POOR SEED
5711, the second year of Moshav Komemiyus, was a Shemitta year. My name is Dov Weiss and I was part of the group of about thirty religious young men who started the agricultural settlement Moshav Komemiyus, in the south of Eretz Yisrael. It was in 1950, after we had completed our army service. I was still a bachelor then. Among the founders was also the well-known Torah scholar and rabbinical authority, Rav Binyomin Mendelsohn, of blessed memory. He had previously immigrated to Eretz Yisrael from Poland and had served as the Rav of Kfar Ata. At first we lived in tents, in the middle of a barren wilderness. The nearest settlements to ours were a group of several kibbutzim associated with the left-wing Shomer HaTzair movement: Gat, Gilon and Negva. Several of our members supported themselves by working at Kibbutz Gat, the closest to us, doing different types of manual labor. Others worked in agriculture, planting wheat, barley, rye and other grains and legumes. I myself drove a tractor. Our produce, which grew throughout the fifteen thousand or so dunam
