Introduction

Kfar Tavor The earliest indication of a settlement at the Kfar Tavor site comes from archeological evidence in the form of ceramics dating from the Byzantine Era. During the later Ottoman Empire (founded in 1299 CE) period, a village named Mes'ha ("the place of unction") was located here. In the last years of the sixteenth century of the Common Era, tax registers listed the village as Masha, in the subdistrict of Tabariyya, Sanjak district of Safad. Mes'ha was variously described as Mechi on a 1799 map and as Meshah in an 1881 survey with an Arab population of one-hundred people.

Kfar Tavor is in the Lower Galilee region of Northern Israel, at the foot of Mount Tabor. Until at least the Nineteenth Century, the village was located on an arable plain that had no trees. Water was drawn from a cistern.

Twenty-eight farmers who arrived in Palestine in 1901 as part of the First Aliya settled in the area near Mes'ha, where they established a settlement with the same name as that of the Arab village; two years later the settlement was renamed with the Hebrew name of Kfar Tavor. The farmers cultivated grapes and, in time, Kfar Tavor supplied the country's wineries with grapes.

Yigal Allon

The British Mandate Census of 1922 listed 274 Jews living in Mesha (Kufr Tabur). By 1945, the number of Jews living in the village of Kfar Tavor, (a.k.a., Mas-ha) declined to 230 people.

Major General Yigal Allon (1918 - 1980) who served Israel as a general in the IDF, as a commander of the Palmach, and as a politician was born in Kfar Tavor. Itay Segev, a basketball player, is also connected to the village.

1. Read more at Wikipedia: Kfar Tavor
2. Jewish Virtual Library article: Kfar Tavor