On the Big Island, organic farming and a desire to return to nature draws an unexpectedly close Jewish community
KONA, Hawaii — About halfway around the globe from native Israel, Michael Manor spends his days in the Hawaiian wilds high above the sea. On a rolling hillside overlooking the Pacific, this Israeli Navy veteran cultivates the mineral-rich volcanic earth.
“I always like to be out in nature,” says Manor, a lanky 62, whose military service overlapped with the Yom Kippur War. “It’s much more nourishing for my soul.”
Manor is among a number of Jews who have put down roots — literally — on Hawaii’s Big Island. These transplants not only embrace this tropical oasis as home, they also till the soil of the largest site in the Hawaiian archipelago.
Scattered between the island’s more touristed areas, these farmers are committed to producing a wide range of organic goods, sometimes on land previously occupied by the island’s once prevalent sugar cane mills. Their crops range from Manor’s leafy greens to award-winning coffee, raw honey and tropical fruits. But even in paradise, conditions aren’t always in their favor.
Last year, in fact, bad weather led to considerable agricultural losses. But this spring, Hawaiian lawmakers instituted tax credits supporting organic farmers. The landmark legislation marks the first of its kind in the United States.
That’s good news for Manor, who has farmed on the island since 1996 and operates one of its more established organic operations.
In the 1970s, after his IDF service, Manor worked in the citrus orchards back home on Kibbutz Ruhama near Sderot. That’s when, he says, he first recognized the risks of conventional insect control — not only to the land and consumers, but also to those tending the fields.
“The very same things that every Israeli soldier is taught to avoid in chemical warfare are close to the compounds used in pesticides,” Manor says. “Organic phosphor and nerve gas are the same thing… The first time I started to work in the kibbutz orchard, I read the ingredients of the pesticides aloud. The others laughed at me.”
Under his label, Mother Nature’s Miracle, Manor grow certified organic arugula, fennel, kale, mustard, parsley, mesclun and other greens. He also produces the colorful, costly edible flowers and baby shiso leaf favored by local chefs.
Hawaii’s volcanic origins continue to impact the soil.
“It’s holding the minerals and the nutrients in very special ways,” Manor says. “The trick is to get it to work for you.”
Manor’s team includes field workers, a sales/marketing manager, and an office manager — his daughter, Shahar Groode, a married mother of three. The labor intensive harvest is transformed at what Manor calls “the kitchen.”
“Cleaning is a big part of the salad mix preparation,” Manor says. “It actually takes more time to wash it and clean it and bag it than to harvest it and grow it.”
Manor is friendly with other local Israelis, including Shai Yerlick, a former restaurateur who spent years in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Yerlick and his wife Trina operate a five-bedroom bed and breakfast in a peaceful area a short distance from Kona’s touristy Ali’i Drive. The grounds boast an assortment of blossoming botanicals, including avocado, orange, lemon, lime, guava, tiny apple bananas, and passionfruit.
In Hawaiian, passionfruit is calledlilikoi, which inspired the Yerlicks to dub their lodging the Lilikoi Inn.
In addition to all the verdure outside, the inn’s kitchen garden also yields tomatoes, green beans, eggplants, green onion, mint, cilantro, basil, kale, cherimoya and sour sop. Next on the menu? Medjool dates–grown from pits salvaged from a package purchased at the nearby Costco.
Pesticides, Yerlick says, are not used.
“Of course I have problems with bugs, but why have more problems?” Yerlick says.
Their operation is more passion than profit.
“We are hopefully breaking even with the coffee,” Yerlick says. “The B&B is how we make a living.”
The Yerlicks moved to temperate Holualoa well above the Kona International Airport after visiting the island nine years ago. Shai, a native of Herzliya, had run a successful catering business in the San Francisco East Bay, “painting” signature sunsets and other designs with dried paprika and turmeric across platters of hummus.
On the island, Yerlick works the land, manages Woofer farming volunteers, and caters meals served on the open-air lanai–the prevalent Hawaiian outdoor porch. A jacuzzi, stone path and open-air shower are tucked within the jungle-like orchard.
“Everything you see, I built,” Yerlick says.
Trina, a veteran educator who also teaches ESL, manages the inn and handles reservations. A small menagerie of chickens, two dogs, a cat and a pot-bellied pig named “Kosher” run amok.
“As far as I know, it’s the world’s only kosher pig,” Yerlick says.
Further south, in the Captain Cook region whose namesake bay draws snorkelers, another estate farm has Jewish roots. Like Yerlick, Una Greenaway and her husband, Leon Rosner, grow organic Kona coffee.
They also market macadamia nuts, chocolate made with home-grown cacao, dehydrated apple bananas and tropical fruits. Exotics include Brazilian Jabotica, which they harvest, then cook into jam sold online at KuaiwiFarm.com.
Greenaway, whose father was a refugee from Germany, moved to the island in 1977 from Guerneville, California as part of the “back to the land movement.”
“From day one, we wanted to make [our farm] organic,” says Greenaway, President of the Hawai‘i Organic Farming Association. “We wanted to rescue it from its former pesticidal use.”
Kuaiwi Farm’s five acres supports 1,900 coffee trees and 20 macadamia nut trees.
“We’re planting more all the time,” says Greenaway, who also serves as the president of the unaffiliated Congregation Kona Beth Shalom.
For more than 30 years, KBS has organized cultural programs and high holiday services. Visiting clergy have included Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, such as Jack Gabriel, Laura Duhan Kaplan and Daniel Lev, who resides on the nearby island of Oahu.
“When we did a grand Shabbaton with Zalman Schachter in 2008 or 2009, that was my most spiritually satisfying experience,” Greenaway says.
Shabbat services take place only once a month.
“People don’t generally move to Hawaii to be Jewish,” Greenaway says. “Hawaii is usually symbolic of leaving.”
For nearby Whendi Grad, who married into a beekeeping family, raising young Jews in the Pacific prompted her to affiliate with KBS, where her children celebrated their bar and bat mitzvahs.
“I was never raised very religious, but it was always part of us,” says Grad, whose son was visiting Israel she spoke with The Times of Israel. “I had always had Jewish friends.”
Grad and her husband Garrett Puett co-own and operate Big Island Bees, which produces raw and organic single flower honey, beeswax and a wide range of related products. Relocating has transformed their lifestyle into one of greater simplicity and beauty.
“It’s a nice life,” Grad says. “It’s very connected.”
Really, everything is connected, according to Manor.
“As a farmer, you have to know something about everything: accounting, farming, human relationships,” says Manor. “That’s why it’s hard for farmers to be successful.”
Amidst 18 acres that once grew sugar cane, Manor has returned to planting and harvesting regularly. And, as a presumed descendant of the 18th century Italian philosopher, kabbalist and ethicist, Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzato (aka the Ramchal), Manor studies philosophy in the evenings. At sunset, his resplendent fields resound with songbirds, frogs and the barking of distant dogs. In many ways, it’s not such a far cry from his first home.
“It’s like a kibbutz here,” Manor says, “Everyone knows everyone.”
As reported by The Times of Israel