With the sky as their huppah in the prison yard at the Federal Correctional Institution in Butner, North Carolina, over a thimbleful of wine smuggled into the prison by a rabbi, along with one witness and a miniature ketubah, Jonathan and Esther Pollard married.
Twenty-five years later, under the same sky, but now in Israel as a free man, Jonathan Pollard, on his knees, scooped soft desert sand and planted a vineyard in Esther’s memory. His new wife, Rivka, and her daughters planted alongside him with a small group of friends and family in a new section of the Ramat Negev vineyard that spreads along the border fence that separates the Egyptian Sinai Desert from Israel.
“Esther and I met in Jerusalem many, many years ago,” Jonathan recalled. “I was 15, at the Weizmann Institute on a summer program, and she was here in Jerusalem, studying. I kind of fell madly in love with her. We had known each other for many years. As kids do, we kind of drifted apart. I went off to college and eventually the Navy. She went to college. And we were always friends.”
They both married others and eventually divorced. Esther was living in Jerusalem, working for the Justice Ministry in the Human Rights Division, when Jonathan was arrested. She immediately wanted to help but was advised not to, due to her government position.
He had been in prison for 13 years when they married. It was an “unauthorized marriage” because prison authorities wanted him to “talk” in exchange for permission. They circumvented this by having a rabbi discreetly perform a religious ceremony. Jonathan already knew that his new wife was battling metastatic breast cancer, and he wanted to be there for her as much as she had been advocating for his release.
“Esther Pollard stood before governments, officials, and the world that had grown accustomed to Jonathan’s suffering, but she never chose silence,” said Adam Scott Bellos, a good friend of Jonathan and CEO of the Israel Innovation Fund and the Wine on the Vine program, at the dedication.
“Her message was simple: Jonathan cannot be abandoned. He must be freed. He must be brought home to Israel. She kept one flame alive through years when darkness appeared stronger than hope, and at last.”
“When she died, it was like all the lights going off in my life. She was my rock,” Jonathan said sadly.
He proudly unveiled a wine bottle with an illustration of the regal Esther, her head wrapped in a traditional Israeli head scarf.
He flashed back to the unauthorized Jewish wedding in the prison yard. “She wore a white dress and a colorful head-wrap. It was bittersweet because by then we knew that she had cancer.
“She had passed a message to the chaplain that I needed to call her. And I did. And the minute she told me what she’d been diagnosed with, I felt my whole life just drain away.
“But she was a fighter, and she said, ‘It’s always in God’s hands. We just have to have faith.’ But the problem was that all through our marriage, I lived with the certainty that I was going to lose her eventually.”
Jonathan felt Esther should not face her cancer alone and believed that being married would give him the standing to be her champion and seek help for her, just as she had championed him. He felt he could not effectively ask for help for “my girlfriend,” but he could for “my wife.”
“I was doing everything I could to get home to be with her,” Jonathan explained. “When I finally got out of prison and met her in New York, one of the doctors we went to said she should get her affairs in order because according to the PET scan, she had perhaps six weeks to live. There were so many lesions in her skeleton that he just stopped counting. Her answer was typical of Esther. She said, ‘That’s what you think?’ He said, ‘Yes.’ And she said, ‘Well, let’s see what God has in mind.’”
She fought and lived more than six additional years, aided in part by a new therapy. The Israeli government initially refused to help with the expensive treatments, but then-US ambassador Ron Dermer personally intervened to secure financial support.
Esther succumbed to the illness eight years later in January 2023, but not before introducing Jonathan to Rivka, who became his new wife after Esther died. He chuckled as he recalled the chance meeting at the Malha Mall in Jerusalem.
“What impressed Esther quite a bit about Rivka was the fact that she was fighting at the time to have the truth told about her grandfather,” he recalled.
“Rivka’s grandfather had been the British field officer, intelligence officer, who had actually tracked down and captured the commandant of Auschwitz in 1946. And he was a very reticent man, a very humble man, and he didn’t seek fame for what he’d done. There were other people who stepped forward and misrepresented themselves as the actual captors of this animal. But through her efforts, the truth is now out about what her grandfather actually did.
“When we walked away, Esther stopped me and looked at me and said, ‘Do you like her?’ And being an old married man, I know a trap when I sense one. So I said, ‘Why do you ask me such an inappropriate question?’
“She answered, ‘I’m not going to make it. And I want you to be happy. This woman will make you happy.’”
Jonathan described Esther as “otherworldly” in her vision, and her Torah knowledge as encyclopedic.
“More than anything else, she was a Jewish nationalist, a religious nationalist of the highest order.
“I remember the last time she was well enough to go outside. I was going up to the North to see something, and she insisted on coming. She could barely walk, and I carried her up the mountain.
“Looking toward Lebanon and Syria, she said, ‘If you look with your heart and soul as far as you can to the north, what you will see is Eretz Hatzvi [the Land of the Hart].
“‘This is when the complete redemption will come,’ she said. ‘You’re going to be confronted with a very horrible war. And it’s not the kind of war you’re thinking about. It will be a war for the Jewish identity of our country.’ And she said that is a war that we can’t afford to lose.
“She added, ‘I won’t be here to see it, but you will.’”
“Jonathan decided to plant the first vineyard that we were able to have planted through our program, which is quite exciting,” Bellos added.
“There are many lives that are measured in years, and there are many that are measured in devotion. Esther Pollard’s life was measured in devotion. For decades, she carried Jonathan’s freedom as both the cause of a wife and the obligation of a people. When others grew tired, Esther continued. When leaders changed the subject, she brought Jonathan’s name back into the room. When the world called her struggle hopeless, she refused to accept hopelessness as a verdict. She did not merely want Jonathan released from prison; she wanted to bring him home to his people.”
He said that the Wine on the Vine program only recently began the new “plant a vineyard” initiative. The donor receives a dunam (0.1 hectares) of vineyard land, can choose the varietal and vineyard, either in the Negev or in the Shomron, a customized designed label, and bottles of their own wine each year. Prior to this, the Israel Innovation Fund offered the opportunity to plant single vines in commemoration of special events.
Ramat Negev Winery’s main vintner, Yogev Zadok, took part in the small ceremony. He explained that the family-run desert winery, founded with plantings, started in 1997. Through belief in sandy soils, careful irrigation, minimal spraying, and selected yeasts with acid adjustments, the winery crafts lighter, mineral-driven wines. Years of experimentation have identified optimal varieties for the harsh climate, and the winery’s diverse portfolio, including orange- and port-style wines, has earned significant international accolades.
“We’ve sold four dunams [0.4 hectares] in the last year without any marketing campaigns,” Bellos explains. “The mission of the Israel Innovation Fund is to reboot the Zionist movement as a movement and bring back the original ideas that connected the Diaspora and the Jewish people to Israel, but in a relevant version for today’s time.
“It’s profoundly fitting that we’re here together on Tu B’Av, which is the Jewish day of love, to dedicate a vineyard in Esther’s memory,” added Bellos at the small vineyard ceremony. “Her love became more than a protest and more than a prayer. Her love became the road that Jonathan would take to come home. Jonathan’s return to Israel was the harvest of a lifetime of love.
“May every vine bear witness to this courage that Esther had, and may every root recall her faith, and may every harvest from here forward honor her perseverance. Jonathan came home because Esther never stopped calling him home. Her life was a complete act of love. Her victory was Jonathan’s return home to Eretz Yisrael. In the sacred soil of the land that she fought to bring him home to, Esther Pollard’s love will bear fruit and take root and live forever.”
Jonathan added that on the day they buried Esther, “I remember thinking, now that she is in the earth, I will see her everywhere. In trees, flowers, and anything beautiful. In nature. Now we have the opportunity to actually taste the fruit of her essence. We can actually make the wine from the grapes that were planted and the vines that were planted in her memory.”
He said that Esther would drink a glass of wine several times a week while studying and teaching him the Prophets and reciting Psalms.
“I once asked her why she always drank wine while studying. Her answer was, ‘So I can taste the words of the Prophets.’”