Saturday, Sept 29th.  Today we visited Rosh Pina, a small town and artist colony in the north of Israel, in the Upper Galilee on the eastern slopes of Mount Kna’anin.  Rosh Pina was settled in 1882 by Romanian Jews.  At the time, the area was part of the Turkish Ottoman Empire. Rosh Pina is one of the oldest Zionist settlements in Israel and literally means “cornerstone.”  The early Romanians, determined to build a village from which they could eek out a living, named the village from Psalms 118:22 “The stone that the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone.”  The original 30 families derived their livelihood from the production of silkworms using mulberry trees donated by the philanthropist Baron Edmond de Rothschild.  However, lacking a source of edible agriculture, the community did not survive and was abandoned for many years.  Recently it has become a thriving tourist town with lovely, extensive, terraced gardens containing the original mulberry trees.
We stayed overnight at Ahuzat Hameiri, a lovely mansion that has been in the Hameiri family since it was built in the late 1880s (photos below).  We had a lovely dinner at Auberge Shulamit. The food was delicious and the wine (Odem Mountain Winery) that the next day we drove to the Golan Heights to visit the winery!

Hamerei Mansion where we stayed overnight at Rosh Pina

Entrance to our room at Hamerei

The jacuzzi in our room!

Our room!  Check out all of the stained glass!

The private terrace outside our room – all for us!

Rosh Pina is filled with paving stones and buildings made out of stone, similar to the “Jerusalem” stone found in Jerusalem.  For my geo friends, Jerusalem stone is limestone but with a very characteristic pale color.  I’m not sure if the stone in Rosh Pina is also a form of limestone, but I’ll bet it is.

Breakfast was on a lovely terrace overlooking the valley.