Although the death of Queen Elizabeth II overshadowed the festivities of the event marking her platinum jubilee – organized by the Rolls-Royce Enthusiasts' Club, which is the official royal car – over a thousand guests arrived at Grosvenor House in London to mark the special date.
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The hall was filled with guests wearing lavish evening gowns and Versace suits, and the smell of luxury perfumes as well as wine, served by Vered Ben-Sadon, the owner of Tura Winery in Israel. Together with her father, they poured the drink that had been prepared at home, in Judea and Samaria, in a settlement called Rehelim, which none of the guests had heard of before.
But before Vered, a now-observant 45-year-old woman, became a winemaker, she lived in Holland as Rosa Van-Koburden. She comes from a family whose ancestors were involved with the Nazis and has now become a Jewish woman raising five children and running a business from a settlement.
"We are not afraid," she said of herself and her husband, Erez. "We march forward with all our strength. We believed that if we planted vineyards – we would succeed. And I, from a young age, had the ability to set a goal and stick to it. I had no problem reaching even the queen and serving her a glass of wine. I'm really not afraid."
To understand Vered's story we need to travel back 70 years, to the city of Essen, in the province of Groningen in the Netherlands. Rivka, Vered's mother, who went by a Dutch name then, was born to Rol and Rekia Meyer, a non-Jewish couple.
"I had a beautiful childhood," Rivka recalled. "I was an only child and received a lot of warmth and love.
However, when she was 11 years old, tragedy struck the family. During a trip to the outskirts of the city, the family car collided with a moose on the road. Rivka's mother was killed instantly, and she and her father got injured.
"It was a highway, and I probably lost consciousness at the time of the accident," Rivka said. "My father and I waited for the ambulance to evacuate us. It was very painful to lose a mother at such a young age, but I am convinced that this was also the beginning of all the changes that happened inside me. It may be strange to say, but from that moment my search for the truth began."
It took a few months for Rol to be discharged from the hospital, after which he began the rehabilitation process, including looking for a new car. As part of that process, he met Lisha Defries, a Jewish widow who had been sheltered by a Dutch family during the Holocaust. The two became a couple and eventually married.
The connection with Rivka's mother's family was lost quite quickly. Although she was born in 1952, after World War II, she soon realized that there was a part of the family's history that members were reluctant to speak about. From bits and pieces of information, she understood that her uncles on her mother's side collaborated with the Nazis during the war.
"I realized that something was off with my uncles because my father refused to come to family events on my mother's side," Rivka said.
After Rol got remarried, Lisha, who had three sons from her previous marriage, became Rivka's new mother. One of those three sons was Yop, who goes by Yoel today. Although they are step-siblings, the two fell in love, despite opposition from the family.
"When his mother found out, they took Yoel and sent him to live with his aunt, to make sure we don't get married," Rivka said.
Vered added, "It didn't help, the love between him and mother was strong. In our family, as I said, we set a goal and reach it."
Although Lisha and Rol's marriage would not last, Rivka and Yoel ties the knot in 1972. They studied physical therapy together and searched for the meaning of life in religious studies until they decided that Judaism was their choice and Israel their home.
The couple immigrated to Israel in 1979 with two little girls: Vered, who was two at the time, and her sister Esther. Upon arriving in Israel, Lisha and the two girls had to convert to Judaism.
The family initially settled in the ultra-Orthodox neighborhood of Bayit Vagan in Jerusalem, but as Vered grew, they realized that the framework was too strict for her.
"It was not for me," Vered recalled. "I wanted freedom, to spread my wings and fly."
Yoel recalled, "She has always been a leader. It's probably a combination of my mother and my father-in-law. Both were dominant, and Vered inherited it."
The Van-Koburdenד did not find their niche anywhere in Jerusalem and moved to Kochav Hashachar, a religious settlement in the Binyamin region.
Vered was an eighth-grade student when she eyes on Erez, the neighbor boy, an 11th-grade student studying at a yeshiva.
"I wrote him a letter, 'If you want, I would love for us to be friends,'" she said.
Erez said, "Of course, I knew who Rosa was. I've had a crush on her since ninth grade. You see, she was a blond Dutch girl who came to our settlement. I've never seen anyone like that before in my life. She was something special, but I didn't do anything about it.
"And then one day, I got this letter. And you have to understand that this is a religious settlement. I was finishing 11th grade at the time, there was an age gap between us. I answered her, 'It's not appropriate.' She insisted, 'Let's meet.' We met and started dating. I would come home from the yeshiva once every two weeks or a month. We dated like that for three years and seven months."
Vered added, "Erez enlisted in the IDF and served in the paratroopers. When I was about to finish 11th grade, I said we should get married. We got engaged and married when I was halfway through 12th grade. I did my SATs in maths when I was pregnant. I was always ahead of my time."
Q: And did your surrounding accept this?
"It was never a factor for me. My parents knew that Erez was a good guy. Do I allow my daughter to marry at this age? No, but it doesn't help either. They will marry when it suits them, and I support and help them when needed. The main thing is that they are happy."
Initially, Vered and Erez thought about living in the Golan Heights, but in the end, found themselves in the Har Brakha settlement located on the southern ridge of Mount Gerizim in Samaria.
"We moved there because it is the land of our forefathers," Vered explained.
The couple invited an agronomist to determine what could best be grown on the land, and his recommendation was a vineyard.
"So that's what we did," Vered said. "We started from nothing, we didn't even like wine. We didn't know how to drink."
The couple initially thought to grow grapes and sell them to wineries throughout Israel, and in 1997, they planted their first vineyards. And although in the beginning, they fell upon hard times, they eventually established the Tura Winery that – as mentioned above – go on to become so successful that its drinks would be served at a royal event.
Q: So tell us how you got to the royal event in Britain.
"In the middle of the pandemic, we got an e-mail, and I thought I was being pranked. It was a time when there were a lot of scams because people took advantage of the situation. The winery was quiet, the workers were on leave, and we worked hard. We tried to understand where the world was going. I said I would check. I called our distributor in London and told him: 'Do me a favor and check if the address and name in the email even exist.' He got back to me and said yes.
"I picked up the phone and asked, 'How did you find me?' They said that someone from their management recommended us. I said that it was a great honor for us, and I was interested in knowing who had made the recommendation. They didn't want to reveal. I thought it was either a Jew or a sheikh with a Rolls-Royce because I had just returned from Dubai. Eight months ago, the correspondent of the royal house, a man with a heavy British accent, called me for a telephone interview. It was amazing."
Vered only became an Israeli citizen five years ago. As the Netherlands does not allow for double citizenship, she decided to stay in Israel as a "permanent resident." But over the years, she delved into the subject of the Holocaust. The story of her family, in which her maternal grandmother's side helped the Germans, while her paternal Jewish grandmother hid from the Nazis, fascinated her.
When she was 40, on Holocaust Remembrance Day, she decided to renounce her Dutch citizenship and went to the Interior Ministry to officially become an Israeli.
"When they told me, 'You will have to give up your Dutch citizenship,' I signed the form. So what?", Vered said, smiling. "I felt very proud. For me, Israeli citizenship is a statement."
Vered continued to read about the Holocaust as she was interested in knowing more about her mother's family's story, but Rivka was reluctant to pull at that thread.
"I drove my parents crazy and asked them to look into the matter," Vered said. "About five years ago, we all flew to Holland. My mother, without the pressure I exerted, would never have opened up about these things. She didn't want to dig and pull all kinds of skeletons out of the closet."
The Van-Koburden family flew to the Netherlands to learn about the family history, and visited, among others, the Westerbork concentration camp located not far from Essen, the city where the parents grew up.
Rivka and Yoel took off a few days before their children and made an appointment at the national archives in The Hague to make sure they had access to the information.
"You can't just enter the archive like that," Yoel said. "We had to prove who we are and what we want. This is a whole procedure. We entered the archive and saw what we saw. It was a complete surprise for us, a real shock."
From the archives, they learned that not only Rivka's uncles but also her mother helped the Nazis.
"They found out that she herself educated Hitler youth and believed in the movement," Vered said. "They had pictures of Hitler and Stalin at home. She was engaged to an SS officer. Complicated things. It was a kind of cloud that always hovered, and maybe that's why I never called her 'grandma', but 'mother's mother'. I also said to my mother, 'I didn't choose the story, the story chose me, and we will do our best with this.'"
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Yoel and Rivka said that over the years no one in the family told them about the dark past, probably so as not to hurt them. To this day, it is not easy for Rivka to talk about sensitive topic.
"Immediately after we were at the archive, I called a Jewish friend from the Netherlands, my mother's age, and family from Yoel's side. They told me that it happened a long time ago and that I shouldn't dwell on it. They said things to soften the pain," Rivka said. "I still don't quite come to terms with it. Acknowledging the past is important, but it's also important not to enter a place of guilt, that you can't get out of. My husband, in my opinion, had a harder than I."
Yoel said, "I was very worried for my wife. It was terrible."
This is how the wheel of fate turned for him: the daughter of a supporter of the Nazis is today a religious Jew, a settler, whose children are also proud Jews.
According to Rivka, it was all meant to be.
"The move to Israel, my children who live in the country and are observant – this is our tikkun ("correction"). We are a link in a chain of generations, and this is also perhaps the reason I agree to share. It is indeed a part of which I am not proud of, but I realized that there is a point in showing the long way We went through until we got here."
