This tour was a look at the early beginnings of the State of Israel.
One of the first things that Herzl does was creating a Jewish agency. Palestine begins to take steps towards Jewish settlement in the land of Israel. A piece of land was purchased and they held the land for a couple of years. According to Turkish Law if you have a piece of land and don’t do anything with it for 3 years, you will have to forfeit that piece of land. The Jewish agency realized that their time was up! So, they had to do something quick. They found a gentleman that knew something about agriculture by the name of Burman, they told him to “go up there, get some people and do something with this courtyard (pictures of the courtyard are displayed below) near the Sea of Galilee.” He gathered together some people and tried to do some work. The remarkable question is “where did these people come from?” According to our Zionist chronology in 1904 Herzl died. In 1905 the Zionist movement says that they had to commemorate their leader and founder, Theodore Herzl by planting a forest which is one the national forest of in Ben Shim’en near the airport of today. Mr. Burman was the Forman of this courtyard and the man in charge of the forest that was being planted. In order to plant a forest you need land and laborers. The laborers of that day were the local Arabs. It was frowned upon that Mr. Burman chooses to hire the local Arabs to plant the forest and this forest is in remembrance of Herzl, which goes against the Zionist movement. Burman’s argument was that he was looking for the cheapest laborers, which were the Arabs at the time. On the other hand the members of the Second Aliyah were hurt because they were not considered for the job of planting the forest in honor of Theodore Herzl. The members of the Second Aliyah wanted to know why they were not chosen to be apart of this major Zionistic movement. Therefore, the members of the Second Aliyah went to find Mr. Burman and they went to that particular forest. One of the men sat on Burman so that he could not move and the rest of them pulled up all the trees and told Mr. Burman “let this be a lesson to you, it’s part of an old Jewish principle, if you don’t punish without giving a warning, let this be a warning to you”. So, that point on Mr. Burman hired the members of the second Aliyah. And those members were the ones to replant the forest, but that was the last time that the Zionist movement would fail to turn the Hebrew, Jewish labor. In 1907-08 Burman had an opportunity to start up another farm near the Galilee. This time he immediately turned to the members of the Second Aliyah and asked them if they would like to be apart of this national project of building a farm, and they gladly accepted the opportunity to serve. (Below is a picture of Mr. Burman’s house.) After a year the farming was a success! And the land did not get converted back to Turkish ownership. The Jewish Agency comes in and says that Mr. Burman’s job is done, the mission was accomplished and they’re going to stop paying his salary and close up shop. The members of the farm want to stay even if there was not going to be a Forman in place. They believed they would make on their own. There were about 12 people on the farm that stayed. This was a very crucial move that they made and they began farming again. Retrospectively, what they did in that one year was create the Kibbutz. There was no employer or employee; it was a group of equal people willing to commit themselves to the land. Some of the people would later move around the corner and start Kibbutz De’Ganya. The ones that moved were socialist in their intentions and Labor Zionism was what they were all about. Other groups came over the next 30 years, and would work for that Kibbutz a while and learn what they needed to learn about agriculture, themselves and each other, and then they moved on to found Kibbutzim and other Kibbutz around the country. So, the first Kibbutz was found in this courtyard.
There was a Women’s Farm founded by Ms. Miszels, she ran the women’s training farm. It started by asking Ms. Rahel to enroll into the University and learn properly and come back and teach all of the trade of farming. In those days there was already an agricultural school, the school was called Mikvah Israel near Ben Shim’en, but only for men. So, Ms. Rahel had to go back to Europe. Mr. Gordon, a key person in the introductory film that we watched before starting the tour. The film mentioned that Rahel was not like everyone else, her and her sister were city girls, they didn’t know how they got here, but they integrated into their new life and learned Hebrew. What’s important is that she became paragon to the Second Aliyah, but she didn’t really start that way at all. Back to Gordon, he was in his forties and he came from Russia. He was the ideal of what was going on at the time, the agnostic rabbi, the guru that Rahel turns to for guidance about whether she should study or go to Europe. He was the authority and spiritual leader for this community. Gordon would coin the phrase “Religion of Labor”; not only would the Second Aliyah come here to rebuild the land physically but they would rebuild themselves in the process, redemption of the land and people by bring the land back to its rightful owners biblically, which are the Jewish people. They wanted to bring redemption back unto themselves through doing work. This work had redemptive values. These people weren’t religious in traditional Jewish sense; they were secular in their own personal lives. They related to their work “Adovah” working the land with the same devotion as a deeply spiritual religious person who practices the spiritual rituals, observing the commandments, and a religious life style. They believed that if they were doing physical labor they were changing themselves. The Hebrew word Adovah has a double meaning, means physical labor and describes what was done in the temple in the days of the temple, which was the divine service. They used really powerful language, for example when they purchased the land they called it “Redemption.” So, when Gordon would speak of the religion of labor, Adovah, he was really connected with the Jewish tradition in a very social way. Once upon a time our ancestors did the Adovah in the Temple and now they did the same activity and significance but it’s: plowing, weeding, interrogating and working in the fields in the land of Israel. So, these concepts go back to Gordon and that nourishes an entire generation, the Second and even the Third Aliyah. So, it’s to Gordon that Rahel asked whether she should go to Europe or stay and be apart of this movement, because she too was part of the Second Aliyah.
In another case we looked at Kibbutz Deganya, in Hebrew when translated directly appears to mean “grain of god”. This is not at all what these secular Jews meant to say. Actually the word “deganya” comes from the word “deganey” meaning grains of, and the letter “ey” in Hebrew represented the five types of grain that they intended to grow, there’s no god there at all. One of the first marriages in the Kibbutz was Miriam Barrots. This was the first celebration in the Kibbutz and no religious or metaphoric religious symbols have any meaning to them. So, they decided unanimously to renew the tradition, the wedding was performed with all tradition with one innovation. Instead of getting married under a cloth canopy, they used sheaves of wheat. Miriam as the bride felt she needed to sanctify herself. A traditional woman sanctifies herself by bathing in the mikvah, but she chose to sanctify herself through work, which is the core of life. To make her wedding day special she went to work in the fields extra hours. Even after the conclusion of celebrating her wedding she went right back to working in the fields, and this is an example of the extreme measures of the Religion of Labor. This was one good example of the ‘New Jew’ that they were seeking to create. The New Jew was going to be a person that was productive, self sufficient, independent, self reliant and capable of self-defense. And, in order to make these changes they felt they needed to make some radical moves. After some time people became overwhelmed with the theology and they began to leave the kibbutz and they founded Tel Aviv.
Soon after, Rahel met a man named Ezer Weizman a member of the second Aliyah and future president of the State of Israel. He was in the Jaffa area but had a curiosity about what was going on in the Kibbutz along the Galilee. Our tour guide read to us poems and essays concerning the romance that Rahel and Ezer had and Rahel’s struggle to depart from her comrades and the landscape of the Kibbutz to study in Europe after receiving the blessings of Gordon. During this time the land of Israel was just an image of Zion in the prayer book, but it was an actual reality and Zion was a place that Jews could pick-up and leave, to go to. Later we went to the cemetery down the road to see some of the famous people of this time period and movement. What we would find on the tomb stones were the following: a person’s name, the year that person made Aliyah (in place of where we would naturally see the date of birth), the person’s death is also included on the tombstone. The Aliyah was a rebirth experience so, placing the date of Aliyah meant the date they were born again. On other tombstones it displayed a person’s Yiddish name and their New Hebrew name which was symbolic of them shedding off their diasporas from which they came from. For example one of the tombstones said that they were “a person of the third Aliyah” simply meaning “I as an individual am not so important, but the group to which I belong to is what really counts” so this is the selfless devotion to the cause and that they are here to redeem their nation and they are a piece of the machinery, a part of the bigger project. This cemetery was a monumental spot for the Zionist movement. This is where some very important people either lived or did something famous. For instance Rahel is buried here, she died in Israel, but requested to be buried here. Some are people, who never lived at the Kibbutz and had nothing to do with this place, but the Zionist movement appropriated them, saying: “you are our founding mothers and fathers” and it was under this ideology that they were able to build what they had built.
One of the VIP’s of the cemetery was, Moses Hess, he was a socialist philosopher. He believed that socialism was going to solve the problem of humanity. Hess believed that they should always hold on to their socialism but be particularistic as Jews. Hess wrote a book titled (pre-Herzl) ”Roman Jerusalem” in the Talmud there is a passage that says “if Rome is flourishing, Jerusalem can’t be flourishing and if Jerusalem is flourishing, Rome can’t be flourishing”; meaning that they are two different world views that cannot co-exist, because Rome destroyed Jerusalem 2000 years ago. We also look at a person whose story was connected to this cemetery, Nathan the farmer. He represented a large number of people from the Second and Third Aliyah who committed suicide because they felt they were not worthy of the standard the community had set and they thought of themselves as a burden to the community, and seeing suicide from those of the Second Aliyah were common. The next tomb was of Naomi Shemer; she is the author of the song “Jerusalem of Gold” and about thousand other songs. She was the most prolific writer of songs. She has popular songs even today in Israel. She was from this area and when she died in 2004 there were so many people who came to her funeral that they had to have twelve parking lots for everyone’s cars and they shuttled people over by bus. Her tomb says she was born in 1930, so that means she was part of the Fourth Aliyah. Below is a picture of Rahel’s grave. It had a bench to sit on and two boxes built into the tomb that stored her poems, which were open to the public. She was a vivacious person but her poems were very sad and melancholy. She came back to the Kibbutz after studying at the University. After coming back she became sick and could not work with the kids anymore. The community sent her away, and she wondered around Jerusalem for four years and this is when she wrote most of her poetry is about the life she never had. She mentioned Mt. Nebo in one of her writings. Moses was buried on Mt. Nebo and this was one of the mountains that we passed coming up north. Moses was the one who lead the people through the desert for 40 years and never got a chance to enter into the Promise Land of Israel, and ever since the book of Deuteronomy the name of Mt. Nebo has represented coming very close to your dream but not quite realizing it, and Rahel had on her tombstone “everyone has their Mt. Nebo across from their Promise Land.”
The next stop we took in our tour was the city of Kiryat Shemonah. This was a city located in the Northern Hula Valley, just west of the Golan Heights. It was founded originally as a development town in 1949. Our group meet with a lady by the name of Hannah who deals with a community that experiences Katyusha Rockets; from time to time these are launched into towns in Northern Israel by the Hizbullah Islamic fundamentalist group stationed in Southern Lebanon. Residents are forced to sleep in bomb shelters, sometimes for days on end, in fear of the attacks. The Second Lebanon War in the summer of 2006 paved how effective the Katyusha can be in disrupting the Israeli home front. During this war Hizbullah rockets reached as far south as Haifa.
The building that we were having our meeting with Hannah was originally a community center, then it was taken over by a college, then 5 years ago it was taken over by the Stress Prevention Center. A facility that was designed to train people to deal with stress prevention and located inside was a shelter that the community could come to be safe when rockets are being launched. For some more history on the town; development towns started in the 1950’s to house big waves of North African immigration that came in which were mostly Moroccans and Lithuanians. They were made up of large families who were traditional, religious, and Patriarchal and with a small amount of academic education. They came with skills in agriculture or trading. They were put into tin shacks in the various development towns. Truckloads of people were brought and dropped in various places. From a Zionistic perspective it was thought to create a nucleus population in the 1950’s. Water was needed to create a big Jewish population here, which is why people were brought here. The Kibbutzim around the area provided labor for those in the development towns, which represented the separation of the rich and the poor. There were several problems that Hannah had to deal with living and working in this area: the culture change and sock, which lead to sociological issues; the issue with security; families and their children; and evacuations when Katyusha Rockets are launched.
In the 1980’s there was a series of non-stop bombardment of Katyusha Rockets. Hannah works on a team of psychologist and social workers that go into the schools to work with the teachers on how to deal with the children after one of these attacks. The day after an attack would be a day they work to encourage all parents to feel comfortable enough to send their kids back to school. In class instead of the regular class work, they give the children the opportunity to draw or paint their expressions, feelings and emotions about the attacks, as an outlet for the children to deal with their experiences and not to bottle them up, because that could cause damage to a child. The town is divided into five sections, each having its own social worker. There has been many casualties over the years; here is one case for example: Hannah told us about two individuals who were killed by two separate Katyusha Rockets that came from two different areas of town in one particular raid. Both people were taking a smoke. One person was at the entrance of the Municipality Shelter, he was a community worker and he had one foot in the shelter and one foot outside and he was killed. The other person went home from the shelter and went to take a smoke on the top of his roof and he was hit directly. In these situations, minutes were very crucial. So, even if your in the shelter it’s not 100% secure because you can’t stay inside 24x7 and not get some fresh air and go about your daily life. One other way they tried to secure the people of this town were by setting up evacuations with a bus that they had. Even though this sounded like a wonderful idea, it caused many problems. First try, they created a list of kids that they would evacuate, but they could only take as many as the bus would hold. In this case there were going to be some kids that would be left with their families. No matter how the list was constructed they would always end up with kids who were not on the list, because in the mist of all the firing of the Rockets, checking the list in those conditions ‘go out the window’ which brought upon another problem with some of the problematic kids appearing on the bus and having to deal with their behavioral problems. On the second try, they created a list of families chosen by the agency. The problem that occurred with this was that the 50 families selected would tell another 50 and promise them that they would get them on the bus so, when it came time to evacuate there’s more than 100 families at the door of the bus. These situations made it vary hard for the social workers to navigate through the crowds of people so, most of the time it was the physically stronger families that would find a seat on the bus. These buses would even have to be careful about how and when it pulled off with the people from the town so, that the bus would not get hit also by the Katyusha Rockets. Many of these buses went to the city of Eliot and most of the citizens would chose to come back to Kiryat Shemonah, just because its home to them, even if it is very dangerous at times. Hannah did reassure that the citizens do enjoy living here and they have community events and entertainment. It’s just in those times that some Israeli might have done something wrong or Israel and Lebanon are discussing a matter that it makes living hard, but this is not an every year living situation. The city has been free of Katyusha Rockets for 2 years now and they hope for the better in the years to come.
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