Mikveh Israel 3.07

Mikveh Israel is a youth village and boarding school in central Israel. Located in Tel Aviv District, it had a population of in.Established in 1870, it was the first Jewish agricultural school in what is now Israel.HistoryMikveh Israel was founded in April 1870 by Charles Netter, an emissary of the French organization Alliance Israélite Universelle, aiming to be an educational institution where young Jews could learn agriculture and leave to establish villages and settlements all over the country and to make the desert blossom. It was established on a tract of land southeast of Jaffa leased from the Ottoman Sultan, who allocated 750acre to the project. The name is taken from two passages in the Book of Jeremiah, Jeremiah 14:8 and 17:13, and was proposed by Wolf Grinstein, one of the school's first students, who later taught there.Netter, the first headmaster, introduced new methods of agricultural training, with Baron Edmond James de Rothschild contributing to the upkeep of the school. Netter pioneered progressive educational methods and a new way of life and agricultural training to the future farmers of this land. There were only about 20,000 Jews in the country at that time, virtually all established in the old traditional cities of Judaism: Jerusalem, Tiberias, Safed and Hebron.In 1898 Theodor Herzl met the German Emperor Wilhelm II at the main entrance of Mikveh Israel during Herzl's only visit to Palestine. The meeting, a PR event engineered by Herzl to publicly meet the Kaiser, was misinterpreted by the world media as a legitimization of Herzl and Zionism by Germany. Today, entrance to the school grounds is via the city of Holon.