SURROUNDED by enormous palm trees and close to the Kinneret shoreline, a late 1920s built villa recently opened to the Israeli general public. The home could well be bestowed with the title of stately home as it was built by Sir Alfred Mond, who later became Lord Melchett, and whose first visit to Israel was during the period he was Britain’s Minister of Health, in 1922. The Melchett villa was sold in the 50s and used by one of the local kibbutzim as a guesthouse before being bought some 20 years later by one of Israel’s wealthiest and best known business families who recently renovated the premises. For NIS 25 one can now participate in a guided tour. Sir Alfred also built a home in Tel Mond in the Sharon area. It sports an impressive statue of the gentleman, an ardent Zionist who fell in love with the Galilee on his first visit to the country after he was taken to visit the area by Chaim Weizmann and other leading personalities. Many Israelis know Tel Mond only from the daunting prison built during the British Mandate period on the opposite side of the main road to the town and surrounding communities, and so did I. Mond purchased land near the Kinneret in order to build a summer home, but he died in 1931 - one year before the villa was completed. The son of Ludwig Mond, a brilliant German chemist who arrived in England on a cattle boat from Germany in 1862, Alfred Moritz Mond was born in Famworth, Lancashire and brought up outside the Jewish faith. In 1902 he founded the Mond nickel works at Clydach, Wales which became the largest of its kind in the world at that time. He also founded ICI in 1926 and was a Liberal Member of Parliament from 1906 until 1928: the year he entered the House of Lords as Baron Melchett. Mond married a non-Jewish woman and his children were raised as Christians. At the age of 50 he developed a strong interest in Zionism, by which time he was a firm friend of Chaim Weizmann, and following his initial visit to the country established a company that became the base of the successful Israeli agricultural industry. He also bought the land that became Tel Mond - a short drive east of Netanya - the same year he was elevated to the peerage in Britain. The single storey bungalow that was the Mond-Melchett home became a museum in 1991 and is frequented by local school pupils researching their  family roots in the area and the huge input of Alfred Mond in the development of the local agriculture, the first work of many of their grandparents. Much of what were once citrus fruit orchards have been eaten up in the last few decades by new housing developments built to accommodate an expanding population wanting to live in the Sharon central region. History buffs, members of Zionist youth movements from both Israel and overseas, university students and groups of pensioners are just a few of the groups and individuals that make their way to the Tel Mond museum situated in the main road of what has become a trendy community as young families and artists move northward from the cities of central Israel. The day I visited, museum director Ruti Gerstein was sitting with a group of local older folk who were planning the 50th anniversary of their Tel Mond school days. They were wading through heaps of papers, photographs and certificates building the program for that very special day whilst excitedly reminiscing with each other their childhood memories of Tel Mond, their teachers and the farming families they grew up in. The museum contains furniture and artifacts belonging to Lord Melchett and family, the former painstakingly preserved and polished to a dazzle.

Large color aerial maps of the area today, displayed alongside black and white British Mandate period ones, really bring home the effect that Mond’s Palestine Plantations company had on the Sharon, from his buying land, dividing the land into settlements - in 1930 Kfar Hess, Herut and Ein Vered - and Kfar Yavitz two years later. At his invitation, groups of Jewish agricultural workers came to settle in the area and work the land he had purchased. In 1944 an influx of Yemenite immigrants were settled in Tel Mond in small government-built housing, the present day price tag definitely only fit for the pocket of a lord. In 1948, Jewish immigrants were housed in a temporary encampment (marbara) in Tel Mond, many of whom eventually permanently settled in the area, also working in agriculture. Lord Melchett’s son Henry, the second Lord Melchett, and daughter Eva Mond - the second Marchioness of Reading - both converted to Judaism in the early 1930s and following their father’s death, laid the foundation for the memorial statue of their father that stands today in the center of Tel Mond. Succeeding his father as chairman of the Jewish Agency, Henry Mond was also a negotiator with the British government. He was chairman of the Palestine Electric Corporation and Palestine Plantations, the company that basically owned Tel Mond. In 1954 Tel Mond became an independent municipality. A number of books have been written about Alfred Mond and family and one by Hector Bolitho written in 1933 tells of when the author travelled to Tel Mond. Gathered at the spot where the foundation stone for the Mond memorial statue was to be laid, the Christian author ponders the long agony of anger between Jews and Arabs, the pogroms and ghettos of Europe and the Jews who had come from so many countries under Alfred Mond’s wing to grow oranges on the plains of the Sharon. The same author was handed a trowel at the foundation-laying ceremony and participated in smoothing over the fresh concrete of the memorial base but under which had been buried a Hebrew scroll. Today the statue of Alfred Mond, the 1st Baron Melchett of Lanford, right hand extended toward the blue cloudless sky, stands in the center of the town he founded.