Al-Far Soap Factory

Soap was a booming industry in the region; it was being manufactured on an industrial scale in Jaffa, Jerusalem, Gaza, and Lod, with the production center located in Nablus (now a Palestinian town in the West Bank where two soap factories operate today). The Al-Far soap factory, now ruinous, tells us about pieces of Lod’s history and is symbolic of the contrasting narratives vying for Lod’s memory. There are two main histories of these ruins; both will be presented here for you to ponder and reflect on in the face of these weed-riddled sandy stones.

The factory was constructed in the early 19th century in stone under the Ottomans. Soap was made here by crushing olives and then cooking them with ash from plants and other oils. They would have been formed into bars and hammer-stamped with an emblem and the name Al-Far. This process required a single worker to individually stamp each bar, walking from bar to bar with his back bent over the soaps until thousands of bars were stamped.

After this process, bars were formed and left to dry before being cut up and packed away into boxes, ready to be sold on the road from Jaffa to Jerusalem. The drying process would have been an impressive sight; the soaps would be rounded and piled into a tower formation one meter long and more than two meters tall, with each row slightly more narrow than the one below in order to maintain structural integrity. The bars of soap would have been left like this over the course of multiple days until they were completely hardened.

After they were dried, the bars would have been wrapped in paper that was also stamped with the Al-Far name. This part of the process was generally left for women, as they were said to contain the patience to wrap, stamp, and pack thousands of soap packages. Soaps were sent out by the crate-load, ready to be sold in Lod’s various markets which were crucially located on the central intersections of Jaffa—Jerusalem, and Damascus—Cairo.

The factory structure is located on the corner of the city market and west of the Church of Saint George and the El-Omri Mosque. It belonged to the Al-Far family, who were forced to flee Lod in 1948. After the war, the site was expropriated by the Israeli Government and is today managed by the State of Israel. ‘Masbane’ is the term for a traditional olive oil soap factory in Arabic. Many of these factories also included olive-oil presses where farmers would have brought their olives. It is undetermined if there was an olive-oil press on this location or if the Hasuna olive press was the central olive press in Lod.

The architecture of the soap factory dates back to the 19th century, most likely the earlier half. The lower-grade olive-oil from the presses was sent over to the soap-making processes. Most of the soap products that were used in traditional societies were oil-based, and olive oils were especially particular to this region and the Mediterranean. The construction of the vault inside is very uncommon in Palestinian architecture, it can, in fact, even be described as rare due to the peculiar use of storage jars rather than long, thick bottle-like jars. The site was found to be in a poor physical state by the Israeli Institute of Archeology. This is perhaps due to the atypical construction style using storage jars, which had a lower resistance to stress than the longer, thicker bottles typical to a masbane like this one.

The Al-Far soap factory, much like many of the other sites mapped on this tour, is being eyed by the local municipality, organizations, and local leaders as a sight ready for renovation and reconstruction. There has been some mentioning of restoring its soap-making capabilities as well as the transformation of the surrounding space to encompass cafés, commercial shops, and other eateries. The soap factory, if restored, would be a gem nestled inside the old city of Lod.