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Friday, 16/10

A Thousand Kisses to You, My Beloved: A Love, Espionage, and Underground Story in Zikhron Ya'akov

A love story that became a real-life espionage thriller

Tour style: A content-rich urban tour
Walking level: Comfortable urban walking
Registration: Details are sent via WhatsApp

“A Thousand Kisses to You, My Beloved.” A tour in Zikhron Ya'akov that is part tour, part love story, and very much a real-life thriller.

What makes the tour an experience?

• The Aharonson family and the NILI network
• Letters, codes, and hidden passages
• Loves, suspicions, and decisions that changed destinies

A Thousand Kisses to You, My Beloved

A Love, Espionage, and Underground Story in Zikhron Ya'akov

Some tours take you between landmarks. Others draw you into a plot.

Zikhron Ya'akov in the early twentieth century looked from the outside like a quiet colony: vineyards, farmers’ houses, a small street, a synagogue, and the baron’s officials.

But behind the closed shutters, an entirely different story was unfolding.

A story involving secret love, spies, carrier pigeons, encrypted codes, an experimental station that became an intelligence center, a British ship arriving secretly from the sea, a hostile Ottoman regime, an internationally renowned scientist, a young woman who became an underground leader, dangerous journeys through the desert, a mysterious death, and historical twists that are almost impossible to believe really happened.

And it all happened here, on the streets where we will walk.

The first mystery: To whom were the thousand kisses written?

Avshalom Feinberg was only 21 when he wrote one of the most famous love letters in Hebrew:

“A thousand kisses to you, my beloved.”

For years, it was said that the letter had been written to Rivka Aharonson.

But this is where our investigation begins.

The letter was written before Avshalom had even met Rivka.

The possibility that it was written to Sarah does not fit the timeline particularly well, either.

So whom was it written to?

Another woman?

A lover erased from the story?

Or perhaps the story we know simply is not the true story?

First wow moment: At the very beginning of the tour, it becomes clear that the most romantic title in the story was born from a mystery that remains unsolved to this day.

Aharonson House: A family home from the outside, the center of another world within

We will stand beside the Aharonson family home and try to see it as it looked more than a century ago.

A respectable home belonging to a farming family in the colony.

But behind its quiet appearance was an extraordinary family.

Aharon Aharonson was an internationally renowned scientist.

Sarah became a central figure in an underground network.

Rivka stood at the heart of a love story.

And Avshalom Feinberg became almost a member of the household.

Wow moment: The house we see from the outside was part of a world of secret notes, contacts, hiding places, and the constant fear that someone across the street was watching.

We do not need to go inside to imagine the drama.

It is enough to stand in front of the windows and ask:

Who looked out of them?

Who arrived at night?

And who knew more than they dared say?

The mysterious scientist

Aharon Aharonson was not a typical spy.

He was an agronomist, botanist, and researcher.

The man associated with the discovery of “the mother of wheat” traveled throughout the Land of Israel and the Middle East, studying plants, water sources, soil, and climate, and accumulating vast knowledge about the region.

Then everything changed.

That same scientific knowledge also became intelligence knowledge.

Whoever knows where water can be found also knows where an army can move.

Whoever knows the desert routes also knows how to transfer people and information.

Whoever maps an area for research can use the same map for war.

One of the famous scientists to emerge from the Land of Israel turned his academic knowledge into a tool in the struggle against the Ottoman Empire.

A research station that became a center of espionage

The agricultural experimental station in Atlit was established for research.

But during the First World War, it also served the members of NILI.

Information was transferred to the British from there.

The British ship Mangeam arrived secretly off the coast.

At night, information, messengers, and funds could be transferred.

Imagine a research institution that tested seeds and wheat by day and became a spy station by night.

And then came the pigeons

When contact with the British became dangerous, the members of NILI used carrier pigeons.

A small note, an encrypted message, a pigeon taking flight.

Everything depended on its reaching the right place.

But one of the pigeons made a mistake.

In September 1917, a carrier pigeon carrying an encoded message landed precisely where it was not supposed to land.

It fell into the hands of the Ottoman authorities.

An entire spy network began to collapse because of a single bird.

From this point, the story becomes a countdown.

Sarah Aharonson: The woman who took command

Sarah was born in Zikhron Ya'akov.

She married and moved to Constantinople.

When she returned to the Land of Israel, she traveled through an area where massacres of Armenians had taken place.

The experience affected her deeply.

Later, while Aharon was abroad, Sarah became one of the central figures in operating NILI in the Land of Israel.

Not a woman on the margins of the story, not merely “the sister of,” but a genuine and powerful leader.

At a time when women almost never held public leadership positions, Sarah Aharonson managed underground activity against one of the greatest empires in the world.

Sukkot 1917: The trap closes

At the beginning of October 1917, Ottoman forces surrounded Zikhron Ya'akov.

The searches began.

People were arrested.

They were interrogated and beaten, and pressure was exerted on entire families.

The streets where we are walking became the scene of a manhunt.

That same colony that today seems to us...