Noga Hareuveni

Noga Hareuveni (1924–2007) was an Israeli botanist and scholar of Judaic studies.

In 1994 Noga Hareuveni won the Israel Prize for his leading role in the creation of a Biblical garden and nature preserve, named Neot Kedumim.

After earning a master’s degree in botany and Judaic studies, he developed a field survival course for training the Hagana and Palmach, Israel’s pre-state military organizations. After 1948, he taught the same program to the Israel Defense Forces.

Noga Hareuveni's parents, Ephraim and Hannah Hareuveni, were botanists who emigrated from Russia to British Palestine in 1912. They collected and classified plants that were mentioned in the Holy Scriptures of Judaism. On the Mount Scopus campus of Jerusalem's Hebrew University, they maintained the Museum of Biblical and Talmudic Botany, until it was destroyed in the 1948 war. In the 1960s their son Noga realized their dream of establishing a botanical reserve of biblical plants, which is today called Neot Kedumim. On 253 hectares, the staff of the botanical reserve now cultivates tens of thousands of trees and other plants. Great cedars are the most impressive of the trees.

"These great trees of course are not native to Israel," Dr. Hareuveni says, "but they're referred to many times in the Bible, usually as a symbol of haughtiness, or again when Solomon had cedar timbers shipped from Lebanon for the construction of the Temple. In 1936 I accompanied my parents to Beirut, where they received permission from the Lebanese Ministry of Agriculture to purchase some seeds. I was the one who shinnied up a cedar and collected the cones. These my parents took back to Jerusalem and planted on Mount Scopus. Jerusalem is less than 3,000 feet above sea level, and most experts said that was too low for cedars to grow. ... But not only did the cedars grow," Nogah Hareuveni continues, "they somehow even survived the neglect of 19 years while Mount Scopus was a no man's land in divided Jerusalem. ..."