“It’s sour and bitter. It’s fun and fresh. I’d maybe add something sweet, and maybe add carbonation,” said Yali Ben David when asked how she liked the fruit drink she’d just consumed at a kiosk in Netanya’s Ir Yamim Mall on the last week of 5784 — a beverage she’d never tasted before.
The fruit drink? Etrog.
The yellow citron, which resembles a lemon but with bumps, returns to the consciousness of Jews this time of year, with the approach of the week-long festival of Sukkot (Tabernacles) that will begin the evening of Oct. 16. An etrog is one of four species — along with a palm branch and leaves from myrtle and willow trees — that the Bible commands Jews to gather on the first day of Sukkot. Later in history, Jews took to making a blessing while holding the Four Species at home or in a sukkah (a temporary hut built for the holiday) or at a synagogue, a custom that continues now.
The relevant biblical verse, Leviticus 23:40, doesn’t specify a citron or any other species. “And you shall take for yourselves on the first day the fruit of the beautiful tree,” it states. But religious authorities in Talmudic times ruled that the etrog, native to Israel, was the designated fruit, and it’s remained one of the holiday’s symbols ever since.
In the days and weeks preceding Sukkot, traditionally beginning with the conclusion of Yom Kippur, celebrants buy the Four Species, which usually are sold together in stores and at tables set out on sidewalks. The most devoted among them seek out the choicest etrog they can find, even bringing magnifying glasses and jewelers’ loupes to carefully inspect each etrog and rule out those with seemingly minute blemishes. Some spend — take a deep breath here — thousands of dollars for a choice etrog.
More than that: Over the centuries, craftspeople designed wooden and silver boxes to hold etrogim during the holiday, and etrog cases remain a mainstay of Judaica in communities worldwide.
When the holiday ends, etrogim, whatever their value, usually are discarded or added to compost. Some people chop them, especially the peel, for etrog jam, akin to orange marmalade.
And that’s all I knew about the possibilities for an etrog.
That is, until I walked through Jerusalem’s Machne Yehuda market a decade ago and stumbled upon a small shop near Agrippas Street. Its name: The Etrog Man.
Intrigued by the idea that someone was so enamored of etrogim as to adopt the citron as a moniker, and lured by the man’s plastic dispensers of freshly squeezed fruit drinks, I approached. The owner pitched his concoctions, most of them made from etrog. He talked up one drink when he saw me viewing the dispenser with this sign: Viagra from Nature. Unsurprisingly, he touted it as an aphrodisiac.
I didn’t catch The Etrog Man’s name then or on a subsequent visit to his shop at the Allenby Street entrance to Tel Aviv’s Carmel Market.
I learned his name, Uzieli Hazay, only now, in mid-September, during a return visit to Machne Yehuda. Uzieli passed away two years ago, said his son, Or, who now runs the family business, which includes the two markets’ shops and a line of etrog-derived products he sells there and at special events, like the weeklong Machne Yehuda Festival at the Netanya mall.
There, he spritzed etrog facial skin spray onto my cheeks and — get this — into my mouth. I asked how the spray could be safe to ingest. “Because it’s natural,” he said.
A woman asked about the spray, and he repeated the routine on her. He requested that she extend her wrist, onto which he daubed some etrog creme. “It’s anti-aging [creme],” he told her.
She smelled it but left without purchasing a container. The etrog is good for the skin, Hazay explained later: It works on pigmentation, and helps teens with acne and older people with wrinkles. He also sells etrog soap, which presumably also is healthy. Less known are the benefits of his etrog beer. All of the packaged etrog paraphernalia feature caricatures of Uzieli.
The etrog’s becoming the basis of the Hazay family’s income merits a story, and this is it.
Uzieli Hazay was from Yemen, and as a child he and his family made aliyah — immigrated to Israel — in about 1950. They lived on Moshav Eshtaol, a few miles west of Jerusalem, where they grew produce and raised goats and cows. Interested in nutrition and healthy eating, Uzieli was drawn to the teachings of Maimonides, the 12th century rabbi and physician famed as Rambam, who touted the etrog’s qualities. In Uzieli’s youth, Hazay said, Yemenite parents wanting to eliminate their children’s stuttering would boil etrog peels and have them drink the liquid. Later on, Uzieli concocted beverages from boiled fruit and other products.
“He wanted to create drinks to strengthen the body, focus and energy,” Hazay said.
At his Netanya kiosk at the busy mall, Hazay sliced what I knew was an etrog, which he called an “Askenazi etrog.” He then sliced an enormous, oval-shaped fruit that was not much smaller than an American football. Its green and beige surface was extremely bumpy. This, he said, was a “Yemenite etrog,” albeit one grown in Israel. The halves of each etrog species were so pulpy as to defy any expectation that quantities of juice hid within.
But they did, and Hazay’s three main etrog-based drinks at the kiosk were those combined with lemon juice, grapefruit juice — “It’s good for pregnant women,” Hazay told a female customer – or the leaves of khat (written and pronounced in Hebrew as gat). Hazay and Itamar Peled, Ben David’s boyfriend, said they knew from their Yemenite backgrounds that men and even boys in the Old Country chewed on khat for their stimulants, to keep them alert during long study sessions of Jewish religious texts.
Hazay buys his etrogim from farmers in Israel, Morocco and Calabria, Italy. He also grows his own at Eshtaol. Hazay said he has no idea of the quantity he uses in a month.
On this morning, Even Yehuda residents Guy and Hila Greenberg and their young daughters stopped by for a drink: etrog, grapefruit and khat whirred together with some cane sugar.
Guy Greenberg’s friend had tried it at the stand the day before and recommended it. The Greenberg couple enjoyed it, too, he said.
Another customer, Shlomo Hershko, stopped by 10 minutes later.
“What can I say? It’s not for me,” said Hershko, of Herzliya. “Some people like it; some, not.”
Hazay was nonplussed. His t-shirt read, “100 percent from nature and squeezed with love.”
Writer-editor Hillel Kuttler can be reached at hk@HillelTheScribeCommunications.com.
