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Harvest of Light

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by Allison Ofanansky and Eliyahu Alpern
Lerner, 2008. Unpaged.
If you would like to give your children beautiful access to a different culture, this is a lovely place to start. In the hills above Safed in Israel the Halpern family harvests olives for food and for oil to light the Hanukkah lamps. The family's young daughter tells how the fruit is picked, prepared, and steeped in salt water to remove the bitterness. Later the family will take their olives to the local press where it will be prepared for multiple uses. The text and pictures of this lovely little book are informative, evocative, and beautiful.
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