John Netzel has spent the last 11 years rescuing farm animals from cruelty, but this year he has rescued more than donkeys and chickens. Netzel is among the Jewish farmers involved in bringing the ancient qishu’im melon back from extinction at his Frederick County sanctuary.
The qishu’im — also known as chate melon — is oblong, green with hairy skin and eaten like a cucumber. It was frequently referenced in the Torah, but has since declined in popularity. According to Numbers 11:5, the people of Israel and their children craved qishu’im during their exodus from Egypt.
Netzel, the president and founder of Peaceful Fields Sanctuary in Winchester, said he had never heard of the fruit before early 2023, when he stumbled upon the Jewish Farmer Network’s Jewish Seed Project on social media and found their initiative to reconnect with the historic melon.
As Netzel read about the significance of the qishu’im, he knew he wanted to get involved. The Jewish Seed Project sent him 30 qishu’im seeds in April.
“I got the seeds from [the Jewish Seed Project] and planted them, of course not knowing what would happen because nobody has grown these melon[s] in Virginia before,” Netzel said, noting that Virginia’s climate vastly differs from that of the Middle East.
Over the Project’s four years, nearly 20 people have grown qishu’im seeds. Netzel said he is among 12 farmers in the United States who are involved in this year’s planting season. His seeds thrived in their 50- by 12-foot garden space and yielded 56 melons, which grew larger than expected.
To celebrate this success, Netzel hosted a qishu’im tasting party at Peaceful Fields Sanctuary on Aug. 11, so community members could try the hairy melon.
“We got to enjoy these amazing food crops that were a part of our culture,” Netzel said.
Netzel picked two of the fruits, cut one and scooped out the seeds, noting that the flesh resembled a cucumber. He was initially surprised when he realized the qishu’im tasted familiar.
“They actually taste a lot like a cucumber,” Netzel said. “When I first had one, I laughed about it because … here’s something incredibly rare [that] almost nobody has ever seen, let alone tasted for hundreds and hundreds of years, and I’m thinking that’s going to have some exotic, new taste profile never before experienced.”
“I think overall, people were pretty excited to try something new,” Netzel said.
Some of the attendees said they tasted subtle hints of melon as well, but agreed that the “bulk of it” was cucumber. The hairy melon is related to the oblong vegetable and looks similar in ancient depictions, likely why “qishu’im” was translated from Hebrew to English as “cucumber,” Netzel said.
Rabbi Yishai Dinerman of the Chabad Jewish Center of Winchester and Bonnie Flax, the president of Beth El Congregation in Winchester, attended the tasting party, and Dinerman offered some historical insight about the hairy melon.
Long ago, qishu’im were so valuable in the Middle East that they were involved in restitution — if a person injured someone or caused them to be unable to work, that person could repay them by guarding their fields of qishu’im crops, Dinerman said at the event.
“It was an important part of our culture and everyday life and an important food item, both as a nutritional food item that could be cultivated in the Middle East, but it also became tied to our identity,” Netzel said. “To be mentioned in old texts specifically, especially when there’s a lot of other great food and crops that could be, but aren’t, means there’s something special about these melons.”
Netzel, who has already registered for next year’s harvest with the Jewish Seed Project, hopes that qishu’im can one day line the produce shelves of local grocery stores.
“One of the goals of this project is to bring this crop back, so that it potentially could be more common than it is now,” Netzel said. “So that it can hopefully be a common part of not only the Jewish experience, but anybody and everybody.”
Outside of the garden space reserved for the qishu’im are the 103 farm animals that Netzel has rescued from cruelty and sometimes deadly circumstances, including survivors of kapparot, the Orthodox Jewish ritual that involves swinging a live chicken overhead, then killing it to donate to people in need. Peaceful Fields Sanctuary is home to chickens, turkeys, ducks, horses, donkeys, cattle, sheep, goats and pigs.
Netzel noted that there are plenty of organizations dedicated to the welfare of companion animals, such as dogs and cats, but farm animals are typically overlooked.
Having grown up as a “farm kid” in the rural West Coast, Netzel has made it his life’s mission to help spread his passion for animal welfare through Peaceful Fields Sanctuary, where he lives. He has been vegan for more than 25 years.
“We have a Jewish mandate to prevent unnecessary cruelty to animals as well,” Netzel said.
His guiding principles in founding the sanctuary are tikkun olam — “repair of the world” — and tza’ar ba’alei chayim — the “prohibition against the cruelty and suffering of living creatures.” The nonprofit sanctuary is entirely funded by the public and run by a small team of staff and volunteers.
One of Netzel’s favorite aspects of working at Peaceful Fields Sanctuary is seeing community members interact with farm animals they are meeting perhaps for the first time. He said he hopes they realize that each animal has its own distinct personality and emotions, and is just as deserving of a safe, forever home as a dog or cat.
“This is what I am meant to do,” Netzel said.
