Visit to the Tekhelet Factory
Last friday we visited the Tekhelet Factory. Its located in Kfar Adumim, a bit past Maale Adumim in the west bank/shomeron, just East of Jerusalem. It’s a small company which has resurrected the lost art of dying the tzitzit (the fringes on the corners of one’s prayer shawl) blue. Most tzitzit today are all white and have been since roughly the 700s when the knowledge pertaining to the blue dye was lost. Its now been rediscovered. It comes from the murex trunculus snail, which has a gland that makes a color-fast dye (so good, in fact, that there are fragments of it from 2000 yrs ago which still contain the dye). The snail was known since the late 1800s when people began trying to recreate this lost skill in earnest, however the problem was that the dye always turned out purple – not blue. That changed (by accident, of course) in 1985 when a professor took a beaker of the dye outside (because it really stinks – I can attest to that, having smelled it at the factory) where it was oxidized by the sun. After sitting in the sunlight, the dye it produces is blue instead of purple. The reason the Israeli flag is coloured blue is because that was our ancient color – the color of tekhelet. After the tour, I purchased a set for my tallit.
