A true life account of living on an communal settlement in rural Israel; from childrearing to picking potatoes, surviving war and isolation.
I became a member of the Zionist youth organization Habonim when I was 10 years old. Habonim was my life. I absorbed all the ideology that was thrown at me, one of which was to live in Israel. I became an ardent Zionist and a socialist to boot. Summer camp was a big thing in Habonim. The first year at camp was also the time when Israel received its Independence. This was in 1948 and Israel was proactive in securing arms for the war. I remember some of the bigger kids telling me that there was a secret hut at camp where ammunition was being stored to send to Israel. I spent my summer trying to find out where this secret hut was. I never did find it. At camp we tried to simulate what it was like living on a kibbutz (a communal agricultural settlement): sharing everything equally, including work, and receiving everything you need.
After I graduated from high school, I participated in a youth program in Israel for nine months. We worked in the kibbutz fields, studied Hebrew, learned about the early Zionists, and had a lot of fun. There were youngsters from all over the world in this program. When I returned home to Harlem, New York, where I grew up, I was convinced that I would live in Israel forever. This was in 1956. I went to University for a year and then married soon after. My husband (who I met on this youth program) and I decided to go and live on a kibbutz in southern Israel. I was already eight months pregnant when we boarded a ship for the two-week voyage. I remember hanging over the rail, trying to keep my dinner down as we neared Gibraltar, a very rocky part of the journey.
After the voyage, we were met by a representative of the kibbutz in Haifa, in northern Israel. We were driven 150 kilometres south to our new home, Urim. My husband Frank and I began to live our new communal lives. Frank picked potatoes and worked in the apple orchard. I was so glad that I was pregnant and wouldn’t be asked to do the same; instead, I was assigned to kitchen duty, where I just peeled the endless piles of potatoes, until my daughter was born.
Children were still living in communal houses when we arrived in 1958; however a few years later, a decision was made that children would remain in their parents house for the night, a very controversial decision at the time. Today, almost all of the kibbutzim have adopted this decision. Our daughter was in the infants’ house, where I would be called in the middle of the night to feed her. I was unable to breast feed and the night nurses were sympathetic to me, trying when possible to prepare bottles of milk ahead of time. But invariably when I stumbled down the path to feed her, she would be fast asleep and wouldn’t awake for the feed. So I stumbled back home and within a half-hour a night watchman would be knocking on my door and telling me I had to go feed my then screaming daughter.
Such was my introduction to kibbutz life. The Infants house had its own kitchen and three or four bedrooms, each with five cribs. There were comfortable easy chairs for mothers to feed their infants and there were one or two children’s nurses to see to each baby. During the day, things were a bit different. When I went to the infant house to feed my daughter, other new mothers would be there. We always sat in a circle, fed our babies and played with them. Of course this was the ideal time for kibbutz gossip. I remember being called the “Americaner”: someone from America who really doesn’t know the ways of kibbutz life. This stopped after a few months when people began to know me.
My first months in the infant house I felt quite uncomfortable because I was unable to breast feed. This caused me great shame and embarrassment and I am sure that the normal bonding with my daughter did not take place because of this shame. The women in the circle did not help any to make me feel accepted and I remember crying myself to sleep for many weeks, and wondering why in the world I ever decided to live on a kibbutz. For six weeks after the birth of our daughter Sharona, I did nothing except take care of her.
When I returned to work part-time, I was again assigned work in the kitchen, mostly preparing food. It was very monotonous work and I was terribly bored. I wanted to do something more stimulating, so I went to the work organizer and found out that choice jobs were given to the veterans of the kibbutz, or to those who knew how to complain the loudest. Since I was neither of these, I resigned to my kitchen duties for a rather long time.
The hierarchical assignment of work was central to the administrative system of the kibbutz. The management of the kibbutz was elected by the general membership. Weekly membership meetings were held, and back then were generally attended by most of the membership. Discussions were held on policies of the kibbutz, whether or not to buy a new tractor or who would be sent out to teach in the public high school of the city. These meetings were very raucous (somewhat akin to Parliament meetings), with people shouting out their opinions in language not necessarily suitable for public events. Sometimes people only wanted a listening ear to vent their personal grievances. I attended these meetings in the beginning, although my knowledge of Hebrew was scarce, and it proved to be a good source of acquiring knowledge of what was going on, and a chance to improve my Hebrew.
My earliest recollections of living on a kibbutz involve being awoken by the sound of chickens peeping and cows lowing at 5 a.m. It felt as if they were just outside my window. As I write, I can almost smell the heavy scent of manure that permeated the entire kibbutz in the early hours. This took some time to get used to, as I was a city slicker.
Besides the infant houses, there were houses for pre-schoolers and elementary students. The elementary school was housed on the kibbutz. Teens went to a regional school and also lived independently away from their parents in communal houses when they reached puberty. They were taken care of by a teen caregiver during the night. Our children visited us at home, after school, and had dinner with us and then return to their own houses at night. The philosophy of having children live in communal houses was based on the idea that parents needed their sleep in order to be productive the next day.
We lived on the kibbutz from 1958 to 1976, almost 17 years. During this time we lived through three wars: the War of Attrition in 1972, the Yom Kippur war in 1976, and the Six-Day War in 1966. Living through war was one of the most frightful experiences one can have. I remember one day walking with my group of 3-year-old children (I eventually graduated from working in the kitchen to working with children, which I continued to do in Canada and for rest of my career), through the apple orchards.
All of a sudden we heard a siren wail. The orchards were quite far off from the nearest shelter. I scooped up two of the children in my arms and the third one held onto my apron string and started running towards the shelter. Overhead there were two planes about to have a dog-fight. My heart was beating so fast, I thought it would burst. We finally arrived at the shelter, and I literally collapsed, happy that we were safe. I remember sitting in the shelter and singing songs with the children to calm them, at the same time trying to listen to the radio, to hear what was going on outside.
The kibbutz was so different during war times. Most of the men had gone off to serve and the women and children were the only ones left on the kibbutz to run affairs. It was a time for bonding, for being comforted, when one heard of injuries, or deaths of loved ones. Gone were the petty arguments or resentments to one another. We were there for each other then. Of course, this did not last very long and as soon as the wars ended, we were back to our petty quarrels.
For me, being in a country that is constantly at war has certainly cemented my feelings against war. In fact, we left the kibbutz because we did not want our son, who would soon be required to enter the military at the age of 15, to go into the army. Today, as the situation in the Middle East escalates, we pray for a peaceful outcome.
Today, I am somewhat critical of the kibbutz way of life. There is nothing comparable to life on a communal settlement. As a young mother with small children, I was free from economic worries; I didn’t have to hold onto a job to support my family. I could relax and really enjoy playing with my kids. I didn’t have to worry about household duties, or cooking meals, or laundry etc. This was such a luxury.
But after awhile, I became bored and wanted to pursue my education. This was not the easiest thing to do. Again the old hierarchical system of the kibbutz was at play. Since I was not one of the veterans of the kibbutz, I had to go to a committee and submit an application for study. If you had friends on the committee, you had better chances. I was told I would have to wait at least five years before I would be considered a candidate to go and study.
With this in mind, we decided to leave the kibbutz in 1976. With little resources in hand we moved to Vancouver, where we were able to move in with Frank’s parents for a short while. It was not easy coming to Canada. We had very little money, no employment, two children with special needs and we had to adapt to a new country, a new language, new schools and new friends. We did survive, and today, we are all settled in, and enjoy life. We have more personal freedom than we would have had living on the kibbutz in Urim and for that we are grateful.
Today, the kibbutzim in Israel are slowly turning into small farms. These are big changes. We went back for a visit a few years ago to our old kibbutz and were shocked at what we found. There are very few children in the children’s houses. These houses now house the children of hired workers. Members pay for all of their meals in the communal dining hall and individual wages are paid to all members. There is very little agriculture happening, and most of the kibbutzim run guesthouses, or have turned to manufacturing in order to survive. The survival of kibbutzim today is indeed in jeopardy.
