Mikveh Israel was founded in the
Mutasarrifate of Jerusalem,
Ottoman Empire in April 1870 by
Charles Netter, an emissary of the French organization
Alliance Israélite Universelle, aiming to be an educational institution where young Jews could learn agriculture and leave to establish villages and settlements all over the country and to make the desert blossom. It was established on a tract of land southeast of
Jaffa leased from the Ottoman Sultan, who allocated to the project. The name is taken from two passages in the
Book of Jeremiah, Jeremiah 14:8 and 17:13, and was proposed by Wolf Grinstein, one of the school's first students, who later taught there. Netter, the first headmaster, introduced new methods of agricultural training, with Baron
Edmond James de Rothschild contributing to the upkeep of the school. Netter pioneered progressive educational methods and a new way of life and agricultural training for the future farmers of this land. There were only about 20,000
Jews in the country at that time, mostly established in the
traditional cities of Judaism: Jerusalem, Tiberias, Safed, and Hebron. Beginning in the early 1880's the school was used to train the first group of farm workers in order to prepare an eventual self-sustaining village in the area. The project was mostly funded by the French Baron de Rothschild, who would only purchase the land on loan, after the farmers had proven that they were properly trained. The men were each established farm workers who were from the Russian village of Pavaluka, and on November 7, 1883, the ten chosen farmers had moved to Palestine and plowed the first rows of earth, at what was known as
Rishon le-Zion, or first to Zion, in English. In 1898,
Theodor Herzl met the German Emperor
Wilhelm II at the main entrance of Mikveh Israel during Herzl's only visit to
Eretz Yisrael. The meeting, a PR event engineered by Herzl to publicly meet the Kaiser, was misinterpreted by the world media as a legitimization of Herzl and
Zionism by
Germany. Today, entrance to the school grounds is via the city of
Holon. For many decades (until the establishment of the
Volcani Center and the Faculty of Agriculture in
Rehovot) the school served as the research center for the country. Their teachers wrote the first study books about agriculture and served as field advisors. Most of the agricultural know-how of the first 50 years was collected and published by Mikve Israel. After finishing their studies, the thousands of graduates left Mikve Israel to start agricultural settlements of all kinds, villages and kibbutzim, moshavim, farms and agricultural schools; or serving in management positions; or continued their agricultural studies in institutions of higher learning and filling positions in research and development, the export branches, marketing and agricultural management. In 1938–1939, at the request of the
Youth Aliyah, a section for religious youth was built to house the religious and traditional youngsters who fled western Europe just before the start of
the Holocaust. based in Mikveh-Israel, 1948 ==Geography==