Sde Trumot · Beit She'an Valley
Our farm sits on ground that Jewish memory has held in two hands for three thousand years. One text curses this valley and asks that nothing ever grow here again. Another calls it the doorway to the Garden of Eden. Both are talking about the same fields.
We own this land · 40 dunam at Moshav Sde Trumot · Since 2012
The curse
King Saul's last battle is fought on the ridge of Mount Gilboa, which rises directly above these fields. Wounded and surrounded, he takes his own life rather than be captured. The Philistines carry his body down into the valley and fasten it to the wall of Beit She'an, a short distance from where we now farm.
When the news reaches David, he does not compose a victory song. He composes a lament for the man who hunted him and for Jonathan, the friend he loved. And in his grief he turns on the ground itself.
הָרֵי בַגִלבֹּעַ, אַל־טַל וְאַל־מָטָר עֲלֵיכֶם וּשְׁדֵי תְרוּמֹת
"Mountains of Gilboa, let there be no dew nor rain upon you, nor fields of offerings."
II Samuel 1:21
Sdei terumot. Fields of offerings. The words David used to describe the abundance he asked this valley never to produce again are the words that now appear on our address. The moshav is named for the curse.
The blessing
Centuries later the rabbis are trying to locate the Garden of Eden, and Reish Lakish gives an answer that anyone who has stood in this valley in spring will understand. Beit She'an sits on a bed of natural springs. Even in a drought it runs green while the hills around it burn.
אם בְּאֶרֶץ יִשְׂרָאֵל הִיא, בֵּית שְׁאָן פִּתְחָהּ
"If it is in Eretz Yisrael, its entrance is Beit She'an."
Reish Lakish · Babylonian Talmud, Eruvin 19a
So the tradition holds both claims at once and does not apologize for the contradiction. This is the place a grieving king asked God to make sterile, and it is the place a sage named as the door to paradise. What decides which one is true is what people do with the ground.
What has been built here
On December 10, 1936, a few kilometers from our fields, the first Homa U'Migdal settlement is raised between dawn and nightfall. Prefabricated wall sections and a watchtower, trucked in and standing before dark. Fifty-six more follow over the next three years. The movement that redrew the map of the north begins in this valley.
The moshav is founded by Kurdish Jews from Sandur, in northern Iraq, a community that had lived apart from the Jewish center for centuries and returned. They settled the cursed fields and, knowing exactly what the phrase meant, named their new home after it. They then proceeded to make it grow. That is not a small thing for us: our whole work is with communities like theirs.
We purchased our 40 dunam at Moshav Sde Trumot in 2012, in the same fields the Sandur community had settled sixty years earlier. The land has been ours since. Everything described on this page is planned for ground we already hold, which is why this is a build and not a search for a site.
The founding site of Homa Umigdal 2.0. Off-grid solar, atmospheric water generation, aquaponics and permaculture, built as a working village and as a template that ships. Every system we intend to deploy to a community in Manipur, Kampala or São Paulo is proven here first.
The residential program for veterans, first responders and trauma survivors begins its founding cohort, on the land, in the valley, above which King Saul died of wounds that were not only the ones the archers gave him.
The tikkun
King Saul was a soldier who came off a battlefield carrying wounds that his body and his mind could not survive. Three thousand years later, that is still the most common way a warrior dies after the war is over. The valley where it happened is where we are building a place for exactly those people to come and be repaired.
Our retreat program serves veterans, first responders and survivors of trauma, on a working farm, through agricultural labor, community living and alternative therapeutic methods. Participants are not patients here. They are people with hands in soil that has been arguing with itself about blessing and curse since the Book of Samuel, and their presence settles the argument.
That is what tikkun means in practice. Not a metaphor and not a slogan. A specific piece of broken ground, repaired by the specific people the world broke, at the same coordinates.
What we are building
Everything drawn below is planned for ground we already own. We are not looking for a site, negotiating for one, or waiting on a lease to come through. Our 40 dunam at Moshav Sde Trumot, just under ten acres, have been ours since 2012. A gift to this project goes into building rather than into acquiring.
The village is designed as one system rather than four separate installations. Solar carries the pumps and the greenhouse; the atmospheric water generators and the springs feed the aquaponics; the aquaponics feeds the permaculture terraces; the terraces feed the people. Nothing here needs a grid connection, a well, or imported fertilizer, which is precisely why the whole thing can be containerized and sent to a community that has none of those either.
Standing behind the work
"plans for a sustainable wellness center on their land in Sde'i Trumot"
MK Nissim Vaturi · Deputy Speaker of the Knesset
MK Nissim Vaturi, Deputy Speaker of the Knesset, wrote on Knesset letterhead about our founders, Harry Rozenberg and Yitz Klein, and about this specific plot of ground. He names Sde'i Trumot in the letter. The wellness center he describes is the one planned for the land on this page, and the work he is writing about is giving chayalim and the general population access to alternative therapies for PTSD and trauma.
Support the work
Your gift funds the build at Sde Trumot: the solar arrays, the water systems, the greenhouses, and the first cohort of the retreat program. Homa U Migdal is a US 501(c)(3) nonprofit, EIN 80-0538832.