Studying in Germany, the chilling encounter with the owners of the distillery and anti-Semitism • Rani Hollander-Moati, owner of the "Hollander" distillery, tells the fascinating life story of her family
The Hollander family in an almost full lineup at a local liquor store
Photo:
Courtesy of the family
Although the Holocaust had been present in her life before, it is doubtful whether anything prepared Rani Hollander-Moati, 32, for the upheaval she experienced while specializing in alcohol distilling in Germany.
"It was in the evening. The elderly professor who also owns the Hartinger distillery empire, kindly offered to accompany him home after school to continue the lesson on the subject of the lesson and show me his private collection of schnapps (fruit distillates - R.P.).
I remember his house as very impressive - huge, a real palace, but then, after we entered the living room, I caught out of the corner of my eye, on the bookcase, a frame with an old photo of him in black and white, wearing Nazi uniforms of the Hitlerite youth movement.
For a moment I could not move.
I felt a shiver all over my body, but after a few seconds I caught myself and recovered.
It was awful - I just wanted to get out of there. "
The family Holocaust memory actually inspired the young Hollander-Moati in setting up her distillery, which is the fulfillment of her grandfather's vision.
"My great-grandfather, the late Yitzhak-Isaac Hollander, owned a winery and distillery in Slovakia as early as the 1930s, when his wife, Rosa, and by her Jewish name - Alte-Itel-Leah nee Sheinfeld, served as the actual winemaker."
"The truth is that she grew up in an alcoholic house and she was the engine behind the opening of the winery - her father, Israel Moshe Sheinfeld from Tarnova, Czechoslovakia, engaged in distilling and trading from home and she simply continued it and set up a winery with her husband in the city of Neutra. His name is active to this day, but he has not belonged to the family for a long time.
"The communists nationalized him after the war and all our attempts to get back there and claim the property back came to naught," she says.
Father Sheinfeld tried to immigrate to Israel after being widowed, aboard the illegal Pentcho ship that was swept away in the middle of the sea to the desolate island of Kili in the southern Aegean Sea.
"The survivors, including my great-grandfather, wrote in a shoe polish on sheets and his son from stones the letters SOS and two Italian rescue ships were sent to them from the island of Rhodes, after an Italian plane passing over them noticed the address.
After a short stay in Rhodes, all the survivors were transferred to the Fermonti di Theresa concentration camp in southern Italy, where Grandpa Sheinfeld managed to build an improvised distillery from all kinds of tin plates he found.
"In the alcohol he produced, he bribed both the Italian guards and the Nazis who roamed there, so it can be said that thanks to the alcohol, he managed to survive and even immigrate to Israel in the end."
And what happened to his daughter Rosa and her family during the war?
Hollander-Moati: "The winery of Rosa and her husband (Hollander) became a household name in the community even before the war, when it also served as the local tavern where the Gentiles also came to drink, including the city police. At the beginning of the war, Yitzhak-Isaac and Rosa bribed the police chief for sums. A copy to get the list of those destined for transports (the deportations of the Jews by train to the death camps - R.P.), and so they warned the people in advance and saved them. "
"One day the police chief informed the Hollander family that they themselves were destined to board the next shipment, and they left everything and began to flee towards Hungary. They were captured several times at the border and returned, and only for the fifth time, on the eve of Seder, did they split and cross it. "The same one we tell around the Seder table every year anew. In fact, their son Akiva, my grandfather, was captured and sent to Auschwitz (1944), but survived there after taking a step in the death march. After the war, the family reunited and returned to Nitra to find that the Communists ruled the area. .
In 1947, Akiva and his brother Yossi decided to immigrate to Australia, not before visiting Grandpa Sheinfeld in Israel.
Upon their arrival in Israel, Yossi enlisted in the religious company of the Alexandroni Brigade, and was killed in the Battle of Tantura ("Operation Port"), on May 23, 48, just nine days after the establishment of the state.
Following his death, Akiva remained in Israel and the entire family followed him.
In order to make a living, the family opened the 'Anavi Zion' beverage factory in Bat Yam and a wine and alcohol store in Jaffa, and after a while Akiva established a second-hand equipment company for the food industry, hoping that one day someone would want to re-establish the winery and distillery.
It was his young granddaughter, Rani, who barely got to know (he died when she was five) who was the one who was attracted to the field and fulfilled the vision.
After studying biochemistry and food science at the Faculty of Agriculture of the Hebrew University, Hollander-Moati took advantage of the family company's business connections and went on a practical internship in alcohol distillation, at the huge Hertinger distillery, in the village of Schwechow (near Hamburg).
She was then only twenty-two years old and was amazed to discover how much antisemitic stigmas had been engraved in the minds of the locals.
"They were shocked when they heard that I was Israeli-Jewish, and I was privileged to hear comments from some of them, 'But how can that be? You have blue eyes and even a small one.' I stayed there at an organic farm and for kosher reasons I cooked the food for myself, when I got the eggs from the free range chickens. Once, after I had to throw away a lot of the eggs because they contained blood, I asked the farm owner for more eggs, and to my amazement she said to me - 'What's your problem with blood in the eggs? You have a holiday that you use blood to make food.' "There were kind and attentive people, but the fact that Jews have not lived in the area for more than eighty years, together with prejudices rooted in antisemitic propaganda, led them to such reactions."
These experiences also did not deter Hollander, who returned to Germany and completed a master's degree in refining at the Higher Distillation Institute of the University of Ohnheim (Stuttgart), after which she established the Hollander Distillery in Beit Meir on the outskirts of Jerusalem.
After serious research and in-depth development of unique recipes, Rani began distilling schnapps from a variety of fruits in the country - apples from the Golan Heights, figs from the Jordan Valley, peaches, nectarines, grapes and cherries, while she cooks natural fruit liqueurs with intriguing flavor combinations like coconut and pumpkin, lemon R., red grapefruit and hops and apple, passion fruit and rum.
Unlike other Israeli distilleries, you skipped the popular whiskey and vodka and turned to fruit distillates only.
Hollander-Moati: "It really is a more niche field, but I got my first glass of apple schnapps from the late Grandpa Akiva when I was about five, a few weeks before he passed away, and since then it's the taste and memory that accompanies me, and I really feel like I'm continuing my distillery. Our unique family heritage. By the way, I named my eldest son, who was born ten months ago, Jonathan-Akiva after my grandfather, and when he reaches the age of five, I will also give him a taste of apple schnapps, in the hope that one day he too will be infected with the family distillation bacterium. "