Our family

The AbouJamra family's olive lands in Kfeir can be traced through deeds going back to the 1890s. Mansour AbouJamra built up the family's lands in the early twentieth century, buying a vineyard at Kessaret 3assaf in 1901 and gathering Birket el Raheb from his co-heirs. His son Nicolas and Nicolas's wife Kater carried them on, and in 1968 Nicolas bought the estate of Atallah AbouJamra, which brought the Sraj groves into the family.

Kater's own story is part of this land too. Orphaned young with her brother Solomon and sister Lucia, she was supported by Solomon, who emigrated to the United States and sent money home. Kater stayed in Kfeir, where she and Nicolas raised their children Issam, Fawzi, Mansour and Abla. Several plots of Lot 2, among them Hamra and Jal el Shajara, came to the family through her side.

The lands still carry that history. Their names are the old names of Kfeir's hillsides, written in deeds that neighbours signed for one another as witnesses; some trees were shared, exchanged or set aside for the village's religious endowments; and the oldest olive, at Toun, is by the family's estimate about a thousand years old. Zaman oil comes from these same groves, harvested each autumn, in the village that has long been called Kfeir ez-Zeit.