For more than four years, members of the Mandragora club, which operates under the Ternopil branch of the Hesed Besht Charity Fund, have been making herbal teas under the guidance of manager Iryna Ivshyna.
Making such teas is a very painstaking task. Every stage of the work is important. First, you need to prepare medicinal plants within certain deadlines (the raw materials for teas are harvested in the forest far from the city, so the products are not only tasty and rich in vitamins, but also environmentally friendly). Then they should be dried properly to preserve vitamins and aromatic substances as much as possible. Next, you need to prepare the preparations and pack them in original bags. But the main thing in this matter is the spiritual background. The famous founder of Hasidism, Baal Shem Tov, as is known, was born and practiced healing in the Ternopil region. Therefore, herbalists from the Mandragora club based their herbal teas on the very herbs that Besht used to treat his patients.
– We thought about what certain Jewish holidays are associated with in our country, – says Iryna Ivshina, – and developed recipes for herbal teas for each celebration. I won’t reveal the recipes, it’s our little secret, so to speak, but, for example, for the holiday of Rosh Hashanah we add pomegranate peels and dried apples to the herbs; for the Sukkot tea recipe – lemon peels, for the Hanukkah tea we add cinnamon and orange. For Tu B’Shevat we prepared green teas with the addition of Sudanese rose and linden. Most recently, we packaged teas for the holidays of Purim and Pesach. Purim tea is spicy, with ginger and cloves, Easter tea is floral, with jasmine, oregano and rose petals.
And what do you think of these recipes? Agree, they are very elegant and, of course, appetizing. This is not an everyday drink, it is a pleasant addition to the dishes of the festive table. This is exactly what is needed to strengthen the immune system and saturate the body with vitamins.
The Ternopil enthusiasts of the Mandragora club worked hard on the packaging for a long time. And they developed a very attractive design: a bag with a wax seal, with a label-logo of the Hesed Besht Foundation. Such bags would be bought with pleasure by connoisseurs of natural and healing drinks, but in order to trade these teas, you need to have a license, and this, as you understand, is expensive and unprofitable - workers cannot produce teas on an industrial scale. Therefore, gourmets can only dream of such deliciousness. And the Ternopil residents brew their healing drinks for a soulful tea party in the circle of their clients during some events and as souvenirs - mostly as gifts for Hesed guests.
Yesterday, Ternopil herbalists handed over two boxes of their fresh, aromatic, vitamin-healing products to us at Hesed, made during quarantine. We thank you and wish our colleagues good dinners in the forest glades. Give health to people, because this is real medicine.
