Tu b’Shevat (the 15th day of the Jewish month of Shevat) is the new year for fruit trees, and begins this year at sundown on Feb.12. It is a time for celebrating the beauty and abundance of nature.
In Israel, it is celebrated by planting trees and outdoor activities such as hikes which connect people to the natural environment. A common way to observe the holiday is to eat fruits, especially the seven species of crops that are native to Israel such as olives, grapes, figs, pomegranates and dates.
It is also common to try a new fruit on the holiday. Oranges are “new” to Israel having arrived around 900 CE with Arab conquerors. Sweeter varieties came in the 15th-16th century with merchants from Portugal, which is why the word orange in Arabic is burtaqal.
Oranges grown by both Jewish and Arab farmers became an important export starting in the late 1800s, with the brand name ‘Jaffa’first used in 1870.
This is a share certificate for American Fruit Growers of Palestine, Inc., (Agudat Hahaklaim B’Eretz Yisrael), a Massachusetts company incorporated in 1920 to introduce modern, mechanized packaging technology to Palestine to increase the fruit’s value and lower labour costs.
The company opened a 1,200-square-meter plant in Petah Tikvah in 1921. A 26-meter-deep well was dug to provide water to a fruit washing machine and conveyer belts were installed to sort the fruit according to size, a method that was used in California.
The company failed within two years since a portion of the oranges was damaged in the process, and the farmers did not want to expose their crop to this risk without compensation, which the company could not afford.
The Hebrew word for orange is tapuz, which is a combination of two words: tapuach (apple) and zahav (gold). The term tapuach zahav was coined in 1827 by the writer Shimshon Bloch who took the phrase from Proverbs 25:11: “A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in a setting of silver.” The word was truncated into tapuz in 1932 by Israeli grammarian Yitzhak Avineri.
The orange may be a golden apple but for the investors in American Fruit Growers of Palestine, including Hyman Stitskin who owned this certificate, there was no gold. In August 1924, all of the company’s assets were sold in a bankruptcy sale.
