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Visiting the new Perrigo Pharmaceuticals plant in Yerucham are (l to r) Ido Eisikovits of JNF partner Green Horizons,
Yerucham Task Force Chair Geri Shatz, and task force members Bob Weiss and Bruce Goldberg. |
By Bob Weiss
As the newest member of the Jewish National Fund's Yerucham Task Force, this was my
first visit to the town. I’ve only been active
in JNF for a year or so, and thought, as a "rookie," that maybe I'd been assigned to
Yerucham as a sort of a JNF hazing.
It can take awhile to find Yerucham on a map -- it's about 18 miles southeast of
Be'er Sheva in the Negev desert.
After my first visit, during the $1 Billion Roadmap Mission earlier this month, I
fully realize my good fortune. I had read that Yerucham was a development town from the 1950s, challenged to keep young people or attract new families. When I got there, everything I found surprised me.
I found
a town poised to become the template for new development in the Negev. Physically, Yerucham is a town of about
10,000 with a history of stagnating population and lackluster economic growth. But recent construction of a new 65-unit luxury hotel has made the town popular as a base for Negev adventure
exploration. U.S. pharmaceutical
firm Perrigo recently completed a new plant. There are over 1,000 units of new,
mostly single-family homes in early construction, and they are already spoken
for through a lottery that was over-subscribed by a factor of five to one. And the IDF has just completed building
the second largest training base in the country just outside town.
