JERUSALEM – Since he was a kid growing up in the town of Kiryat Tivan, Roy Itzhaki would regularly see them in the street, on their way to work, in coffee houses, as free as anyone else in the village to live their lives.
Though they live with a range of intellectual disabilities, these residents of the nearby residential center at Kfar Tikvah were as much a part of the community as the statue of war hero Alexander Zaid in the center of town.
So it seemed completely natural to Itzhaki to invite them, nearly a decade ago, to join him in a bold venture he was launching. That’s when the then-twenty-five-year-old IDF officer, fresh out of uniform, did something many considered crazy: he opened a winery.
Itzhaki recalls the well-meaning industry expert’s warning back then. “You seem like a nice young man so I’m going to give you some free advice. Don’t go into the wine business. Your chances for success are nil.”
“He was right in many ways,” an older and wiser Itzhaki says with a laugh, twirling the stem of a wineglass – filled with water. “It’s a bruising business: high pressure, high stakes and nearly impossible to break into. On paper our chances were nil.”
But having grown up in a family crazy about wine, and living in a part of Israel where wine grapes grow in abundance, Itzhaki forged on. First, he rented out grape arbors in both the Galilee and the Judean Hills, then his father the civil engineer led the renovation of an old cow shed into a tasting and sales room, and finally his mother suggested the name Tulip. The first year’s yield: 7,000 bottles.
From the very start the disabled workers were part of the fledgling winery’s team. Their home was a deserted kibbutz that had been transformed into a residential center for those with mental disabilities. It got its start in 1964 when Dr. Zigfrid Hirsch, a British philanthropist and Holocaust survivor, began rounding up mentally disabled people from across Israel, determined to give them the chance for a life of maximum normalcy and productivity. The result was Kfar Tikvah, Hebrew for “Village of Hope.”
Today some two hundred people with disabilities live in the village, and thirty of them work at Tulip. Itzhaki says he knew it was the right thing to employ them, but he admits his workforce took some getting used to.
“I kept asking myself, ‘What can I expect of them?’ ” he says. “How can I communicate with them? But within a day or two, I fell in love with these people.”
Tulip worker Nathan Can’ani listens with rapt attention to his boss during the telling of this story, which is in fact his story too, and every so often he interrupts the flow.
“I like to put the bottles on the machine,” he says with a wide grin. “I like that job.” Now 64, Can’ani has been with the winery full-time since its early days in 2003. Itzhaki says employees like Can’ani continue to amaze by dutifully performing “the repetitive work that would drive us crazy with its monotony…. But eight hours later they’re still so happy, still interested in every detail of the job and still doing excellent work.”
It was in 2006 that Itzhaki first approached the rabbinate.
“I could see that the only way to grow in this market is to be kosher,” he says. “That’s what the better hotels and restaurants across Israel require and it opens up the lucrative kosher export market, too.”
Another potential jump in sales comes on Rosh Hashanah and Pesach, when Israeli employers traditionally give their employees a bottle of kosher wine, says Itzhaki.
Yet Itzhaki’s employment of the disabled presented a significant roadblock to going kosher. Jewish law requires that every person who touches wine in any stage of its production must be observant of mitzvot – but Itzhaki’s disabled employees were not.
When one kashrut expert toured the plant on bottling day, he quickly sized up the situation.
“He told me our wine could be kosher, but first I would have to let them all go and hire new workers in their place,” Itzhaki recalls. “I told him, ‘I’m sorry. Here’s the door. I am not firing these people.’ ”