Once upon a time in Jerusalem-,
Tnuva Dairy on Yirmiyahu Street, Romema.
Tnuva Dairy was established as early as 1926.
The first dairy in the city belonged to Mashbir and was located on Ben Yehuda Street in the city center.
The elders of Jerusalem still remember the lowing of the cows and the smell of fragrance that burst from the dairy where the sanitary conditions were not among the best in the world.
The farmers in the Jerusalem area received permission from the Histadrut to part with the Mashbir and join the Jerusalem dairy established by Kibbutzim Kiryat Inavim, Atarot and Ramat Rachel, and thus the Tnuva cooperative was established and the dairy moved to a small rented warehouse in the Mahane Yehuda market
Production increased and the cows provided work, and a larger dairy was built in the Mahane Yehuda market with refrigeration equipment that was the pinnacle of technology at the time.
In 1935, the dairy moved to the Geula neighborhood to a 3-story building.
There were still no telephones then, and the workers talked to each other on the different floors through the coated copper pipes that transferred the milk, cream and whites at the end of the conversation.
The milkmen left the dairy in the morning on bicycles with a cart or with a horse and cart in tow and distributed the milk in glass bottles that were placed near the residents’ doors, while the milkman collected the empty bottles from the previous delivery.
After the establishment of the state, the needs of the residents increased and in the early 1950s a new site was chosen for the new and sophisticated dairy, on Yirmiyahu Street in Romema near the old biblical zoo.
The builders worked for five years to build the new industrial dairy.
The dairy was considered one of the first dairies in the world to produce quality milk after the pasteurization process, which is, as all remember, boiling the milk, killing most of the harmful bacteria and cooling it again, according to the teachings of our informant Louis, whose last name is proudly carried on every dairy product around the world.
The dairy operated for many years and supplied fresh milk to all the city’s residents – in hot and cold weather, in times of peace and war, Tnuva’s trucks would go out to distribute dairy products all over the city.
In the 1970s, the trend of introducing new products to the dairy began – Rivioune, Eshel and sour cream, at the same time as the process of raising the kosher levels to meet the demands of the ultra-Orthodox residents of the city.
In 2005, the Tnuva complex, located on an area of 18.5 dunams, was sold in a hasty telephone poll between the members of Tnuva’s management to a group of ultra-Orthodox entrepreneurs for a price of 29 million dollars, with Tnuva continuing to rent the building from the entrepreneurs for another four years until the operation of the dairy is moved.
This is how world fame passed to her from one of the most recognizable buildings in the city-
In the area of the old dairy, a huge neighborhood was established for affluent ultra-Orthodox from around the world,
The big green car no longer travels far, and has been replaced by huge trucks with modern cooling tanks,
The Tnuva cooperative and the association became a limited company and were sold to the Apex fund for a billion dollars, mainly because of the real estate it owns, and the kind kibbutzniks who sold the company made the businessmen richer.
In the past three years, Apex has earned more than a billion dollars from the purchase, just from the increase in the shares and the withdrawal of dividends and the real estate activity it carried out.
In May 2014 Apex sold its stake in Tnuva to a Chinese company at a company value of NIS 8.6 billion.
This is our Jerusalem –
from a dairy on Ben Yehuda Street to a luxury ultra-Orthodox neighborhood with an American accent, from glass bottles and milk on a cart to a cooperative of blue-collar workers who invested their souls in raising cows and caring for them until they finally turned into a Chinese investment fund that owns 56% of the well-known and Israeli brand.
Shabbat Shalom to the far and near from Jerusalem.
