Although the death of Elizabeth Queen of England overshadowed the festivities of the event marking the 70th anniversary of her reign, organized by the Rolls-Royce-Bentley Enthusiasts Club - the official royal car - but more than a thousand guests, the people of the upper 1000s, still arrived in early October at Grosvenor House, on the edge of Hyde Park in London, Note the impressive date.
Among the fancy evening dresses, the Versace suits and the strong scents of luxury perfumes, Vared Ben-Sadon, one of the owners of the Israeli winery "Tura", also walked around, accompanied by her father, Yoel.
The two poured the produce they had prepared for those present: wine from the settlement of Rahlim, a small spot in Samaria that none of the guests at the event knew before, and had probably already forgotten on their way home.
"I didn't know that wine is made in your country," said a fancy Norwegian, who owns a chain of hotels in his country, and then he was interested in how to ship "several boxes" to him, to open up the palate.
Vared (45), a religious woman with a wig on her head and an unusual presence in the human landscape at the event, commented after the Scandinavian left: "We believe that God is helping us.
Another thing - we are not afraid.
We are running forward with all our strength.
Erez, my husband, is a visionary, who believed that if we plant vineyards - in the end we will succeed.
And I, from a young age, had the ability to set a goal and stick to it.
I had no problem reaching even the queen and serving her a glass of wine.
I'm really not afraid."
Israeli shamelessness?
"You don't succeed with shame."
It is not certain that one book will be enough to describe how Red - or in her original Dutch name: Rosa van Couberden - came from a family with dark roots that helped the Nazis at the time, and became a settler, a mother of five, who produces quality wine.
"My life is interesting from the beginning, and will probably be interesting until the end," she laughs.
"I've never walked in a furrow. A furrow is something I don't know."
Rose with an interested guest at a Rolls Royce event in London last month.
"We believe that God is helping us, we are not afraid", Photo: Yoav Picharsky
"I screamed because of the socks"
To trace the extraordinary family story, you have to go back 70 years, to the city of Essen - the capital of the Dutch province of Drenthe.
Rivka, the mother of Vared, then Elesh, was born to Roll and Rikia Meyer, a non-Jewish couple.
"I had a beautiful childhood," recalls Rebecca.
"I was an only child who received a lot of warmth and love."
When she was 11 years old, tragedy struck the Dutch family.
During a trip outside the city, the family car collided with a moose standing in the middle of the road.
Rebecca's mother was killed on the spot, her father and herself were injured.
"It was a highway, and I probably lost consciousness at the time of the accident," Rebecca recalls.
"My father and I waited for the ambulance to evacuate us. It was very painful to lose a mother at such a young age, but I am convinced that this was also the beginning of all the changes that took place inside me. It may be strange to say, but from that moment the search for the truth began for me."
A few months passed until Sharol, the father, was released from the hospital, but when he did, he began to rehabilitate himself, and among other things, he looked for a new car.
In the same circumstances, he met Lisha Defries, a Jewish widow who hid during the Holocaust with a rural family in the North of the Netherlands.
Lisha, a mother of three sons, asked to sell her car.
The superficial acquaintance turned into a romantic relationship, and the two got married.
The connection with Rebecca's mother's family was severed quite quickly.
Although she was born in 1952, after the Second World War, she soon realized that there was a part of the family's history that she was reluctant to mention.
From scraps of information, which arrived even then, she realized that her uncles, her mother's brothers, collaborated with the Germans during the Holocaust.
"I realized that something was wrong with my uncles, because my father refused to come to family events on my mother's side," says Rebecca.
"He got angry, would say the family name and immediately use an offensive comment."
After her father's marriage, Rebecca already had a new mother, Lisha, one of her three sons from her previous marriage was Yop, today Yoel.
Yoel is three years older than Rebecca, but in a short time the two stepbrothers fell in love, despite the opposition in the family.
"When his mother found out, they took Yoel and sent him to live with his aunt, the main thing is that they don't get married," says Vared about her father.
"It didn't help, the love between him and Rebecca was strong. In our family, as I said, we set a goal and reach it."
Rivka (Ved's mother) with her father and mother, who supported the Nazis, photo: from the family album
Although the marriage of Leisha and Roll, the parents of the two, did not last, Rivka and Yoel were already a married couple in 1972.
They studied physical therapy and searched for meaning in their lives in religious studies, until they realized that Judaism was the direction and that Israel was home.
The couple immigrated to Israel in 1979 with two little girls: two-year-old Vared and her sister Esther.
It was clear that the mother and her daughters had to convert if they wanted to be part of the Jewish people.
"My wife was under so much pressure during the conversion," Yoel recalls.
"She got confused between Yom Tov and Shabbat when she was asked, and then Rabbi Shlomo Goren, who was in charge of the procedure, asked her to return to her studies. She started to cry, and when he realized that her intentions were true - at that moment he said, 'You have passed.'"
The Van Koburden family settled in Jerusalem in the ultra-Orthodox Beit Vagan neighborhood, thinking that this lifestyle would suit them, but when Vared began to grow up, they realized that the strict framework would not last.
"I studied with Rabbi Leuchter, but it really wasn't to my liking," Vared recalls.
"I came home and told my parents, 'That's it.' I literally screamed. I didn't want to walk in long socks. It wasn't for me. I needed freedom, to spread my wings and fly."
The parents noticed that their daughter was different in the ultra-Orthodox landscape.
She would climb trees, pick willow and sell on the street.
"Ever since I can remember her, she was a leader," recalled the father, Yoel.
"It's probably a combination of my mother and my wife's father. Both were dominant, and she inherited it."
The Van Koburden family did not find their place in Jerusalem and migrated to Kochav Hashahar, a religious community settlement in the east of the Benjamin Mountains.
Vared was an 8th grade student when she laid eyes on Erez, the neighbor, an 11th grade student at the "Or Etzion" high school yeshiva, who would come home about once every two weeks. "I wrote him a letter, 'If you want, I would love for us to be friends,'" she teller
"Of course I knew who Rosa was," Erez admits.
"I've been sick of her since the 9th grade. You see, a blonde Dutch woman came to our settlement. I've never seen anything like that before in my life. She was something special, but I didn't do anything about it.
"One day I receive a letter. And you have to understand that this is a religious-national settlement, more in the ultra-Orthodox direction.
I was at the end of the 11th grade at the time, there was an age gap between us. I answered her, 'It's not appropriate.' She insisted, 'Let's meet.' That's when we started dating. I would come back from the yeshiva once every two to a month. We dated like that for three years and seven months."
"Erez enlisted in the IDF and served in the paratroopers," Vared continues. "When I reached the end of the 11th grade, I told him: 'We are religious, we keep touch, it's excessive. Let's get married.' We got engaged and married when I was in the middle of the 12th grade.
I did my matriculation in mathematics when I was pregnant.
I was always ahead of my time."
How did the environment receive it?
"It was never a factor for me. My parents knew that Erez is a good guy. Do I allow my daughter to marry at this age? No, but it doesn't help either. They will marry when it suits them, and I stand behind them and help where needed. The main thing is that they are happy. Look at me I often wear a wig, and no one in our community wears a wig. I wear it because I feel more presentable that way, more of a woman, the way I want to look. I don't think that a person should lead his life according to what they say. It is true that there are standards of morality and behavior , but there is also your 'I believe'."
Vared with her parents, Rivka and Yoel, and husband Erez.
"I never walked in a rut", photo: from the family album
Vared and Erez initially thought about living in the Golan Heights, but in the end they found themselves in the settlement of Bracha on Mount Gerizim in Samaria.
"We moved there because it is the land of our ancestors," Vared describes.
"Erez said that each Jew who lives here covers a maximum area of half a dunam, and if we want to settle the land properly, then we must have a large and well-established agriculture like in the kibbutzim. He brought an agronomist who understands the soil, and asked what would be most suitable to grow on the bald Mount Tershim. The agronomist said 'The most optimal would be to grow grape vineyards, because of the altitude and the climate'. That's what we did. We started from nothing, we didn't even like wine. We didn't know how to drink."
The initial thought was to grow grapes and sell them to wineries throughout the country.
In 1997 they planted 20 dunams of vines.
"In the first two years, we reached a turn of bread," Erez recalls.
"It was a huge investment. Each dunam costs around NIS 20,000, and we had no money. There was NIS 18,000 from the wedding, and we scraped the rest. At the same time, I did electrical work, while Vared specialized in social work."
Vared reminds him: "There were years when I cleaned houses when I was pregnant. As you hear. I did everything so that we would have something to eat."
Erez (48) does not dwell on the dramatic story.
"After the first harvest, I went to the Carmel Mizrahi wineries in Rishon Lezion with crazy excitement. Israel Flam, the head winemaker, said, 'If you're already here, let's go down to the cellars.' Home I stopped maybe ten times on the way to recover.
"I woke up Vared at three in the morning and said: 'Next year we are building a winery.' This. I felt missed."
Three explosive devices in the vineyard
In 2003, Vared and Erez established the Tora Winery in the Rachelim settlement, where they moved to live.
"We did a somewhat childish financial calculation," says Erez.
"I said, 'I will produce 6,000 bottles, I will sell each bottle for NIS 100 and I will have an income of NIS 600,000. In a few years I will make a decent living.'
"I imagined that everyone would be begging for bottles, but I realized that the competition is tough, and in the stores they told me, 'For NIS 30, I'm not ready to buy from you.' They work hard, because I did everything."
Tora Winery started with 1,200 bottles, in the years that were full of security incidents in the region, the height of the second intifada.
"I worked as an electrician to make a living, and when I finished work I would run to work in the vineyard," Erez says.
"One Saturday night I went out to spray at 12 o'clock at night. There was a crazy fog, which is characteristic of Har Bracha in the months of July and August, and this time the fog was accompanied by a strong wind. I realized that it was impossible to work, so I folded. I parked the tractor at a friend's house and returned home to Rachel. I didn't have time reach an apple intersection, and a friend called hysterically 'Where are you?'
He told me that they sent a standby squad, because there was a terrorist in the area of the vineyards. I turned around and flew back. It turns out that the Palestinians were observing the vineyards and waiting for the night when the farmer would arrive to spray. They saw the lights of my tractor, and a terrorist set off with the goal of getting to me. God gave me A kick in the butt 'go home' - and bring spirit.
I almost cried with excitement.
The terrorist did not find me and continued towards the settlement, reached the military post, and there they attacked and killed him."
Sounds stressful.
"Is it stressful? I had three IEDs in the vineyards. The early 2000s, a spring Friday, burning thorns. I called a lot of guys to come help put it out. We finished at four in the afternoon, returned home, and on Sunday I went to see what the damage was, because many times on The vine you see the results only after 24 hours.
"I went down to the vineyard with an M16 that I had from the reserve, a cartridge in it, a bullet in the barrel - and suddenly I noticed between two rocks a sort of scuba diving oxygen cylinder, and an electric wire coming out of the end. I graduated from Lebanon, I immediately understood what it was about. It turns out that the fire was intended to activate the charge when all the guys They are busy turning it off. Apparently the wires burned and disrupted the operation. I called the police, who sent a saboteur with a robot. There were more than ten kilograms of explosive material. The robot was torn to pieces."
Rose and cedar in the vineyard.
"I want to enjoy life. Our business is also based on passion. Something that will turn you on", photo: Eric Sultan
"They will put us in the same furnace"
What started with 20 dunams and 1,200 bottles, stands after less than two decades on 560 dunams, about 180 thousand bottles and about 30 employees.
60 percent of the wine is flown to stores abroad. When I asked if they had anywhere to grow, Erez smiled slightly. "How much will the world population be by 2050, ten billion?
There is no winery owner in the world who does not want his business to be the best.
Our dream is to raise the profile of the Land of Israel, so that the world will know that this land is made of milk and honey and does not eat its inhabitants.
The world gives great respect to Israeli wine, and anyone who knows me knows that the business is going great, but I'm not interested in money."
Vared: "This is how I educate my children. You have to struggle, plow and sow in order to reap. In London I had a free hour, so we went to Harrods. I saw a coat for a two-month-old girl there for NIS 4,000. Guys, this is not healthy. This is me My 'believer' is alive."
Wouldn't you buy a Rolls Royce if you could?
Erez: "Lourdes won't be a Rolls-Royce either, even though she dreams of a Mercedes. My car is from 2013, and it's used for my needs. I don't have a watch, and my sunglasses are from Decathlon, NIS 70. At every toast I say to our employees: 'What a privilege For us! We don't just work for a living close to home, when people burn hours in traffic jams. We also do something that has ideological and religious value. We have crazy added value here."
The couple knows that politics always comes up when talking about a winery located in Samaria, beyond the Green Line.
Not only abroad there are people who boycott produce that comes from there, also in Israel quite a few reject it in advance.
"I encounter it more in Tel Aviv than when I travel abroad," Ward admits. "In London, no one said a word to me about it.
BDS is an organization that makes more noise than action, and if Norway has now issued a blacklist, then fine, one person said 'no'.
We found another who ordered double the amount.
"It's sad that they don't know how to make a distinction. After all, those same people watched South Africa's games back in the day, and they have no problem traveling to China with all the problems. 'A beautiful soul.' Less likes - they change.
"You know what my answer is? They put us all in the same furnaces during the Holocaust, and they will put us back in again if we let them. You can disagree with everything someone else does, but from here to running for BDS and standing at the checkpoints, the distance is long. I am most in favor of democracy, But inside the house we are one people, and if we don't remember that, they will have to remind us."
Are you saying this to the supporters of the boycott?
"What keeps me at the winery is the fact that I host people from all over the world around the table. We drink wine and find what connects. Whoever doesn't buy, that's another task for me. In the end, we agree on 99 percent, and on the percentage we don't - we agree to disagree."
Do they buy a bottle at the end?
"I had a group of media people from the left who didn't buy from us, but I heard from an employee who poured them for a tasting, that one of the guys said to the person sitting next to him, 'This is Ben Zo wine...' and for them it's a compliment. I had very anti people here, a delegation of professors and journalists , and there was a journalist from South Africa who suggested that I watch out for him. After the tour they called and said that the man had softened, came back later.
"I'm telling you that people have no idea. I had a Knesset member who asked, 'Where is Gush Katif?'
Guys who raise their hand and decide whether to turn or not - and don't know what they're talking about. For me, Torah is a place of connection, people sit and ask questions. You, for my part, can then go to the nearby Arab village, but don't look at reality from only one side its".
There are extremists in your area.
"There are also in Tel Aviv. We live with the edges, but they were never mainstream."
Do you have relations with the Arab neighbors?
"I can't go alone to the neighboring village, but if their child comes in, I promise you everything will be fine. This is an example I always give, and I once told a journalist, 'Bring the women from the neighboring village here.' Do you know the difference? Here maybe a neighbor will say 'What do you do?'
But there their neighbor will kill them. This is a reality that is difficult to move forward with. Leave politicians, the people here need to speak with courage to find a solution. A way? At the moment I have no idea and no one does."
With all the years you've lived here, do you believe there's a chance?
"We have to believe, otherwise where will we end up? We don't have another country. We have to sit, talk, listen. After all, every couple has problems. They can divorce or sit and think about what each one gives to the other. We are not a couple, but nevertheless we live here and probably Forever we will live side by side. To constantly think about who started - there is no point, because it does not advance us. We need to think about what we do from here."
Erez: "We are moderate, but moderation is a matter of where you put the endpoints. We are a people who returned to their country, and we have no other place. The Arab neighbors need to understand that we are here in faith and worldview and in prayer for thousands of years in which we dreamed of returning. Pray every day for Nablus, Hebron and Jerusalem, not Tel Aviv or Eilat, and the price we are willing to pay to stay is high. All the terrorist acts will not help, they will only cause sadness for both sides.
"We are like a company that charges and needs to reach its destination. If one soldier falls, it does not stop. We do not want to deport them, we do not want a war of independence 2. We want to live here and raise children and grandchildren in peace. We need to internalize this, after many years of conflict" .
The Sheikhs of Dubai recommended?
Red and Erez are parents of five: Ila (26), married and mother of two, director of the education department in the settlement of Ofra;
David (24), MP in Givati; Shahar (21), married and an officer in the Air Force; Yonatan Karmi (18), a trainee at a pre-military preparatory school; and Hillel Samdar (10), a school student.
Erez is the CEO and winemaker of the winery, while Vared is responsible for marketing and sales. She is constantly on the line between Israel and abroad, and is now supposed to be in the US.
"Religious women usually stay at home," she admits.
"I am abroad three months a year.
There aren't many businesswomen in our sector, but it's something that keeps developing, and I'm glad that there are those who have done it after me.
A woman has the abilities of a man, but there is no doubt that there is also a price.
I have a 10-year-old daughter who knows that mom goes out to work."
Did you study business administration?
"I learned from life. I love it, and I always feel it's like chess. You sit to see what the other side is doing, and want to make the right move. I'm very competitive."
At the magnificent event in London, Red felt at home, fearless, laughing and getting along with everyone.
Sometimes it seems that she walks on the fine line between sacred and profane.
"I never went for hardware," she explains.
"I'm not ashamed to say that it's the other way around: I go to the rabbi and ask, 'Give me the easiest,'" she laughs, "I want to enjoy life, and our business is also based on passion. Something that will turn you on. During Corona, I remember saying to myself, 'I'm locking up now High heels, put on makeup, turn on music - and the world will change. We will win. There is no other way. Thank God that the corona is already history."
How did you even get to the Rolls Royce event, with a connection to the British Royal House?
"In the middle of the corona virus, an email arrived, and I thought I was being undecided. It was a time when there were a lot of stings, because people took advantage of the situation. The winery was quiet, the workers were in khalat, and we worked hard.
We tried to understand where the world was going.
I said I would check.
I called our distributor in London and told him: 'Do me a favor and check if the address and name in the email even exist.'
He repeated and said yes.
"I picked up the phone and asked, 'How did you get to me?'
They said that someone from their management recommended us. I said that it was a great honor for us, and I was interested in who the recommender was. They were unwilling to reveal. I said that either it was a Jew, or that I had just returned from Dubai and met some sheikhs with a Rolls-Royce-Bentley, maybe it was one of them. Eight years ago Months later, the correspondent of the royal house, a man with a heavy British accent, called me for a telephone interview. An amazing event."
Until five years ago Lord did not have Israeli citizenship, and she lived here as a "permanent resident".
In the Netherlands, according to her, it is not allowed to hold two citizenships, and since in the past she was advised not to give up the original one, which might help her in times of need, she did so.
Until recently, she could not vote in the Knesset elections.
But over the years, Vared delved into the subject of the Holocaust.
The story of her family, where her maternal grandmother's side helped the Germans, while her paternal Jewish grandmother hid from the Nazis, fascinated her.
When she was 40 years old, on the day of the Holocaust, she went to the Ministry of the Interior, renounced her Dutch citizenship and left before the siren as an Israeli citizen.
"When they told me, 'You will have to give up your Dutch citizenship,' I signed the form. So what?", she smiles.
"I felt very proud. For me, Israeli citizenship is a statement."
The Holocaust did not let Mord go, who read quite a few articles and books, especially the books of K.
Tsatnik (the late Yehiel D'Nor). She was interested in knowing more about her mother's family's part at that time, while her mother, Rivka, was quite reluctant to probe the bleeding wound. She knew about her uncles' past, and according to her, that was enough for her.
"I drove my parents crazy and asked them to look into the matter," Vared recalls.
"About five years ago, we all flew to Holland. My mother, without the pressure I exerted, would never have opened these things. You don't want to dig and pull all kinds of skeletons out of the closet."
The Van Koburden family flew to the Netherlands to visit the family roots, and among other things visited the Westerbroek concentration camp located not far from Essen, the city where the parents grew up.
Rebecca and Joel took off a few days before their children, and made an appointment at the National Archives in The Hague.
They wanted the books opened to them.
"You can't just enter the archive like that," says Yoel.
"We had to prove who we are and what we want. This is a complete procedure. We entered the archive and saw what we saw. It was a complete surprise for us, a real shock."
In the archive it became clear that not only Rivka's uncles helped the Nazis, but also her mother Rikia was active and helped the Germans.
"They discovered that she herself had educated Hitlerite youth, who believed in the movement," Varad says.
"They had pictures of Hitler and Stalin at home. She was engaged to an SS officer. Not easy things. It was a kind of cloud that always hovered, and maybe that's why I never called her 'grandma', but 'mother's mother'. I also said To my mother, 'I didn't choose the story, the story chose me, and with that we will do the best.'"
"soften the pain"
Yoel and Rebecca say that over the years no one in the family told them about the dark past, probably so as not to hurt them.
To this day, it is not easy for Rebecca to talk about the sensitive issue.
"Immediately after we were at the archive, I called a Jewish friend from the Netherlands, my mother's age, and family from Yoel's side. They told me that it happened a long time ago and that it shouldn't dwell on it. They said things to soften the pain," Rebecca recalls.
"I still don't quite come to terms with it. Acknowledging the past is important, but it's also important not to enter a place of guilt, which you can't get out of. My husband, in my opinion, had it harder than me."
Yoel: "I was terribly afraid for my wife. It was terrible."
This is how the wheel of fate turned for him: the daughter of a supporter of the Nazis is today a religious Jew, a settler, whose children are also proud Jews.
Rivka says that everything is intentional: "The immigration to Israel, my children who live in the country and keep tradition - this is our correction. We are a link in a chain of generations, and this is also perhaps the reason I agree to be exposed. It is indeed a part of which I am not proud of, but I realized that there is a point in showing the long way We went through until we got here."
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