Mikve and the Hope of Israel

“Without Mikve Israel we would not have a country,” declared Israel’s first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion at the birth of the nation in 1948. What is so important about a place that most of us have probably never heard of? Mikve Israel was the first school of agriculture that started in 1875 – that’s 150 years ago – long before there was a state or even that many Jews in the Land! Yet this small seed of a dream to grow a nation in a barren land that would be loved by Jews and people around the world sprouted up…