This year’s bumper wheat crop has become the center of a fierce controversy between wheat farmers and ultra-Orthodox Jews. The latter insist that it be exported because they cannot eat produce grown on Jewish-owned land during this “shmita” (every seventh) year in which the land is to lie fallow according to biblical injunction.
The government has already served notice it will pay the farmers less than usual this year because most of their crop will be going overseas. The farmers accused the government of knuckling under to religious extremists.
The ultra-Orthodox claim they have made arrangements through their cohorts in the U.S. to have the Americans sell Israel wheat grown by non-Jews to compensate for the exported Israeli wheat. The farmers said this will cost the Treasury scores of millions of dollars in needless expenses, plus transportation and port handling charges. The Chief Rabbinate has taken what it considers to be a compromise on the issue. It readopted a 1919 ruling by the then-Chief Rabbi Avraham Hacohen Kook that crops could be grown during a fallow year if a bill of sale was arranged to pass the land nominally to non-Jewish ownership for the year.
That has been accepted by the moderate Orthodox but rejected by the Agudat Israel and the Neturei Karta, the Jerusalem sect which refuses to recognize the State of Israel.
Haaretz reported Tuesday that the staunchly secular kibbutzim were the first to comply with the ultra-Orthodox demands.
The three largest kibbutz bakeries in Kfar Hahoresh, Einat and Mishmar Hasharon produce 17 percent of the country’s bread and fear an ultra-Orthodox boycott of their products, Haaretz said.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
