The story of Ptil Tekhelet begins with Rabbi Eliyahu Tavger shlit”a, a Jerusalem resident who immigrated to Israel from Russia at the age of eight with his father, a former Prisoner of Zion.
As a young avreich, Rabbi Tavger studied the work of Rav Shmuel ben Hofni Gaon on the subject of tzitzit, and his curiosity was sparked. After years of research and extensive experimentation, he concluded that the Murex trunculus sea snail was the source of Tekhelet. Rabbi Tavger personally collected the snails and succeeded in producing two sets of Tekhelet strings—the first made since the era of the Geonim.
To produce additional strings, Rabbi Tavger turned to a recent immigrant from America, Joel Guberman, who knew how to scuba dive. Guberman brought along two friends, Baruch Sterman and Ari Greenspan, and that dive into the depths of the sea ultimately gave rise to Ptil Tekhelet. Ever since, the organization has been producing Tekhelet strings and making the Torah and scientific knowledge surrounding Tekhelet accessible to the wider public.
“When I look back on that moment,” says Baruch Sterman, today the organization’s CEO, “I realize that it was one of the most significant decisions of my life. We constantly find ourselves at turning points where we have the opportunity to do something important, and I believe Hashem placed me at that exact moment for this purpose. I feel that there is a shlichut here—to restore this profoundly important mitzvah to the Jewish people, and an opportunity to take part in something historic. There on the beach, we began to discover the larger-than-life figures who had devoted themselves to researching Tekhelet: the Radzyner Rebbe and Rabbi Herzog.”
These rabbinic scholars embarked on their search some 1,300 years after the secrets of Tekhelet had been lost—along with the identity of the chilazon from which its unique dye had been produced. Their many discoveries, together with those of other researchers, ultimately pointed to the Murex trunculus as the source of Tekhelet. But one crucial piece was still missing: no one had succeeded in producing blue Tekhelet from the murex. The mystery remained unsolved.
Then, in 5745 (1985), the secret of Tekhelet was unlocked. Textile expert Prof. Otto Elsner z”l discovered that exposing the dye extracted from the murex to sunlight at a specific stage of the dyeing process alters its chemical composition, producing a beautiful blue—the Tekhelet described by the Torah.
This discovery paved the way for Rabbi Eliyahu Tavger shlit”a to take the theoretical knowledge and put it into practice, producing the first Tekhelet strings made since Tekhelet had been lost.
More than 20 years later, at our small facility in Kfar Adumim, we continue to produce Tekhelet strings and refine our production methods, providing the finest, most mehudar Tekhelet strings so that Jews can once again fulfill the mitzvah of tzitzit in its entirety:
“And they shall place upon the tzitzit of each corner a thread of Tekhelet.”
