The Ballad of Yoel Moshe Salomon
The song helped fuel a controversy amongst descendants of the founders of Petah Tikva regarding the relative roles of their ancestors in establishing the colony.
[2] In 1870, the Alliance Israelite Universelle founded the Mikveh Israel agricultural school some five kilometres south of Jaffa on 260 hectares of land leased from the Turkish government.
[5] The religiously observant Jews from the Old Yishuv in Jerusalem, who founded Petah Tikva, had initially been less successful in obtaining agricultural land.
[7] Their attempt to acquire land at Khirbat Deiran near Ramla also failed, though that property was eventually purchased in 1890 on behalf of a group of Polish Jews.
[11] The land was owned by two Christian businessmen from Jaffa, Antoine Bishara Tayan and Selim Qassar, and was worked by some thirty tenant farmers.
Yoram Taharlev was inspired to write The Ballad of Yoel Moshe Salomon after reading the account of the founding of Petah Tikva in Avraham Yaari's Memories of the Land of Israel (1947).
[19] That account was grounded in the version of events provided by Yoel Moshe Salomon's son Tuviah for the Petah Tikva 50th Anniversary Commemorative volume of 1929.
Gutmann, Stampfer, and Barnett return to Jaffa in the evening, but Salomon, an Arabic speaker, stays behind to make more enquiries about the health of the fellahin.
To allay their doubts regarding whether to proceed, the group engage a Greek doctor to advise them on the suitability of the land on offer for settlement.
(The first mention of Dr. Mazaraki in relation to the founding of Petah Tikva was six years afterward, in an article in the 1848 issue of a Hebrew literary annual.
Lang identifies the elder, Karlemo, as the one who probably advised the founders of Petah Tikva of the health dangers of the Yarkon Valley swamps.)
The opening words of the ballad set the scene: בבוקר לח בשנת תרל"ח beboker lach bishnat tarlach "On a humid morning in the year 1878".
The Ballad of Yoel Moshe Salomon was recorded in 1970 by Arik Einstein, a popular artist in the then emerging Israeli rock music genre.
It was the final track on Einstein's and composer Shalom Hanoch's influential album Shablul ‘Snail’,[23] and was featured in an accompanying film by the same name.
[26] The actual re-enacted ride was timed to arrive at Founders Square in Petah Tikva at 4 pm, where a set of five sculptures by Shmuel Ben-Ami were unveiled.
[30] Eli Eshed, a writer on Israel popular culture and a member of the Salomon family, refers to the controversy as ‘version wars’.
[31] The Ballad provided new fuel for the disputes when its account of events came to serve as the basis for much of the public commemoration of the 130th anniversary of the founding of Petah Tikva.
When the journalist—and Barnett's descendant—Yaffah Berlovitz was interviewed by Eli Eshed, she drew attention to the fact that Salomon had discouraged the Yarkonim and had later abandoned the colony to return to Jerusalem.
She concluded that "to present him [Yoel Moshe Salomon] as a hero, it's really ridiculous, even with the apologetics at the end that say that it's a story or a dream".
Ben Ezer added that "the education system in the schools, which is to say the authors of textbooks and certainly the teachers too take the ballad as the single authorised source for teaching about the history of Petah Tikva,…".
The only name mentioned in Howard Sachar's frequently cited history of Israel, with respect to the founding of Petah Tikva, is that of Yoel Moshe Salomon.
[36] The Ballad was written early in what Regev and Seroussi call the middle period of the SLI genre, when attitudes toward such songs were becoming tinged with nostalgia.
Though it might be faulted as history, the Ballad has ensured that the founding of Petah Tikva remains a part of popular Israeli collective memory.
