Business

Where God And
Geology Meet

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Armed with a biblical passage, a blessing from the
Lubavitcher rebbe and a team of scientists, a new
immigrant searches for oil in untapped territory.

PATRICIA GOLAN
Special to The Jewish News

I

srael may be surrounded by oil-
rich countries, but its own long-
hoped-for oil boom has largely
been a bust. Israel's wells only
satisfy less than one percent of the
country's gas and oil needs.
But recently, a new exploration
company, Givot Olam, announced it
had discovered a reservoir containing
1 billion barrels of recoverable oil. To
date, what little oil has been found in
Israel has been
in the south.
But, a year
ago, pursuing
a theory that
Israel is linked
to the regional
petroleum sys-
tem known as
the Palmyra
— or Syrian
— basin,
Givot Olam
sunk a test
bore-hole in
Rosh Ha'ayin, in central Israel, an area
where no one had drilled before. Tests
of the light crude oil extracted from
that bore-hole indicate it comes from
the same oil "province" that has
enriched Saudi Arabia and other
Middle East countries.
The founder and executive director
of the Givot Olam company is
Russian immigrant Tovia Luskin. "We
are talking about a completely new
basin, a totally unexplored part of the
most prolific petroleum system in the
world," says Luskin. "About 70 per-
cent of the world's oil reserves are
here. We have proved geologically that
this Palmyra basin extends into Israel.
This is our contribution to the oil
exploration here, and I believe it is a
breakthrough."
Luskin's inspiration to look for oil
in Israel where no one else had looked
before came from the Bible.
Emigrating from the former Soviet
Union in 1976, Luskin went first to
Canada, then Indonesia and finally
settled in Australia, all the while work-
ing as a petroleum engineer for large

Patricia Golan is a writer for the
Jerusalem Post Foreign Service.

and

oil companies. It was in Australia that
Luskin became a religiou's Jew and a
disciple of the Lubavitcher rebbe, the
late Menachem Mendel Schneerson.
One day while studying the Bible, a
phrase in Deuteronomy caught the
petroleum geologist's eye. The passage
(33:13,15) quotes Moses who, before
he dies, blesses the tribe of Joseph: "...
and of Joseph he said, blessed of the
lord be his land, for the precious
things of heaven, for the dew, and for
the deep that coucheth beneath ... and
for the chief things of the ancient
mountains,
and for the
precious
things of the
everlasting
hills."
What,
wondered
Luskin, could
those "pre-
cious things"
be? And what
does "ancient
mountains"
mean? Luskin
discovered that the medieval Jewish
biblical commentator Rashi had
hypothesized that the passage refers to
hills formed before the rest of the sur-
rounding landscape — quite a modern
geological concept.
Convinced that the Bible offered
geological clues as to where oil could
be found, and armed with a blessing
from the rebbe (the text of which now
appears on the company's Web site)
Luskin moved to Israel and set up his
exploration company, Givot Olam,
Hebrew for "everlasting hills." His
biblical clue pointed him to Rosh
Ha'ayin, which falls in the biblical
domain of the tribe of Joseph.
But while the Bible provided a
sort of compass in his search for oil,
Luskin has not used it as a 20th-cen-
tury geological guide. Once in Israel,
he assembled a team of fellow
Russian immigrants, geophysicists,
geologists and petroleum engineers
with experience in the former Soviet
oil industry. After two years of
research, Luskin's team reached the
conclusion that the wells in Israel
"have turned up dry because they
have been dug in structures formed
after oil ceased to migrate to the

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