I am in Talmei Yosef because, while I was in the Masa Volunteers Program, someone added me to a WhatsApp group, where I met people who added me to other WhatsApp groups, where I responded to a post written by Ori, and then I took two buses and hitchhiked, and then I decided to keep coming back.
Ori is tall and lanky. As you’ll read or hear in a moment, Ori is an important man in Talmei Yosef, and he works hard. His phone always has new messages waiting. Sometimes he’ll hand it to me; I can quickly write an answer to a foreign volunteer who wrote something too long and too English for him to patiently respond to.
Since I have arrived and moved in to a 3-bedroom house (where there have been up to 8 people living at once), Ori has been assigning volunteers to beds as they become available. He sleeps on the couch in the living room.
Ori agreed to let me record a conversation, which I going to provide an English interpretation of below. All errors in translation are mine. (Statements in parentheses are my commentary. Watching us was another volunteer, Malachi, who arrived today - I kind of just hit record and tried to get Ori going without explaining anything, so at the beginning of the conversation I turned to him to explain.)
Begin Translation
Eidan: (To Ori) OK. Let’s start before everything. Do you want to say something about where you born, your family? Whatever comes to you.
(Aside to Malachi) I want people - I write a blog, yes? To my family and friends abroad. I want people to know Ori, that’s the goal here.
(Returning to Ori) So whatever you want.
Ori: OK, no problem. I’m Ori, Ori Yaluvsky. I was born in Kibbutz Eilot, near Eilat. At age 12 I moved to Moshav Ramon, near Afula, in the Gilboa. I’m 20. I did a year of national service. Before that I was in high school in project HILA (a program for at-risk youth). And before that at a school called Ein Harod.
Eidan: Great.
Ori: After my year of national service, the IDF didn’t recruit me, because I am diabetic. Today I’m here in Talmei Yosef.
Eidan: Ok - how did you get here? Did you think you would work in agriculture?
Ori: In my life?
Eidan: Yeah, sure.
Ori: Because I was from the kibbutz and the moshav, all my friends I grew up with worked in agriculture, and they all loved it. And I didn’t, I hated it. I went to work in catering, I liked food more. And I worked [in agriculture] a little bit, during Corona I worked on an almond plantation, but I didn’t think I would go back to it. I thought maybe I would do something in that style, something small, but not at that level. But then the war started, and I understood that maybe they need help there….
How did I get here? On October 7th, I was working at a placed called Selina Ramon (a hotel), which is found in the Makhtesh Ramon, under Mitzpe Ramon (Makhtesh Ramon, or “Ramon Crater”, is a large rock formation in the Negev Desert in the South of Israel. Mitzpe Ramon, “Ramon Lookout,” is the nearest settlement.) And I was there with displaced people, basically the whole month, and in the first week of the war, the first evacuees that arrived were named Eli and Ayelet. They have two girls. They were together, with the girls, in the area of the small party (the Nova festival had a main stage and a secondary stage some distance away).
Eli has a business partner named Anani. His wife was murdered. The kids were taken to Gaza and have since been freed. And Eli and his wife were in fact the first evacuees I got to know. I really connected with them. After a month with 300 evacuees, I got a call from Eli, asking me if I wanted to come and help him harvest pineapples. Eli grows pineapples. I said yes and I came for two days. I stayed for three months.
(He didn’t mention this on the recording, but I know from past conversations that he spent the month in the Makhtesh helping with childcare and cooking for the evacuees, while also recovering from a burn wound on his hand from before the war. Ori once talked about comforting children who had read their classmates’ names on the lists of confirmed dead.)
Eidan: And now we’re in Eli’s house, right?
Ori: Now we’re in Eli’s house. Eli was here in the beginning two months, he would come for a night every week. In the first two weeks I would come here, I would work Sunday through Tuesday, Wednesday I would come with a bunch of friends, we continued that way for two weeks. Then I started to volunteer on another farm. Then I started to bring volunteers.
Eidan: Did someone tell you to bring volunteers? Or was it your own idea?
Ori: The story is, on the second farm - Eli didn’t tell me to bring volunteers. But the second farm, when we got there, was really in a crisis. We had to take peonies out of the refrigerator. That was the task: 5 full fridges, [flowers] in huge buckets, that are not fun to move and so on. We got there on Sunday, we sent a friend to this other farm, to Shmulik and Tamar Almog, older farmers, about 60 or 70 years old, and we got there, we worked, me, Netta (I think the friend’s name), Thais, and Shmulik. We understood it’s something that needs a lot of people, so I advertised.
Eidan: Where did you advertise? Facebook, WhatsApp?
Ori: Yeah, to friends. And… people started coming, we completed the task, in one week, to empty the fridges and plant them in greenhouses and grow them, and today people are harvesting them. We finished that, but they have many other flowers, and 20 dunams (20,000 square meters) of tomatoes that were ruined, so I started to bring more volunteers and to work with them. And then another farm talked to me and asked if I could bring them volunteers. And by the time we got to December 20, I had started contacting farms, farms started contacting me, today I’m bringing volunteers to ten different farms.
Eidan: Ten. All in Talmei Yosef?
Ori: No, some in Yated, one in Yesha. And there are many others looking for employees, so I try to help them find employees, many people come to me looking for work, they want money. I work, now… (muttering)
Eidan: So, if you were not in the places where you were, if there was another guy, or maybe nobody…
Ori: Then maybe some other guy would have come along and helped them just like I did. For sure somebody would have done it. (This sounds like modesty, and it is, but it is also true that there are people doing exactly the same thing a few kilometers away. A young generation, saving the envelope, with no qualifications other than their own achievements and the fact that there is nobody else.)
Eidan: And if someone from the government told you tomorrow -
Ori: From the government?
Eidan: Yes -
Ori: There’s no such thing.
Eidan: Hypothetically?
Ori: No, no. There’s no such thing.
Eidan: OK. That’s the answer.
Ori: There’s no such thing, leave it. There’s no work [being done]. All the organizations in the state, they are civilian organizations.
What is being done, one thing that can be said for the government, that they did, is the grant, the grant they made for workers to come here, that the farmers need to pay the workers. The current grant that they gave to farmers in the Gaza Envelope and other places in Israel has helped a bit with bringing Israeli workers. But it’s a bandage, it won’t hold water.
There’s no government. We have to help the farmers.
Eidan: Ok… (Turning to Malachi) Did I forget something?
Malachi: Excellent.
Eidan: Thank you very much, Ori, thank you. For all of it.
End of Translation
At the end of most days, Ori smokes a joint, reads, or watches videos (mostly cooking content) on social media. If he can lie in the grass and listen to jazz as the sun sets, it means he had a relatively relaxed day.
He cooks frequently and with energy, often leaving trails of flour or spices on the counter. Ori doesn’t always remember to put food into the fridge before it stays out all night or to take food out of the oven before it burns. But everything he makes is made to share. Volunteers and workers are constantly being invited to Eli’s house to sit and eat. (As I was finishing the last paragraph, he had me taste a salad he made for us. “Eidan - I cook and you clean?” he asked, not for the first time. I agreed as usual.)