The Baron In Eretz Israel: Five Visits During His Lifetime

 The Baron’s first visit to Eretz Israel took place five years after he became engaged in the settlement enterprise. He arrived anonymously on 2 April 1887, sailing with his wife from France to Alexandria, Egypt, where they left their private yacht and boarded the Austrian ship The Lloyd, arriving in Jaffa like ordinary passengers.

However, the newspaper Hamelitz reported the arrival of the Baron and his wife at the Jaffa port: ‘Among many other passengers, a tall thin man was seen, clad in splendid clothes. On his head, from the hills of England, his pale face is surrounded by a small, round beard, and his eyes, like a turquoise spring giving forth deep thoughts, gazed forward toward the East, a moment after the passenger observed the buildings of the city of Jaffa opposite him in the brilliant morning light. Suddenly he turned to a dignified, average-sized woman standing beside him. Time to get down to the fishing boat, he said, Here I am, here I am — she answered him graciously, and from her two full eyes two tears flowed down her smooth cheeks, pure as the eternal skies’.

Six years after his first journey to Eretz Israel, on a sailing trip in the Mediterranean, the Baron decided to take an unplanned detour to the land. In a steamship, he anchored at the Haifa port, from there made his way to Tantur for a tour of the glass factory, and then reached his final destination, Zichron Ya’akov, where he was given a warm, impressive reception. In the course of this visit he went out to the fields to see the new plantings and to the vineyards, and he reviewed the accounts of the colony.
On 25 January 1899, the Baron arrived for his third trip to Israel. His boat anchored in the Jaffa port and from there he headed to the colony of Rishon le-Zion. He stopped at the winery, tasted the wine, and announced to the farmers that from that moment onward they would have to take care of themselves. Afterwards he continued to Petach Tikva. The young people of the colony came on horseback to welcome him; at their head was Avraham Shapira, who would one day serve as the Baron’s bodyguard during his visits. Nor did the Baron forgo a short trip to Jerusalem before returning to Jaffa, sailing to Tantura and again visiting Zichron Ya’akov. This trip, apparently, was businesslike and somewhat disappointing. Yerachmiel Halperin, one of the founders of Zichron Ya’akov, wrote in his diary: ‘We had a reception for the Baron, who with the Baroness are in our colony for the third time. They spent several hours at the colony, he visited the synagogue, the winery, the school, the administrative office’.