If, like me yesterday, you have a few minutes to spare waiting for your child to finish in the Misgav School, you could do worse than head the back way towards Atzmon, which was previously known as Segev. To its south side, on the way to the Misgav Elementary School, there is one of those roundabouts that seems pointless – one turn-off is blocked and the other goes into the Segev Forrest, but is nevertheless metalled. It was this latter road I turned into, hoping to get a view of the beautiful wooded Nahal Segev valley, and indeed I was not disappointed. But I was curious to see two narrow, straight, metalled roads turning south, overgrown with bushes and many plants that looked more horticultural than natural. I got out the car and realised I was in a ghost town. Other than the roads, whatever had been there was now gone, and returned to nature; but there were hints and clues. A garden plant here, a sewer inspection cover there; a broken electrical cabinet here; an earth pipe there; a plaque commemorating the funder of some landscaping here, a water pipe there; some steps here, a path there. Rather ghostly and mysterious. Was this part of Atzmon? Why was it deserted? Where were the foundations of the former houses? You can see my pictures here; it is now rather beautiful, having returned largely to nature.
This was the town of Etgar (אתגר), meaning ‘Challenge,’ one of 430 temporary caravan settlements built around Israel in the early 1990s to house the huge influx of Jewish people from the USSR and Ethiopia who made Aliyah then. Supposed to be destroyed after five years, many of these caravan sites remained for more than 10 years and a few still exist. Etgar was established in established in 1991 and was the home of 300 families for about a decade. The caravans are gone but, as I found, you can still see the remnants of the services and reminders of the gardening that the one-time residents undertook.