from Haaretz 2/2/12

http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/jerusalem-dig-uncovers-earliest-evidence-of-local-cultivation-of-etrogs-1.410505

By Zafrir Rinat

The earliest evidence of local cultivation of three of the Sukkot holiday’s traditional “four species” has been found at the most ancient royal royal garden ever discovered in Israel.

The garden, at Kibbutz Ramat Rachel in Jerusalem, gave up its secrets through remnants of pollen found in the plaster of its walls.

The garden was part of an Israelite palace at Ramat Rachel that has been excavated for many years, most recently in a joint dig by Prof. Oded Lipschits and Dr. Yuval Gadot of Tel Aviv University and Prof. Manfred Oeming of Heidelberg University. The palace existed from the time of King Hezekiah until the Hasmonean period in the second century B.C.E.

The excavations revealed that the garden must have had a beautiful – and strategic – view, but it lacked its own water source. Thus the ancient landscape architects had to build channels and pools to collect rainwater for irrigation.

The archaeologists discovered that the garden’s designers had removed the original hard soil and replaced it with suitable garden soil. But until recently, they had no idea what was grown there.

Then, Lipschits said, he and his colleagues had a “wild thought”: If plasterers had worked on the garden walls in springtime, when flowers were blooming, breezes would have carried the pollen to the walls, where it would have become embedded in the plaster.

Enlisting the aid of Tel Aviv University archaeobotanist Dr. Daphne Langot, they carefully peeled away layers of the plaster, revealing pollen from a number of plant species.

Most of the plants were wild, but in one layer of plaster, apparently from the Persian period (the era of the Jewish return from the Babylonian exile in 538 B.C.E. ) they found pollen from ornamental species and fruit trees, some of which came from distant lands.

The find that most excited the scholars was pollen from etrogs, or citrons, a fruit that originated in India. This is the earliest botanical evidence of citrons in the country.

Scholars believe the citron came here via Persia, and that its Hebrew name, etrog, preserves the Persian name for the fruit – turung. They also say royal cultivation of the exotic newcomer was a means of advertising the king’s power and capabilities.

The garden at Ramat Rachel is also the first place in the country to yield evidence of the cultivation of myrtle and willow – two more of the four species used in Sukkot rituals.

Home > Branching Out Beyond Egypt

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Branching Out Beyond Egypt

Lulav merchant David Wiseman holding some rare domestic date palm branches. Courtesy of David Wiseman

New domestic, foreign suppliers of lulavim shaking up business, but prices still higher than last year.

Tuesday, October 11, 2011

Helen Chernikoff, Staff Writer

Ever since the government of Egypt announced a ban on the export of date palm branches, life in the Sukkot business has been high-stress for everyone — but not David Wiseman.

A British-born Orthodox Jew transplanted to Dallas, Wiseman sells Sukkot’s ritual bundles of flora and has developed a domestic source of palm fronds, better known as the lulav, a key element in the foliage shaken and waved during observance of the harvest holiday.

The Jewish world, now focused on reducing its reliance on Egyptian palm branches, is playing catch-up with Wiseman. While his colleagues were wringing their hands and paying a premium for product flown in from Spain, he was serenely supervising the cutting of his own stock.

“If anyone wants lulavim, they have to come to me,” he said. “There’s no genius involved in this. You have a critical component of an item that you sell. You have to make sure it’s coming from a place that you can rely on. It’s a simple supply issue.”

Typically, most of the palm fronds used worldwide during Sukkot hail from the Sinai, but in August, the Egyptian government prohibited their sale, citing danger to the trees. Egyptian growers willing to flout the ban hiked their prices, and the chain of merchants who move the branches from desert orchard to Judaica shop passed the increase along.

That’s why many sellers are raising prices on Sukkot sets of etrog, date branch, myrtle and willow by about $10 this year. It’s also why they’re now seeking suppliers who, like Wiseman, have cultivated alternative sources of date palm branches.

“It’s not fair to the merchant to have to swallow this whole huge nut and lose tens of thousands of dollars,” said Avi Fox, owner of Rosenblum’s World of Judaica in Skokie, Ill., who is raising prices on lulav-and-etrog sets by $10 to offset the higher cost of lulavs shipped by air from Israel and Spain.

Prices for the sets in the U.S. range from about $45 at the low end to more than $80 for the specimens judged sufficiently gorgeous to fulfill the obligation of “beautifying” the mitzvah, although cheaper sets can be found on the street in heavily Jewish neighborhoods like Kew Gardens Hills in Queens right before the holiday starts.

Called a lulav, the date palm branch is combined with myrtle and willow into a bundle, also called a lulav. The foliage, together with an etrog, or citron, is held and shaken while reciting certain prayers on Sukkot.

The problem of lulav supply is not a new one. Egypt forbade exports in 2005, causing a shortage, and the possibility and rumors of similar bans has loomed over the holiday since then. It was that episode that spurred Wiseman, whose business is named Zadie Reuven’s Esrog Farm after his grandfather, to start buying from a domestic date palm orchard. Wiseman’s operation started in 1995 as a backyard orchard from which he sold ornamental etrog plants, and it was inspired when his weekly Talmud class met in a sukkah, the temporary hut built during Sukkot, and decided on a whim to taste an etrog.

True to the business’ scholarly roots, Wiseman has written a 60-page treatise, “The Esrog,” under the nom de plume Zaide Reuven, covering everything from botany (Epidermis vs. Hypodermis) to recipes (Candied Esrog) to stories (The Esrogim that Cured the King) and, of course, reams of relevant laws. He will e-mail it to you for $12.

Now he works with a partner who owns an etrog orchard in California that produces thousands of citrons, Wiseman said, but he would not reveal how many sets he is selling this Sukkot.

After this year’s experience, Fox and other merchants say they will urge their suppliers to follow Wiseman out of Egypt for good, even if the non-Egyptian lulavim cost more. In fact, Fox would have saved significantly this year by buying from Wiseman, who charged $6 per lulav, more than the $4 price of a typical Egyptian lulav but much less than the $15 Fox said he paid.

“The good thing about this year is that it shows we don’t need [the Egyptian suppliers] anymore,” said Levi Zagelbaum, president of New York-based wholesaler The Esrog Headquarters, whose operation buys lulav-and-etrog set components from an Israeli firm whose name he would not reveal, then assembles them and sells them to synagogues, schools and retailers. Zagelbaum also declined to discuss the size of his business.

While Zagelbaum normally relies on Egyptian lulavim, this year, only 30 percent of his supply came from there. He procured the rest from Israel and Spain, and because he paid more to do so he will charge his customers higher prices this year.

“God willing, everyone knows there’s a problem, and they’re going to order from other sources,” Zagelbaum said.

Historically the cheapest component in a Sukkot set, the lulav became instead the driver of higher prices in the aftermath of the “Arab Spring” protests. The overthrow of President Hosni Mubarak has complicated trade between Egypt and Israel. Since Mubarak’s ouster, for example, a pipeline carrying Egyptian gas to Israel has been attacked several times.

Yet in Israel, lulav prices have not gone up.

In a normal year, Israel would import about 450,000 lulavim from Egypt and grow about 200,000, Meir Mizrahi, head of plant quarantine services at the Ministry of Agriculture, told The Jewish Week. At the urging of the government, Israeli growers filled in the gap left by Egypt this year.

Also, Jordan has supplied a record number of 150,000 lulavim because Israeli merchants wary of an Egypt-related shortage took the time to teach Jordanian date palm growers how to cut the branches, Mizrahi said.

“We were initially concerned, but it turns out there was no shortage,” said Binyamin Levine as he did a brisk business at a Four Species market opposite the Mahane Yehuda shuk in Jerusalem.

American merchants say they’ll meet demand as well. But prices are inspiring sticker shock because they reflect air versus ocean shipping, the higher cost of labor in Spain and Israel, and the reduced Egyptian supply, which at about 200,000 was less than half what the United States normally imports.

“By and large people have been very understanding, but there are always people who will complain,” Fox said. “They will be told they owe us an additional $10 and they’re going to go nuts. It’s not going to be fun, but that’s the way it’s going to be.”

Fox claims that with sufficient planning, the American Jewish market can liberate itself from the unpredictable Egyptian lulav trade. But it might not be that easy, points out Shlomo Perelman, who owns Judaism.com. His supplier, Schwartz Esrog Center, “fought for him” this year and secured him an adequate supply of Israeli lulavim. But he can’t control their business decisions, he said.

Wiseman wants the industry to know that he might be on the verge of discovering a second source, this time in Florida, which he is going to inspect after the holiday. He can see a day when he’ll be able to satisfy the domestic lulav demand himself.

But Egypt’s bounty, as ever, beckons, said Chaim Pauli, who owns Elli-chai’s One Stop Judaica Shop in Silver Spring, Md., and is absorbing the higher costs rather than raise his prices this year.

“Until everybody agrees, it’s not going to happen,” said Pauli. “Next year the Egyptians will get smart, they’ll flood the market with a half-million lulavim.”

With reporting from Israel by Michele Chabin and Amy Spiro.

Copyright 2010 The Jewish Week

Shaken Up

Egypt’s politically expedient ban on the export of palm fronds has altered the lulav market in unexpected ways

By Allison Hoffman|October 12, 2011 7:00 AM

In August, a few days after Israeli forces mistakenly killed ^[1] six Egyptian police and military personnel during a counter-terror operation in the Sinai, Cairo announced that it would ban the harvest and export of palm fronds and hearts—effective immediately. Egypt’s agriculture minister, Salah Youssef, said the move came out of concern for the country’s date palms, which have been afflicted by a parasitic weevil. But the timing was more than a little conspicuous: He was hailed ^[2] for defying another longstanding policy of ousted Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak that was perceived to favor Israeli interests over domestic ones.

Palm fronds are like Douglas firs: crops that have value only when marketed to a particular group of people at a particular time of year. Known as lulavs, palm fronds are as important to observant Jews during Sukkot, which begins tonight at sunset, as Christmas trees are to Christians in December. The tightly furled spears of immature fronds are one of the four species traditionally shaken during the holiday, a mimic of ancient rituals performed by priests in the Temple.

Egypt, as it happens, is the largest supplier of lulavs in the world, shipping as many as 700,000 fronds to Israel and about as many to the United States and Europe every fall. So, the threat of a potentially holiday-wrecking shortfall sent distributors—and politicians—into a frenzy. “Let my lulavs go!” exclaimed a press release sent ^[3] out by Rep. Howard Berman, a Los Angeles Democrat, who is facing a tight re-election battle in a newly drawn—and heavily Jewish—district.

This isn’t the first time Sukkot observers have had to cope with lulav drama. The last big scare was in 2005, when Egyptian authorities curtailed palm-frond exports over concerns for the country’s date crop. The result was a run ^[4] on lulavs in New York’s Orthodox precincts, where prices for the lowest-end fronds shot up from $2 to $10. (And that was after Egypt agreed to release about 450,000 fronds to Israel and another 100,000 to the United States, once aggressive lobbying from Jewish officials prompted the State Department to get involved ^[5].) But earlier panics featured villains closer to home: In 1999, Israeli authorities filed a complaint against an Arab-Jewish cartel suspected of cornering ^[6] the market on Egyptian output, driving the price up. In 1986, American Jews were stymied by U.S. regulators who impounded ^[7] a crucial 90,000-frond shipment from Tunisia, leaving them to rot in a warehouse for want of a proper certificate of origin.

This year’s episode has struck many as evidence of a structural problem in the lulav market that can’t be ignored any longer. “Why would anyone rely on a single source of anything?” asked David Wiseman, a Dallas-based distributor of Sukkot sets known as arba minim, which include an etrog, or citron, and myrtle and willow branches alongside palm fronds. “It’s crazy.”

The trouble for buyers like Wiseman is figuring out where else to go. Egypt is the world’s leading producer of dates, followed by Iran, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Pakistan—all unlikely suppliers of lulavs for anyone looking to diversify. Israel ranks No. 17, producing a mere 22,000 metric tons to Egypt’s 1.3 million. Jordan, which helps boost Israel’s supply, doesn’t even rate in the top 20, according to the most recent U.N. statistics ^[8]. Kosher lulavs, which must be straight and have unsplit green leaves, can only be obtained from particular varieties of palms that, today, are under relatively limited cultivation. And American demand, by all accounts, is steadily rising, from an estimated 270,000 fronds in the mid-1980s to at least 500,000 today. “The market has exploded,” said Yitzchok Summers, the rabbi at Anshe Emes, an Orthodox synagogue in Los Angeles. “When I was growing up here, there were a couple of places you went to get your lulav and etrog, but last year when you went down Pico Boulevard there were kids sitting outside the Judaica stores who would do drive-up service.”

Israeli officials announced last week that they expected to satisfy domestic demand for about 650,000 lulavs, in part thanks to new preservatives ^[9] that allow for a longer harvest window in Israeli date groves. Jordan provided a buffer shipment of about 110,000 palm fronds—including, traders told Ha’aretz, some contraband ^[10] Egyptian lulavs. Special import licenses were also granted to Spanish growers, though Hamas nixed efforts ^[11] to open up imports of 50,000 fronds from Gaza.

But everyone seems to agree that Israel’s patchwork solution has strained global supply—leaving American Jews to figure out their own plan for replacing the high-quality, low-price lulavs from the Sinai. The obvious solution, according to Summers and Wiseman, is to buy domestic— specifically, from California and Arizona, the top two date-producing states. Late last week, Wiseman said he was still waiting on a cut of the Egyptian supply, but he’s posted a notice on his website announcing that he is only selling California lulavs this year and for the foreseeable future. “As far as we know,” the announcement read, “we are the first major dealer to make this decision, and we have received the overwhelming support of our customers.”

The majority of dates produced in the United States are deglet noor or medjool, whose fronds tend to be too weak to meet halakhic standards. But Wiseman estimates there are enough trees of sturdier varieties in California—including the dayri palm, whose tight fronds command premium prices—to produce as many as 40,000 lulavs each year. “I got California ones last year because I wanted to wean people off Egyptian lulavs,” Wiseman told me. “But there is no infrastructure. The trees can produce, but you need a system of cutting them, packing them, sorting them, and distributing them.”

Calls to growers in the Coachella Valley, in the desert east of Los Angeles, suggested the first hurdle is actually explaining to growers what a lulav is. (“Are you sure? Palm fronds are really big,” said a woman who answered the phone at Brown Date Garden, when she heard about the ritual lulav-shaking.) Even among those who know about Sukkot, there is hesitation about getting into the lulav business. “We’ve been approached in the past and have never engaged,” said Albert Keck, the president of Hadley Farms, one of the best-known growers in Southern California. “I cringe at cutting off the central terminal of a young palm.”

That hasn’t stopped smaller growers from getting into the market. Arthur Futterman, a small grower in Indio, Calif., who was raised in a Reform Jewish household but is now an evangelical Christian, has worked ^[12] for the past six years with dealers from the anti-Zionist Satmar Hasidic community, which does not buy Israeli products. “At first I was helping them locate farmers around the desert who had dayris and helping them do their packing and shipping,” Futterman explained this week. It was slow work: Each grower who agreed to participate had fewer than a dozen of the high-end dayri palms. Futterman said most growers limit cuttings to four fronds per tree. “It’s like cutting your fingernail to the quick,” he said. “You can do it a little, but not too much.”

Now Futterman has leased several acres to brothers Shulem and Schmiel Ekstein, Satmar dealers who have planted several dozen dayri palms exclusively for Sukkot. Those trees, however, won’t mature for several years. In the meantime, Futterman said, there is an opportunity for people with less exacting interpretations of halakha. “The minutiae the Eksteins want are not present in most varieties—they will look at the last little leaf to make sure it’s sealed closed,” Futterman said. “But in my mind, you can take any center frond that’s not opened up, like a rosebud.” And, he went on, “if that’s your understanding of closed, then there are thousands here.”

Which is how Rabbi Summers of Anshe Emes has managed to satisfy his congregation’s needs this year. “I work through someone who said there was a big problem because of Egypt, but he was able to secure lulavim from Palm Springs,” Summers said last week. Still, Summers had a Plan B: “I have two date palms in front of my house, and you can see the lulav in the middle. It’s kind of high up, but I was thinking, this year, if I’m really stuck, I can always just get a ladder.”

Find this story online: http://www.tabletmag.com/news-and-politics/80515/shaken-up/

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Etrog Man

California citrus farmer John Kirkpatrick, a Presbyterian well-versed in Jewish agricultural law, is the only large-scale grower of etrogs in the U.S.

By Miriam Krule|October 12, 2011 7:00 AM

Growing etrogs ^[1] is a difficult business. Too much sun and the yellow skin of the citrus fruit will burn; too little sun and the flowers won’t blossom. There’s infestation to worry about—red citrus mites are particularly fond of them. And then there are the religious prohibitions; blemishes render the fruit, a citron in English, useless for Sukkot, so if a branch or leaf pierces the skin of the etrog, you’re in trouble.

But John Kirkpatrick, a third-generation citrus farmer in California’s San Joaquin Valley, has overcome these obstacles and more. He’s the only large-scale grower of etrogs in the United States.

The octogenarian Kirkpatrick, who grows lemons, tangelos, and oranges in addition to etrogs on some 50 acres, is a Presbyterian. He knew almost nothing about the fruit when he was approached with an unusual business proposal more than 30 years ago. “It’s been a cultural trip for us—I’m Christian, but I now understand an awful lot about halakhic law,” Kirkpatrick said, using the Hebrew word for Jewish law, “as it relates to agriculture.”

In the fall of 1980, Kirkpatrick got a call from Yisroel Weisberger, “an Orthodox Jewish boy who worked in a Judaicia store in Brooklyn,” the farmer said. Weisberger, who also held a part-time job in a customs house handling etrog imports from Israel, was interested in finding a way to grow the fruit in America. Each Sukkot, Jews are commanded to shake the arba minim, or four species ^[2]—the etrog and lulav, as well as willow and myrtle branches—to celebrate the holiday. (These days, a set of the four typically sells for $40, with the etrog the most expensive component, but can cost up to $150, depending on where it’s from. Most etrogs are imported from Israel, Italy, and Morocco.) Producing and selling them here had the potential to be a lucrative business.

But first Weisberger needed a farmer. He had heard of Kirkpatrick, a well-established citrus farmer—back then he was chairman of the Citrus Research Board ^[3]—and hoped Kirkpatrick might refer him to a suitable grower. They spoke for an hour, and Kirkpatrick grew fascinated by the history and culture of the etrog, which he knew little about. “I had read about them in a five-volume set about citrus fruit,” he recalled, but he’d never seen one. Over the course of the conversation, Kirkpatrick became “convinced by the attractive-sounding value of the fruit,” as he put it. “You’ve already found your man,” he said when Weisberger asked him for some names. “And from there it was onward and upwards.”

John Kirkpatrick’s etrog orchard. (Susie Wyshak/Flickr ^[4])

Success didn’t come easy. “I found out that although I’m an expert citrus grower, I was not an expert etrog grower,” Kirkpatrick said. “It’s easier to grow 2,000 acres of oranges or lemons than to grow one acre of etrogs.” A friend of Weisberg’s helped them acquire plants from an Israeli grove, but the first few years were particularly tough. In the beginning, they produced “mediocre fruit that sold on street for $2 or $3 a piece,” Kirkpatrick said.

Unlike the other fruit Kirkpatrick grew, etrogs came with an additional set of rules. “It requires understanding of halakha,” Kirkpatrick said. The lineage of each etrog tree must be certified, and the fruit can’t be grown on grafted or budded trees. Rabbinical supervision is required.

Kirkpatrick knows his Jewish religious terminology, at least as it pertains to etrogs. He recounted the differing opinions about the necessity of pitoms ^[5], or stems, to be intact to qualify the fruit as “complete.” And he explained that his business began to turn around in 1987, “when we got to our first shmita” —the last year in the seven-year agricultural cycle mandated by the Torah as a year of rest—“and had a pretty good year.” (In 1995 Weisberger got his brother-in-law Yaakov Shlomo Rothberg involved, and he has since taken over as Kirkpatrick’s partner.)

While Kirkpatrick was gregarious during an initial phone conversation, he declined to speak on further attempts to contact him. In the 2010 Encyclopedia of Jewish Food ^[6], Gil Marks writes about Kirkpatrick’s etrogs and reports that he has about 250 etrog trees on his farm, with his orchards producing approximately 3,000 etrogs a year suitable for use on Sukkot; some 9,000 don’t qualify.

David Wiseman, the owner of Zaide Reuven’s Esrog Farm ^[7], a Dallas-based distributor of the four species, has been buying etrogs from Kirkpatrick for 13 years. “They produce excellent quality, and are honest, honest people,” Wiseman said. “It’s a pleasure to work with people who know what they’re doing,” Wiseman’s etrogs sell together with lulavs for between $50 and $130. “John is very knowledgeable about the Jewish laws and concerned that he fulfills all the details of the Jewish laws,” Wiseman said. “If anything, he’s more stringent than he needs to be.”

And what happens to all that fruit that doesn’t make the grade? Etrogs that ripen and can’t be used for Sukkot, Kirkpatrick explained, end up being sold to greengrocers, manufacturers of marmalade, and, most frequently, the makers of citron-infused vodka—opening the distinct possibility that some of his etrogs are enjoyed year-round.

Find this story online: http://www.tabletmag.com/life-and-religion/80571/etrog-man/

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Just returned from our supplier in CA where we picked, checked and sorted beautiful lulavim.Eating fresh organic dates directly from the trees. It does’nt get better than that.

Fruit Of Arab Spring?

The price of lulav-and-etrog sets could rise this year due to a date palm branch shortage.

With Egyptian supply down, Sukkot ritual objects expected to be pricier.

Tuesday, September 20, 2011

Helen Chernikoff

Staff Writer

Lulav and etrog sets sold in the United States may be pricier than usual this Sukkot, due to an Egyptian ban on the sale of the date palm branches.

Citing danger to the trees, Egypt’s minister of agriculture said on Aug. 7 that Egypt would not export the branches for two years, according to an article in Al-Masry Al-Youm, an Egyptian Arabic-language daily newspaper. Most of the branches used worldwide during Sukkot, which begins on Oct. 12, are grown in the Sinai, with smaller quantities available from Israel, Spain, Morocco and parts of the United States like California and Arizona.

After weeks of delay, a reduced supply of palm fronds is making it out of Egypt to the U.S., but the uncertainty highlights the need for alternative palm branch sources, said those in the industry, especially because the problem is not a new one.

“It’s a disaster,” said Levi Zagelbaum, president of New York-based wholesaler The Esrog Headquarters, whose operation assembles lulav-and-etrog sets and sells them to synagogues, schools and retailers. “My phone is ringing off the hook.”

Rumors of such shortages crop up with seasonal regularity, but the last time a shortfall actually threatened the celebration of the holiday was in 2005, when the government of Egypt announced a similar ban and then agreed after diplomatic wrangling to harvest at least 400,000 branches. That episode inspired calls for investigations by both U.S. and Israeli organizations suspicious that Israeli suppliers had conspired with Egyptian growers to inflate prices by artificially slashing the supply. The next year, Egypt’s lulav trade with Israel even scored a mention in a confidential diplomatic cable dumped in August 2011 by Wikileaks, the website that publishes secret and sensitive documents.

Not surprisingly, this year’s political turmoil in Egypt — which has dramatically increased Israel-Egypt relations on everything from border security to gas pipelines to the safeguarding of Israel’s embassy — has also added a new wrinkle to the lulav trade. The entire process of bringing lulavs from producer to consumer — involving several stages, such as harvesting, spraying, shipping and going through border crossings and customs procedures — seems to have stopped functioning as well as it usually did under Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, observed David Wiseman, whose Dallas-based “Zaide Reuven’s Esrog Farm” sells etrog-and-lulav sets in the United States.

Mubarak was overthrown in February, after the months of protests known as the “Arab Spring.”

Despite the announced ban and other issues, a ship bearing about 200,000 lulavs — less than half the typical U.S. demand — left Egypt on Sept. 18 about two weeks later than it should have, said Zagelbaum, citing information from his Israeli suppliers.

Israel’s Ministry of Agriculture and Development said on Sept. 18 that while it can’t control prices, it will help to ensure adequate Israeli supply in part by subsidizing harvests of domestic date palms.

A spokeswoman for the Embassy of Egypt in Washington, D.C., could not obtain government comment.

Harvesting date palm branches won’t harm the tree if the cutter stays clear of the bud from which the branches grow, said Ismael Rodriguez, manager of Texas Palms, a palm orchard in Kingwood, Texas, about 30 minutes southwest of Dallas.

The date palm branch, called a lulav, is bundled together with willow and myrtle branches into a ritual object, also called a lulav, which, together with an etrog, or citron, is held and shaken, while reciting certain prayers on Sukkot.

In a normal year, an average set costs in the mid-$30s. Prices on sets that contain an Egyptian lulav will probably increase by about $5, say Zagelbaum and Avi Fox, owner of Rosenblum’s World of Judaica in Skokie, Ill., both quoting tentative price information from suppliers. Neither would disclose the names of those suppliers, which they said are a trade secret.

The industry and the community that supports it must stop relying on Egypt for date palm branches, said Wiseman, whose business is named for his grandfather. “Does anyone with a brain rely on one single supplier for a key component?” he asked.

Wiseman said the low price that Israeli firms can pay on bulk orders of Egyptian branches is a strong economic incentive to maintain the current system of relying on Egypt despite periodic threats to the supply. He buys from a U.S. date branch source and his business is getting a nice pop from this season, he said.

“My customers understand that we should not be buying anything from Egypt,” he said. “They saw the attacks on the Israeli Embassy and ask, ‘Why are we doing business with these people?’”

But not everybody is worried.

“It’s happened before, someone will make a deal and cut them at the last minute,” said Rabbi Shimon Kraft, owner of The Mitzvah Store in Los Angeles.

“Part of it is to drive the price up. It’s business.” Kraft would not disclose suppliers’ names for the same reason as Zagelbaum and Fox.

Zagelbaum said wholesalers will scramble this year to make the reduced supply fit the demand. To make up the difference, those assembling the sets will probably not discard as many branches that are blemished but nonetheless “kosher,” or suitable for inclusion in the lulav.

“We can’t be as picky as we usually are,” he said.

Fox will enlist the Chicago rabbinate to validate the price increase, as he did in 2005, the last time a reduced and uncertain supply of Egyptian date branches raised prices, he said.

His profit margin on the product will remain the same or decrease slightly from last year. “Everyone is going to have to spend at least some money to share in the burden of this ‘lulav tax,’” he said.

Nobody has yet called for an official investigation into this year’s likely shortage. But a business whose product is a ritual object should be more transparent, said Moses Pava, director of Yeshiva University’s Syms School of Business and a professor of business ethics.

Rabbis even use the lulav and etrog to symbolize character, with the lulav standing in for strength and the etrog for heart, pointed out Pava.

“We should know where they’re coming from,” Pava said. “We should know where they’re grown. Customers should have access to all this information.”

Israel correspondent Michele Chabin contributed to this report.

Thursday September 1, 2011 12:39 PM 

It is well-known that Rav Michel Yehudah Lefkowitz zt”l, rosh yeshiva of Yeshivas Ponovezh L’tzeirim, who was niftar this summer, was given seeds of an esrog by the Chazon Ish to plant to produce esrogim that are pure and are under no suspicion of being murkav, grafted.  The Chazon Ish had approached him with an esrog that he said was definitely kosher and was not grafted. The Chazon Ish actually asked Rav Michel Yehudah to plant the esrog seeds in his yard and told him that he would have parnassah from it.

Rav Michel Yehudah asked, “Can an esrog grow in the Bnei Brak climate? Moreover, I don’t have any experience growing esrogim, and an esrog tree takes much time to cultivate. I don’t have time to cultivate it; I want to learn Torah!”

The Chazon Ish replied that all he would have to do was plant the esrog and water it. The Chazon Ish promised him that it would not take up much of his time.

The esrog tree in Rav Michel Yehudah’s yard.

Remarkably, that esrog tree grew into the famous “Lefkowitz-Chazon Ish Esrogim.” Rav Michel Yehudah barely had to invest any time into it, despite the fact that an esrog tree is usually very sensitive, requires much attention, and does not last for many years. 70 years later, that tree stood tall in Rav Michel Yehudah’s yard and was still producing beautiful esrogim.

However, this month, news emerged from Bnei Brak that the historic tree has died. Since the time of Rav Michel Yehudah’s petirah, the tree’s branches have gradually been getting dried out, and, at the present time, the tree is all but dead. The fruit have fallen off and the branches have dried out.

Upon learning of the news, the Toldos Aharon Rebbe, who is makpid each Sukkos to make a bracha on an esrog from Rav Michel Yehudah’s yard, sent chassidim to confirm the report. They indeed found that the tree has withered.

While the general story of the Chazon Ish’s esrog tree is well-known, there are some lesser known facts and stories about the tree:

Rav Michel Yehudah said that when he asked the Chazon Ish what din the esrog had, the Chazon Ish responded that “it has a din of masores” [tradition, just as if the subject esrog had been handed down from generation to generation].

The Chazon Ish constantly inquired after the welfare of the tree, asking Rav Michel Yehudah if he was watering it enough, etc. His grandson related that during the second year of the tree’s life, it looked like it would fail. Rav Michel Yehudah reported this to the Chazon Ish and the Chazon Ish told him not to worry. “If the Ribbono Shel Olam desires it,” said the Chazon Ish, “He can make a wind come that will revive the tree [and make it live for many years].” There was an immediate improvement and, as is well known, the tree lived more than 60 years after its planting, despite generally short life spans for esrog trees.

The first year after the fourth year of the tree’s production [the tree's produce is forbidden until after the fourth year], the Chazon Ish went to Rav Michel Yehudah’s home to personally choose his esrog, getting down on his hands and knees under the tree’s branches to select the best esrog.

The Steipler Gaon did this all his life, selecting his esrog (and one for his daughter, Rebbetzin Barzam) on the 15^th of Av. The Steipler would inquire throughout the year as to the status of tree. Interestingly, during the last year of his life, he did not inquire as to the status of the tree; the Steipler ultimately passed away on the 23^rd of Av and was too ill that year to have chosen his esrog on the 15^th of Av.

When the Steipler would come to select his esrog from Rav Michel Yehudah, he would give Rav Michel Yehudah an amount of money. Inevitably, Rav Michel Yehudah would protest that it was too much, to which the Steipler would reply, “You’re giving me everything. I’m giving you nothing.”

Until this year, each Sukkos, Rav Chaim Kanievsky made his bracha only over an esrog from this tree, regardless of whether another esrog might be cleaner.

As is well-known, Rav Michel Yehudah gave anyone the right to cultivate the seeds and start an orchard from his tree, with no request for compensation.

And now, with the tree having died, those who are makpid to obtain “Lefkowitz esrogim” will have to look for a tree planted with seeds from the original tree.

{Yair Alpert-Matzav.com Israel}

from: http://etrogtree.blogspot.com/