Hefer Valley Regional Council

Hefer Valley

עמק חפר‎
وادي حيفر
Hefer Valley עמק חפר‎; وادي حيفر
Regional council (from 1940)
	Emek Hefer Regional Council building
District	Central
Government
• Head of Municipality	Galit Shaul
Area
• Total	127,940 dunams (127.94 km2 or 49.40 sq mi)
Population (2014)
• Total	41,100
• Density	320/km2 (830/sq mi)
Website	Official website

32°21′N 34°55′E / 32.350°N 34.917°E / 32.350; 34.917

The Hefer Valley Regional Council (Hebrew: מועצה אזורית עמק חפר, Mo'atza Azorit Emek Hefer) is a regional council in the Sharon region of the Central District of Israel. It is named after an administrative district in this area in the time of King Solomon (1 Kings 4:10).

The council covers an area adjacent to Hadera in the north, to Netanya in the south, to the Mediterranean in the west and to Tulkarm and the Green Line in the east. As of December 2020, the jurisdiction area of the council has a population of about 42,600 people.^[1]

The Regional Council offices are located near Kfar Monash, at the Ruppin junction, next to the Ruppin Academic Center.

History

Hefer Valley (Emek Hefer), 1947 JNF map

The region of Hefer Valley (Emek Hefer) covers an area known to its former Arab Palestinian inhabitants as Wadi al-Hawarith^[2]

In the early 1900s, a local midwife, Olga Hankin, reported information about the economic state of the families in the region to her husband, Yehoshua Hankin, who was in charge of land purchase for the Jewish National Fund (JNF). In 1927, Yehoshua Hankin resolved the complex legal issues involved in purchasing the land, and signed an agreement for the purchase of the Hefer Valley. The only difficulty was that the JNF did not have sufficient funds to pay the sum needed for buying the land. The chairman of the JNF, Menachem Ussishkin, set out on a fundraising trip to Canada, returning with $300,000 and undertakings to bring it up to a million, the sum required to purchase the Hefer Valley over a period of seven years. At the 16th Zionist Congress held in Zurich in 1929, Ussishkin announced that Emek Hefer was now in Jewish hands.

A group of 20 young members of the "Vitkin" and "Haemek" ('the valley') movements settled in the newly purchased valley. They moved into an abandoned building and began draining the swamps and preparing the land for agriculture.

In April 1933, they built their first houses at Kfar Vitkin, in the heart of the valley. In 1931, a group from the Hashomer Hatzair movement in Hadera established the settlement of Ein HaHoresh, planting the first citrus grove.

A company called "Yachin" prepared plantations for settlers from abroad. Another group from the Kibbutz HaMeuhad movement, founded Givat Haim in 1932, while the organization of demobilized soldiers from the Jewish Brigade set up the settlement of Avihayil.

Ruppin Academic Center was established in the region in 1949.^[3]

List of settlements

Kibbutzim

Moshavim

Community settlements

Youth villages

References

^ "LOCALITIES AND POPULATION, BY MUNICIPAL STATUS AND DISTRICT" (PDF). Israel Central Bureau of Statistics. 31 August 2021. p. 2.
^ Piterberg, Gabriel (2008). The Returns of Zionism: Myths, Politics and Scholarship in Israel, Verso Books ISBN 978-1-844-67259-2 p. ix: "I grew up in an affluent part of Israel which is strewn with labour Zionist cooperative settlements. The region is called Emeq Hefer. What I came to realize was that underneath Emeq Hefer lay — erased and buried — Wadi Hawarith; and that my joyful and privileged childhood and young adulthood in Emeq Hefer were inextricably intertwined with the destruction of Wadi Hawarith and the removal of its previous inhabitants."
^ "Ruppin Academic Center – The Council for Higher Education of Israel". che.org.il. Archived from the original on 2013-01-29. Retrieved 2015-07-02.

External links

Official website (in Hebrew)

[1] "LOCALITIES AND POPULATION, BY MUNICIPAL STATUS AND DISTRICT" (PDF). Israel Central Bureau of Statistics. 31 August 2021. p. 2.

[2] Piterberg, Gabriel (2008). The Returns of Zionism: Myths, Politics and Scholarship in Israel, Verso Books ISBN 978-1-844-67259-2 p. ix: "I grew up in an affluent part of Israel which is strewn with labour Zionist cooperative settlements. The region is called Emeq Hefer. What I came to realize was that underneath Emeq Hefer lay — erased and buried — Wadi Hawarith; and that my joyful and privileged childhood and young adulthood in Emeq Hefer were inextricably intertwined with the destruction of Wadi Hawarith and the removal of its previous inhabitants."

[che-3] "Ruppin Academic Center – The Council for Higher Education of Israel". che.org.il. Archived from the original on 2013-01-29. Retrieved 2015-07-02.

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