Published: 17 December 2020
Last updated: 4 March 2024
IN THE SUMMER OF 1974, my parents and I spent two days on an army base near Vienna. Run by the Jewish Agency and heavily guarded by the Austrian military (in the wake of a recent terror attack), the base was used as a transit camp for Soviet Jews on their way to Israel, like my family.
These 48 hours were full of unforgettable “firsts”: hearing Hebrew spoken, meeting Israelis, or seeing a plane with a Star of David on its tail. One such moment occurred at the end of our first dinner. The servers came out carrying large baskets and handed every one of us an orange with a tiny green sticker that read “Jaffa.”
I have no memory of what it tasted like (not great, I imagine, as summer is not the citrus season, and the fruit must have spent months in cold storage), but it didn’t matter.
As I put an orange segment in my mouth, I knew that I wasn’t just having my first taste of Israel, but was ingesting a Zionist symbol.
The next day, on our El Al flight to Tel Aviv, female flight attendants wore bright orange skirts, orange striped tops, and funny orange-coloured hats. Someone explained to us that their unusual uniforms were an homage to Jaffa oranges.
FULL STORY The rise and fall of Israel’s oranges (Tablet)
Photo: Jaffa oranges being loaded onto a ship, Ashdod, 1971 (Israel Government Press Office)
