Noah's Park

For the Lord thy God bringeth thee into a good land, a land of brooks of water, of fountains and depths that spring out of valleys and hills . . .

--Deuteronomy 8: 7

In biblical times, Israel was indeed a good land. It had thick forests in the north, rich farm lands near the Dead Sea, and oases that dotted the desert in the south. An astonishing variety of animals thrived in these regions; archaeologists have unearthed elephant bones in the Jordan Valley, and the prophets wrote knowingly of stealthy bears, the light-footed roe and the wild ass that "snuffed up the wind." But centuries of overgrazing and overcultivation depleted the land. During the reign of the Ottoman Empire, virtually all of Israel's trees were felled to provide fuel for Turkish locomotives. As a result of the depredations, the desert gradually advanced. Many of the original animals disappeared from the good land.

Choice. Now they are coming back, thanks to Israel's official conservation department, the Nature Reserves Authority, and its burly, indefatigable director Major General Avraham Yoffe, 58. "It fell to my generation to choose between protecting the last remnants of biblical animals or allowing them to perish irretrievably," he says.

For a man who had once stopped a tank advance to observe a rare cream-colored courser in flight, the choice was easy.

The result is a sort of Noah's park. Located in the Negev Desert, near the Jordanian border, the 8,000-acre Hai Bar reserve now contains about 100 species of biblical animals, many of them on the verge of extinction. To collect them, Yoffe undergoes almost biblical trials. Arab governments routinely refuse, for political reasons, to sanction the shipment of animals to Israel. Yoffe once got round this problem by paying Bedouin hunters in the Judean hills to catch him 15 Nubian ibexes, one by one. But he still yearns for a pair of wild Arabian oryxes (a kind of antelope), which can now be found mainly on the Arabian peninsula. His chief recourse is to turn to zoos that have the species he wants, and that quickly consumes the funds he can raise. Yoffe bought three addaxes for $10,000 from a game preserve in New York's Catskills, for example, and three Saharan oryxes cost him $2,500 a head.

Keeping the animals is no easy matter either. Not only can antelope bound over the reserve's fences, but predators like steppe wolves--themselves protected animals--find ways into the fenced areas and hunt down the animals. The worst experience came after the purchase from the Iranian government of several pairs of onagri. Ignorant of the wild ass's habits, officials at the reserve soon found that they had too many competitive males in the herd. Fights broke out. The winners tossed their rivals onto their backs and castrated them. Now, led by two surviving males, the herd numbers eleven of the species on which Jesus rode into Jerusalem.

Avraham Yoffe is undaunted by the problems. He plans another preserve of biblical animals on a hilly, wooded 5,000-acre tract in Galilee. He hopes to stock it with Judean lions, Syrian bears, roc and fallow deer from Iran. Like Noah, he will do his best to ensure that the beasts go forth and multiply. "We wish to live amid life," he says.

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