the grape excels,” our guide said. The tasting is slow on purpose: hold the stem, swirl, breathe, wait, all the way to the flagship Mountain Peak blend, aged 22 months in oak.

On the hilltops of Itamar, Lilian brought us to Botz Bagiva, the ceramics studio of Batya Erdstein. Born to Yemenite parents who had moved to the United States, Batya is a nurse who made aliyah from San Diego 12 years ago. A decade ago, her husband gave her pottery tools, and her home studio began shipping Land of Israel designs to Jewish communities abroad.

Three months before our visit, she put her life savings into a large new workshop, built so that people with disabilities can take part too.

“We don’t rely on formal strategy. We operate on faith, prayer, and heart,” she said. The week before we came, groups of 40, 50, and 100 people arrived, all by word of mouth.

She sat the boys at the wheel. “Keep your elbows down on your knees, bring your hands together soft as butter, and let the wheel guide you,” she instructed gently. As the wet clay smoothed beneath their fingers, Batya looked out across the sweeping hilltop.

“For me, creating here is living a dream,” she reflected. “It’s the space, the heights, and the open horizon. It isn’t just physical – it spiritually expands the heart. Waking up at five in the morning to see the sunrise in this deep quiet – that is where real healing happens.”

She sees the hill itself as part of the lesson: “Taking clay out of earth that was once full of thorns and stones, and seeing with your own eyes that a couple with a few kids managed in 10 years to build something real on the map. It gives people so much inspiration.”

“Batya invested her soul, her best money, and her whole heart here,” Lilian said. When our plans shifted that afternoon, nobody minded. As someone in our group put it: “We just flow with it.”

In Itamar, Roy Mandelowitz built MRH Ranch, Mandelowitz Roy Horsemanship, “with my own 10 fingers.” A national champion in Extreme Cowboy Racing, he has worked with horses for more than 30 years. He grew up poor and with severe dyslexia.

“I was born into a very unhealthy environment and grew up among crime families,” he told us. “I know what horses gave me in my life. They saved me.”

At the recent national championships, Roy won bridleless riding, guiding his horse through obstacles with no reins, while his daughter took second among the youth. His 80-centimeter-deep arena footing was lab-tested to protect the horses’ joints.

“When we compete across the country, my team doesn’t just represent me. We represent Samaria,” he said. “There are so many stigmas out there. When people see the professionalism, skill, and sportsmanship coming out of Itamar, it breaks down barriers and shifts perceptions entirely.”

Trophies are not the point. “If I have a flag, a true core purpose for this place, it is working with youth at risk,” Roy said. Lone soldiers find a coffee corner with fresh-baked goods, and young people use his recording studio. For our boys, the ride was what Roy calls therapeutic tourism: “A deep inner journey.”

Givot Olam, the organic farm Avri Ran founded on hilltop 851, is known across Israel for its free-range eggs and goat cheeses. At Cafe Shamayim, Sara served us organic yogurt, the farm’s cheeses, coffee, and fresh-baked goods. Everything here, even the small synagogue with its carved stone ark, is built from local stone.

“When Avri first started, people thought he was crazy,” Lilian said. “But he taught everyone what true sustainable agriculture means.”

Avri sat with us at a wooden table outside. When he arrived, he said the hill was bare rock and stone terraces, and he pointed to the old photographs on the walls and to Mark Twain’s account of the empty, desolate hills he crossed in the 1860s.

“People come with pre-packaged scripts,” he said, “but history and physical facts on the ground speak for themselves.”

Baruch put it even more plainly: “Here at Givot Olam I can tell you unequivocally: there was no Arab village here.” What the hills do hold, he explained, are ruins of ancient settlements, most likely from the Second Temple period.

A guide then led us to a rock-cut winepress and down stone stairs into a hand-carved wine cellar and a bell-shaped cistern that stays cool all year. “Over 2,000 ancient wine presses have been surveyed across these hills,” he said. Standing in the farm’s new organic vineyards, he told us, you are watching the prophecy come true in real time.

Givot Olam is also a place of mourning. Near the old wooden watchtower lies Or, a Duvdevan soldier who fell defending the country, buried on the hill among his family and comrades. Nearby, a young widow built a lookout for her husband, who fell in Gaza.

Sitting there, I told our hosts what I look for in my work: something deep and real, beauty in the people and the land, shared without judgment, without prejudice, and without politics.

At Khan Ben Hakramim, Naomi Ronsky and her husband Moshe run air-conditioned Mongolian-yurt glamping built for recovery.

In holiday seasons, they give the whole site to one extended family at a time, up to 80 people. They have hosted families evacuated from Gush Katif, reservists, and wives of wounded soldiers. Groceries wait in the fridge on arrival, and a Sefer Torah sits in the main yurt so families can pray on site.

“Wellness isn’t just massage tables or saunas,” Naomi told us. “It’s a unit of reservists sitting together around a grill at night, talking through what they’ve experienced. It is giving people a place that can hold their story, give them air to breathe, and let them leave refreshed.”

Baruch drove us down white switchbacks into the Samaria Desert, past Wadi Atala, the path Jacob chose to Shechem so his flocks would not harm anyone’s crops. At the bottom lies Ein Fuka, also called Ma’ayan Arnon, a clear spring pool under a towering eucalyptus, on the ancient border between Ephraim and Manasseh. We picked wild figs straight from the branches.

“When you come down here early in the morning, you are completely alone with nature,” Baruch said. Gazelles and foxes come to drink.

Climbing out, we stopped at Mitzpe Matan, a lookout built by the father of Matan Zagron, a young officer killed in a 2002 terror attack. Below lay Nahal Tirza, where, Baruch said, the Israelites came up into the land under Joshua.

“You aren’t just looking at scenery,” he said. “You are looking at the gateway through which our ancestors entered the Land.”

The next morning at 7:00, mist still hung over Elon Moreh as we drank coffee with Baruch at Ein Kabir, a spring pool shaded by fig, willow, and mulberry trees. The local teenagers care for it, draining it once or twice a year and scooping out the mud by hand.

“When you keep a place truly clean, the next person who arrives feels hesitant to leave trash behind,” Baruch said. There are no lights at night. “Nighttime belongs to the animals.”

A kollel head from Bnei Brak once called him; until then, they had always gone to the Golan. Now haredi families come by the busload. To me, this is wellness at its simplest: a cold morning swim with your children and a ripe fig picked off the tree.

At the new Elon Moreh Heritage and Visitor Center, director Shira began with Abraham, whose first stop in the Land of Israel, she reminded us, was “the place of Shechem, unto the oak of Moreh,” in the valley below. She told us about archaeologist Adam Zertal’s discoveries on Mount Ebal and about the 1970s pioneers who tried eight times to settle here.

Quoting pioneer Menahem Felix, she said: “They put their head against the wall, and on the eighth time, the wall broke.” Lavie and Eitam lingered in front of Uri Sa’adya’s photographs of golden eagles, foxes, and gazelles on the cliffs just outside town. “The nature here is wild and breathtaking,” Shira said.

Our last stop was Mount Gerizim, the biblical Mount of Blessing, facing Mount Ebal across the valley of Shechem. On its summit lives the Samaritan community, about 850 people between here and Holon, who still write in ancient Hebrew script and carve their mezuzahs into stone.

Baruch shared a story from Yefet, longtime director of the Samaritan Museum, about his 90-year-old mother, who kept the full Yom Kippur fast against a doctor’s advice and came through it. We left with jars of Har Bracha tahini, made by Samaritan producers.

From the mountain we could see the vineyards of Tura and Kabir, where two young couples planted their wedding savings. A few ridges away, a nurse from San Diego shapes clay on faith, a horseman saved by horses teaches teenagers to ride, and a couple keeps a Torah scroll in a yurt so tired families can rest.

Jeremiah promised that the planters would plant and enjoy the fruit.

In Samaria, they are also setting a table and inviting the rest of us to sit down.

The writer is a travel photojournalist mapping Israel’s natural landscapes at the intersection of wellness, healing hospitality, and sustainable tourism. He was a guest of the places mentioned.