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Veggieville

    The sign at the entrance to Moshav Amirim reads like a menu of the community: shiatsu and reflexology; massage and movement therapy; holistic massage and healing; Chinese medicine and naturology.
    It's that kind of place.
    Everyone in town specializes in something, though there's no sign of a plumber or electrician.
    There's a biofeedback and stress management expert, and a specialist in sensory and motor condition. A natural cosmetics person, a nutritionist, an osteopath.
    There is a tarot-card reader. And even a synagogue.
    What's not on the sign, among the 30 B&B's and eight restaurants, the artisans and alternative-medicine practitioners, is "meat eater."
    That's the last thing you'd expect at the only completely vegetarian community in the country.
    But that's the first thing it had.
    In a village where the dietary debate stretches from liberal vegetarianism to orthodox veganism, from the permissiveness of those who say a bit of cow's milk is not a terrible thing, to those who would die before eating an egg, there is, believe it or not, A Meat Eater.
    Eating a fish kebab on Amirim, as I did, is tantamount to munching a pig's knuckle in Mea Shearim. (In fact, there is pork on the moshav: wild pigs sometimes wander down from the hills, but they always get out alive.)
    Amirim, southwest of Safed -- perfectly situated between the Big Macs at Golani Junction and the famous steaks at Vered Hagalil -- is a picturesque haven dedicated to healthy living. There is no need for No Smoking signs here. A health club, or exercise room, would be ridiculously redundant. There are no chubby children.
    Shlomo Lifshitz, who put me up in his cozy guest room, was not born into this way of life. The hardy, weatherbeaten farmer was a sickly youth, bent and wheezy, an asthmatic. He became utterly transformed once he adopted veganism.
    Ha'ikar habriut ("health first"), as they say, goes doubly for Shlomo, considering the other meaning for the word ikar: farmer.
    Nowadays, no one thinks of these people as weirdos, but you can imagine what was said back in '58, when Amirim was registered as a sort of Veggieville. After years of austerity, Israelis hungered for meat.
    Shlomo recalls going to miluim with a sackful of organic oranges. The other soldiers thought he was nuts. His face creases into a genial smile. "They said the one thing you can get here is oranges, and what you bring is oranges?! So I challenged them to a blindfolded taste test, and proved that I could pick out the organic oranges every time."
    His guest-room kitchen is stocked with white sugar and -- gawd! -- even milk. I raised an eyebrow at him.
    "Look, I don't insist our guests should be like me; I don't even mind if someone smokes in the room. But once we had a few families who came here and started barbecuing meat. We asked them to leave."
    I asked his two teenage sons if they ever yearned to rebel, just a bit, just once, and sneak off to nearby McDonald's.
    What Israeli kid wouldn't? 
    They grinned. "Nope."

THESE MOSHAVNIKS are eager to spread the good word about their beliefs. Indulging my curiosity, Shlomo set me up with a vegan breakfast one morning, a vegetarian the next.
    At the Lamdans', I got a passionate lecture on organic, vegan, salt-free, egg-free, absolutely-no-animal-products-here living. I didn't get a laugh when I scanned the table and asked where the herring was. But the spread they prepared was wonderful; I had planned on escaping to Vered Hagalil for a slab of flesh for lunch, but I was sated until dinner.
    The following morning, at Dalia's Restaurant, Dalia Cohen covered a table with her own specialties. However, I was most intrigued by the pat of butter. "I'm not a fanatic," she said sweetly, and forthwith, I was offered an egg. Here, too, breakfast was a joy: not merely from the eating of great food, but from the surge of energy I felt converging on me through the huge wall of windows. Even on a cloudy day, diners are dazzled by a flood of morning light, and an awe-inspiring vista.
    For a mad moment or two, I thought I could actually live without meat ... if it meant sitting at this table, and being served this food by this woman.
    Not so Eliyahu Soudry.
    After Amirim's unsuccessful settlement by Yemenites in the early '50s, Moroccans were brought here in 1956, and they, too, left soon after. Well, all but Eliyahu and his two brothers. When the vegetarians arrived in 1959, together with a charter specifying this as a strictly meatless zone, the Soudrys declined to move out. They refused, at first, to part with their live chickens and goats, and only after a while consented to stop grilling dead animals outdoors.
    A mighty feud erupted, and it simmers to this day. Eliyahu still harbors resentments: "I eat meat," he said hotly, "and they ate me."
    The Soudrys are old-fashioned, old-world folk in a thoroughly Western, progressive community, but there is a modicum of interdependence. Everyone here has his little cottage industry, and for the elderly Soudrys, it's pitot -- whole-grain, yet.
    Even Amirim's staunchest vegans pop by to buy them: as if to say, the principle behind the dispute is not Eliyahu or his pitot, but what goes in them.