Winnie the Pooh in the caves of Tekoa
Tekoa 2006: Former kibbutznik Amit Biran heals mentally ill youths with a German machine, Yonatan Erlich secludes himself in the nearby Haritun caves, and Tzuri Froman keeps Winnie the Pooh along with his holy books in his cave. The 'last settlers' in Judea and Samaria
Everything falls into the chasm of the river, and only on the last bit of rock is there a bed that looks out over the mountains. A goat path goes underneath the cliff and disappears, and leads to the caves of Tekoa’s youth and Winnie the Pooh and the Haritun cave where Kobi and Yosef, two young boys, were murdered by shepherds from the nearby village.
Along the way we see a sign for “frequency healing,” and that is how we come to a sort of small property with a stone house and two connected trailers surrounded by a large yard with pools, all of them built by an expert, and animal cages, and fruit trees and vegetable plots.
It all looks like the yard of the Robinson Crusoe family, which is attempting to supply all its needs in the heart of the desert. A robust bearded man is spraying water on a dirt plot.
We enter the man’s yard, and he tells us his name is Amit Biran. The Defense Ministry pays his salary—he is the local defense team officer—but he is also the owner of the farm, as well as a frequency healer and the grandson of Fishel Handwerger, who came to Israel from Poland and founded Kibbutz Givat Haim, and the son of Zecharia Bernstein, a founder of Kibbutz Mashabei Sadeh. His wife Yael is a descendant of Rivkah Becker, from the women of Hashomer at Kfar Giladi.
A small troupe of offspring moves around Amit. The children, some of whom are his children and some of whom his grandchildren, have names like Honi and Yakim, Pelli and Tzuri and little Ta’ir.
Black Scorpions and memories
“Only yesterday a black scorpion stung me here,” says Biran, showing his hand. “It was agony. A pulsating pain.” Biran speaks almost with pride, as if he has connected with his grandfather Fishel through the scorpions and the land, with the Galilean guards and the forgotten beginning of Israel. “We’ve come home,” Biran tells me, and he means his return to Judaism, but also to the beginnings of the place where there was nothing but stones.
Most people here, as in many of the settlements, are employed by the government. Biran works his plot and also works in agriculture, just like where he grew up. He and his wife Yael were born in the 1950s on kibbutzim. They were young, secular Jews who traveled the world.
They were seekers, but in the 1980s they found Judaism and stopped seeking. Later they came to Tekoa through Rabbi Froman. “And everything is still in motion. The search hasn’t been completed,” says Biran.
Some of his 11 children are becoming secular, taking off their kippah. “They leave without defiance. I share my children’s feeling about the lazy way of thinking of the religious. You can become submerged in the religious world of three prayer sessions a day and the synagogue… lacking the intense searching that you sometimes see among the secular.”
When they came here in the mid-1980s it was quiet. It was hard for them at first, as former kibbutzniks, to live in what was called “concentrations of Arab populations,” but they discovered in 1986 how comfortable it was to stop by the greengrocer in Bethlehem, to leave the kids in the car, to buy vegetables from the Arab villages, and to go to the trailer that looks out on the open scenery. They came with four children, and another seven were born in Tekoa.
Biran does not feel he is disinheriting anyone; he feels disinherited because there were Arabs who began to come closer to them and to build their homes here. But in 1987 the halcyon days came to an end and the first intifada began. The trips to the greengrocer ended. The friendships ended as well. Biran believes that the days of the Oslo peace process and the Tunisians who came with Fatah put an end to an almost idyllic situation.
Healing with German machines
One small room is separate from the rest of the house, and that is where Biran keeps his frequency healing treatment table. From time to time patients come to him from all over Judea and Samaria, but there is also a young man who left a mental health institution in Israel and is undergoing frequency healing and “living naturally and cleansing himself,” both through nature and the Bicom machine in the clinic.
This German machine diagnoses and treats physical and other ailments, and has even helped youths with bipolar syndrome. About a dozen young men damaged by a bad life have passed through Biran’s yard. This is a kind of calling, a livelihood and a good deed.
When we talk in the kitchen we ask about Rabbi Froman’s son, who we’ve heard has a cave, and one of the children says something about “Yonatan’s cave.” “Ah, the caves,” said Biran, “this is something unique to the young people of Tekoa.” We are told that in Tekoa the young people, both before and after their army service, go down to the wadi for relaxation. So it was for Tzuri, Rabbi Froman’s son, and Yonatan, the Erlich’s son.
Biran directs us to the home of Yonatan, who is busy preparing his cave. When we walk there we realize that this is the house we’d seen on the plot of grass at the edge of Tekoa. A woman sitting outside tells us that she is a guest, a refugee from the Katyushas from Kadita who came here to find peace and quiet. The girl who was playing and moving with amazing balance on the cylinder of cables is from a kibbutz near Mt. Gilboa.
“Yonatan, Yonatan,” we call, and a young man covered with curls and a beard comes out, looking like the local Jesus. This is Yonatan Erlich, born in Tel Adashim 22 years ago, who came with his parents to Tekoa 11 years ago when they became religious. His great-grandfather was Julius Erlich, the owner of a farm in Germany who came to Palestine in 1937 and settled in Tel Adashim, where Yonatan’s grandfather works the land to this day.
At the age of 16 Yonatan left his parents’ trailer and found an empty trailer, like other young people here. Afterwards he looked for a cave. Why a cave? “I aspire to privacy.
You need to go down to the wadi in order to understand this.” We go after him and slide on the slope of the cliff, where for about a quarter of a kilometer there is a water pipe that he placed there and buried in the earth. We skip after him on the goat path. Yonatan descends barefoot on stones and thorns.
“These are excellent caves that were quarried in the chalk stone by secluded monks from the Monastery of Haritun the Great,” says Yonatan. “There are wells. There are springs. There are hiding places and one-room caves. Mine is a penthouse with three rooms and a balcony.”
The wadi is spread out before us. We skip several stone steps and reach a sort of cracked stone area facing the mountains. There we see four quarried entrances with white curtains. Inside, “Yoni’s cave” is arranged like a model apartment: carpets and beds, fabrics on the walls, a pipe for the shower and a drainage pit.
Sometimes Yoni makes a campfire with friends. Sometimes he rests here in the daytime, remodelling or building something, or sits and plays the flute. But he won’t stay here at night. Since the two boys from Tekoa were murdered in the large cave, something in the air reminds you that this is enemy land. He opens his case and takes out the silver plated flute to play for us a bit, a lone sound in the great silence.
Afterwards we leave his cave and go along the cliff to Tzuri Froman’s cave. No one is there, and we find a heater with a chimney, a rug, a mattress, and a pile of books. It was Winnie the Pooh who noted that a lair is also sometimes a type of surprise, and we were actually surprised to find Winne the Pooh resting on a pile of Jewish religious books at the edge of the cave. Winnie the Pooh is so beloved of the boys in the Tekoa yeshiva that at weddings and bar mitzvahs they sometimes sing “Winnie the Pooh, Winnie the Pooh” because “he is as innocent as a small child, and that’s the highest state there is.”
There is a book there on seclusion and several candles, and from the entrance you can see the desert and the mountains, and it feels like the sky’s the only limit. At the end of the horizon is a military helicopter, and it connects to the terror of sleeping in the cave, and I remember that even Winnie the Pooh had a problem. After he licks the honey he gets very fat, and he isn’t able to get through the narrow opening of his burrow. Sometimes a person or bear can’t satisfy his passion and also get the peace and quiet he longs for.
