Cheese-maker Shai Seltzer’s Har Eitan Farm

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Shai Seltzer's Har Eitan Farm goat cheeses. Photo by and © Vision Studio

Har Eitan Farm and cheese caves are west of Jerusalem, down the eastern slope of Mount Eitan near the Sataf Springs, at the end of a long and rubbly dirt road, dotted with small placards with images of goats on them.

Like any good alchemist, cheesemaker Shai Seltzer works magic on a regular basis: changing the milk of his Anglo-Nubian crossbred goats into dozens of varieties of pungent cheeses, from the mildest, creamy little crottin disks to big-flavored, crumbly, wizened wheels that are aged for up to five years. Some kinds are wrapped in grape leaves or coated in ash; two are named for his daughters, Michal and Tom; and all are ripened in a natural limestone cave on the farm.

“Shai’s goats have space, shelter, and a beautiful view of the Eitan Valley, and they are well fed on healthy grasses and greens that help them generate the elixir that is their milk.”

Visit Har Eitan and you will find yourself sitting at a small table under a massive stone overhang: this is the front porch of the cave in which these gastronomic miracles happen. If you are lucky, Shai might let you have a peek into the stone chamber where the affinage takes place: a cool, dark space lined with shelves stocked with patient tommes and the aroma of goat-cheese paradise.

His animals are clearly happy. They have space, shelter, and a beautiful view of the Eitan Valley, and they are well fed on healthy grasses and greens that help them generate the elixir that is their milk. Shai chats with them in Hebrew, which, naturally, they understand. “Yes, they speak Hebrew,” he says. “But the main thing they do is laugh. All the time, they are laughing!”

 Shai’s great talents attract regular visitors, although his enclave is not advertised to the world. There is something quietly thrilling about discovering a hidden gem like this, and Israel is studded with them from top to bottom.

Stills from the film The New Cuisine of Israel, available with the purchase of The Desert and the Cities Sing: Discovering Today’s Israel.

 Har Eitan Farm >

Mizpe Hayamim Hotel and Spa in the Galilee

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Sammy Chazan (left) and an assistant working in the gardens of Mizpe Hayamim in a still from the film  Mizpe Hayamim: A Retreat for Body and Soul

Sammy Chazan and his wife, Anita, are the owners and resident miracle-workers of Mizpe Hayamim, an organic farm, hotel, spa, and more, located in Rosh Pina in the Galilee.

“The Galilee is infamously studded with stones: the line is very clear where Mizpe Hayamim’s vibrantly green farms end and the hard, gray, uncultivated land adjacent begins. ”

Mizpe Hayamim is truly a healing place in all senses. The hotel was the original vision of Erich Jacob Yaroslavsky, known as Doctor Yaros, a German homeopath who moved to Palestine in 1920 and envisioned a beautiful healing center at this spot. Yaros passed away in 1984, but Sammy Chazan has continued and expanded upon many of his ideas.

The thirty-seven acres on which Mizpe Hayamim is located are now cultivated with orchards, flower and herb gardens, and an organic farm and dairy, all of which supply the needs of the hotel’s guests. There are two restaurants (one is vegetarian) as well as a “confectionary” and bakery from which magnificent breads and sweets emerge daily, and a dairy kitchen-laboratory where dozens of types of cheese are made from the milk of Mizpe Hayamim’s goats and cows. The spa, too, uses products derived from the farms and gardens, in the form of floral essences and oils, soaps and tinctures, all with heavenly smells of lavender, jasmine, rose. The rooms and suites of the hotel are elegant and tranquil, looking out into treetops and beyond, as far as Mount Hermon or the shimmering Lake Kinneret.

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Organically grown crops at Mizpe Hayamim in a still from the film  Mizpe Hayamim: A Retreat for Body and Soul.

Guests walk on twisted paths that wind beneath fruiting mulberry trees, through patches of garden overflowing with green spinach and chard, next to barns from which curious sheep crowd to the edge of their pens to peer out. Much of Mizpe Hayamim’s staff is hired from the local Arab and Druze population, who work both in the hotel and on the farm. The land here, though now green and yielding, was by no means always so. The Galilee is infamously studded with stones: the line is very clear where Mizpe Hayamim’s vibrantly green farms end and the hard, gray, uncultivated land adjacent begins. Dr. Yaros toiled for decades here to make this place useable, and his project continues. As Sammy says: “It is a lot of work. It never ends.” But it is unquestionably worth the effort to make possible this remarkable place, where healing seems so feasible, and where, as Sammy puts it, “everything is harmonized.”

The film  Mizpe Hayamim: A Retreat for Body and Soul is available with the purchase of The Desert and the Cities Sing: Discovering Today’s Israel.

Mizpe Hayamim Hotel, Spa, Organic Farm >

Cheese-maker Shai Seltzer's Delicious Alchemy

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Shai Seltzer in a still from the film The New Cuisine of Israel

Shai Seltzer has the mien and the aura of a holy man, or perhaps a wizard: he is often swathed in white clothes, his head wrapped in a white turban. He has a long, snowy beard and wears a pair of scholarly wire spectacles. For a man with a snowy beard he is, however, extremely spry with a wild sense of humor that borders on the naughty.

“When you are making cheese, you are painting.”

— Shai Seltzer

An afternoon with Shai at his Har Eitan Farm, west of Jerusalem, will likely be filled with talk: botany (of which he is a scholar), history, politics, Slow Food (he is of course an activist), cheese-exhilarating enzymes, the life of goats, international cheese conferences (which he regularly attends, and where he is lauded as a superstar), and more. He will expertly pace the sampling of cheeses through your visit, so that the palate will not be overwhelmed—“Slowly, slowly,” he advises. Plainly, these creations still please him greatly, although he must have tasted them hundreds of times.

Botanist, activist, sage, gastronomic magician, Shai is also a teacher who takes in students of cheese making, and who has shared his knowledge with women’s cooperatives in Africa and India, and more locally among the Bedouins, giving them tools and skills to bolster their own microeconomies. Perhaps most importantly, Shai is an artist: “When you are making cheese, you are painting,” he says. “You are painting with milk and with bacteria.”

And indeed, his cheeses are masterpieces. 

Har Eitan Farm > 

These stills are from the film The New Cuisine of Israel, available with the purchase of The Desert and the Cities Sing: Discovering Today’s Israel.