Hartuv

'Mount of Goodness') was an agricultural colony in the Judean Hills established in 1882 on land purchased from the Arab village of Artuf by English missionaries.

Yehuda Appel writes in 1922 that an unnamed manuscript was found, dated circa 1882 or prior stating:[1] "..And the people of Artuf village owed money to the government.

Then the soldiers appeared in the village, arrested the old men who belonged to them, and hung them by their feet in the big fig tree near the threshing floor and began to gather thorns and thistles to light a fire and torture their souls until they paid the debt... and they found a savior angel who saved them (at the very last moment...), From this horrible death, one Effendi (it turns out that it was Iskander Effendi, the Spanish deputy consul from Jerusalem who suddenly appeared at the very last moment...).

The Arabs do not know (so it is written) whether the appearance of the savior angel was by chance... or if it was premeditated... but at that time they had great joy..." Maoz Haviv, a regional researcher from Kibbutz Tzora notes that:[2] In 1881, following disturbances among the Russian Jews after the assassination of the Tsar, which were named "Storms in the Negev", Yehiel Ben Rabbi Yehuda Leib began to work for bringing Jews to agricultural settlement in Israel.

In the Polish city of Radom, he recruited 11 heads of families, all of them Jewish farmers who worked the land, and together with them he returned and immigrated to Israel to establish an agricultural colony here."

In the early 1880s, the Spanish consul in Jerusalem bought over 5,000 dunams of land from the villagers of Artuf, which he sold to the London Society for Promoting Christianity Amongst the Jews.

[4] In his 1912-13 literary almanac, Luah le'eretz yisrael, historian Abraham Moses Luncz wrote: "Artuf (Har-Tuv), founded in 1895, about 10 minutes from D'ieban along the route of the Jerusalem-Yafo railroad, 101 inhabitants, Sephardi Jews of Bulgarian origin.

[citation needed] Invoking the Collective Punishments Ordinance, the British Mandatory authorities heavily fined the Arab villages whose residents attacked the Jews of Hartuv.

On March 18, 1948, a convoy that had just finished resupplying Hartuv was ambushed on its way back to Jerusalem by the forces of Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni.

[9] After the establishment of the State of Israel, a ma'abara transit camp was set up to accommodate the masses of new immigrants arriving from Europe and Arab lands.