Growing from History // The granddaughter of Holocaust survivors and Nazi collaborators became an award-winning Israeli winemaker

It’s hard to hear about Vered Ben Saadon’s life and not be impressed. The co-owner and co-founder of Tura Winery in Rechelim, Israel, Vered lives in the rolling hills of Shomron, owns a vineyard, and travels internationally several times a year. In 2022, she was even invited to Grosvenor House in London to serve her wine to over 1,000 guests in honor of the late Queen Elizabeth II’s platinum jubilee. 

Of course, once you chat a bit with Vered, you that she is disarmingly down to earth, and you are fascinated by her life story, which is the stuff of an epic novel. 

It begins with her grandmother, Lisha, a Jewish girl from Holland who was 15 when World War II started. Lisha lived in hiding over the course of the war, and like Anne Frank, her Dutch contemporary, she wrote a diary—but unlike Anne, she survived. (Years later, Lisha gave that diary to Vered in honor of her bat mitzvah, and she gave it to her daughter for her bat mitzvah. It was then donated to Yad Vashem.) 

Lisha married a Jewish Holocaust survivor with whom she had two sons, but her husband, sadly, passed away when the older boy, Joel, was only eight. She married a second time and had another son, but she was widowed again when the boy was still young.  

Lisha’s third marriage was to a non-Jewish Dutch widower with a daughter named Els, who ended up marrying Joel. These are Vered’s parents. 

But wait. There’s more.

Joel and Els were both seekers and studied world religions. But when they decided to learn about Judaism, their teacher knew very little. It was Els who took the initiative to learn more. 

“My father was Jewish, although he was not religious,” Vered recalled. “But my mother really pushed him to ask and learn.” 

Around this time, Els discovered something disturbing. She learned that her mother’s side of the family had been Nazi collaborators. Some of her uncles had even been convicted and served jail time for crimes they’d committed during the war. “My mother had known there was something bad about the family,” Vered said, “but now she knew a lot more. She felt she needed to give an answer for what her family had done. Her answer was to become part of the Jewish nation.”

With the help of Jewish relatives on Joel’s side who had already moved to Israel, the couple and their two young daughters left Holland and moved to Israel. After a long period of study, Els (now Rebecca) and the girls converted to Judaism. The family lived in the Bayit Vegan neighborhood of Jerusalem, where young Vered attended a Bais Yaakov school. 

“When I was ten, I told my parents I needed something different,” she said, and that prompted the family to move to Kochav Hashachar, a settlement in Shomron. 

During Vered’s senior year, she married Erez Ben Saadon, a young man from Kochav Hashachar. 

“I was 18 and a week,” she said. “I did my math Bagrut (matriculation exams) when I was expecting my oldest, and I got my degree with three children.” They now have five children and two grandchildren. 

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