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re you the kind of person who loves olives on your pizza or the one who picks every single bit of olive off? Olives are something that most people either love or detest. Olive oil, on the other hand, is much more popular. There are many olive oils that don’t have much olive flavor. That means even those who don’t love olives can eat foods prepared with olive oil. And of course, when Chanukah comes around, lighting with pure olive oil is the absolute best way to glow! Come behind the scenes as we learn oil about this precious oil from Rabbi Shmuel Veffer of the Galilee Green olive oil company.

For years, Rabbi Veffer worked in kiruv: first for Aish HaTorah yeshivah in Jerusalem and then in his native Canada where he served as outreach Rabbi at The Village Shul in Toronto. There, in addition to inspiring unlearned Jews to discover their heritage, Rabbi Veffer was also inspired — to create new inventions that helped Jews live frum lives. Starting with his invention of the KosherLamp, the Shabbos lamp that we all now take for granted, Rabbi Veffer went on to invent a range of other useful items such as Shabbos toothbrushes, the KosherClock alarm clock, and more.

When the Veffers moved back to Eretz Yisrael about nine years ago, they settled in the lower Galilee region in the village of Yavne’el and opened a bed-and-breakfast. But soon Rabbi Veffer began looking for a new challenge, and the olive trees that surrounded them became a bigger part of their lives than they could have imagined.

A Pressing Situation

“One member of our community had permission to harvest olives from the trees around the shul, but he didn’t have a car, and the olive press was a ten-minute drive away,” Rabbi Veffer retells. “You have to get the olives from the tree to the press within a day or it harms the quality of the oil — meaning, the quicker you get to press, the better the quality will be.” The clock was ticking for his olive-harvesting neighbor so Rabbi Veffer offered to help. He loaded up his car to the brim with the fruits (yes, olives are fruits, not vegetables) but even so, it took three trips to get all of them to the nearby pressing facility. “It was after sunset when he finished picking and the pressing wasn’t finished till midnight,” he continues. “When we brought the oil back and I tasted it, it was the most unbelievable oil.” (Excerpted from Mishpacha Jr., Issue 738)