MEFALSIM, Israel— Plaster sculptures by Meir Perlmutter adorn the grounds of this kibbutz to
which the sculptor and Sha'ar Hanegev¹s mayor, Alon Schuster, both belong.

One piece, called "Hand and Foot," is the subject of a self-deprecating joke that the kibbutz members like to tell.

Perlmutter intended the sculpture to represent the "unifying of the body," Schuster related. "But in Hebrew, we have an expression, 'to show the foot,' which means 'bankruptcy,' so now people say we are showing bankruptcy."

Schuster's mother, Yael, considers herself to be one of the lucky ones at Mefalsim. This is not only because her son the former teacher has become the mayor of the Sha'ar Hanegev region at the northern edge of the Negev desert. It is also because Alon and another son, Ishai, along with seven of her grandchildren, all are living on the kibbutz.

Only her daughter Nitsa doesn't live in Melfasim, having instead moved to Kibbutz Eilon near the border with Lebanon. In contrast, other mothers of Yael's generation have watched child after child forsake kibbutz life altogether for better economic opportunity in the cities.

Baruch Reznik, 88, left a Baron de Hirsch settlement in Argentina to become a pioneer at Mefalsim, which took its name from a Hebrew word conveying the sense of "plowing the way." Reznik said his fellow Mefalsim founders "talked about ideals; they wanted complete sharing. The younger generation wanted fulfillment as individuals."

Yudit Tzamir, general secretary of the kibbutz, responded: "It wasn¹t easy for the youngsters to have the burden of those ideals. The economic situation went from worse to worse. Mefalsim was based on agriculture. It provided a living, but it went down as fast as the government subsidies went down. It was cheaper to import wheat and cotton.

"Then we decided to start an industry, but it was not all that easy. We had to take out loans and we found that a small factory does not support the whole population."

Kibbutz Mefalsim owns 75 percent of a factory producing a metal powder used in molds for machine parts. "Very few work in the factory, perhaps seven or eight, while the rest are from outside," said Tzamir. She explained that the "median age of the kibbutz members is 60," meaning most members are retired.

Profits of the factory cover only 10 percent of the kibbutz's budget. "We have tried various other things to raise money, including tourism, but tourism was hard hit by the intifada," she said.
"We still have cow sheds. We have tried many little factories. We tried to organize festivals for other people— there was no shortage of ideas. But today we do with less and less.'

Rentals are a major source of income for the kibbutz, which has a total population of 550. Some people, while not kibbutz members, like to live in a quiet, gated community, and since some younger members of the kibbutz have moved away, there are available homes. Additionally, new tract homes have been built on the kibbutz.

Collecting rent means that the kibbutzniks are "landlords," even "capitalists" of a sort, and this is a hard pill to swallow for many of them who grew up on Marxian philosophy.

Yael Schuster recalls that her father-in-law, Natan Schuster— the grandfather of the mayor— had been a communist. On the other hand, her husband Yehuda, the mayor's father, had been a socialist. The two used to argue about the kibbutzim. The grandfather ominously predicted that "as land is owned by the kibbutzniks, they some day will be on the side of the capitalists."

"Once," Yael said, "every worker was accepted as equal and work itself was considered a value. Today it is only measured in money. Some people work at jobs that do not produce a lot of money, but those jobs still require effort. If someone worked in the garden, they worked hard and they were appreciated."

Field workers are appreciated today, she added, "but today there are people who get more money based on their outside salary, on their level of responsibility. It hurts me that socialism doesn't go on; I had hoped that the country would be more equal. Alon's father, who was a lecturer, was proud to state that the difference between high salaries and low salaries in
Israel was very close."

To what did she attribute the fact that all three of her children remained kibbutzniks, while the children of other families left the kibbutz movement?

"The idea in our house was to put a lot of work into the doing, not the telling," she said.
Mayor Schuster promptly got up from his chair, went around the table, and gave his mother a kiss.

"My husband was born in Germany. After Kristallnacht, in the town of Schmalkadden, my husband's father was sent to Buchenwald and released. He wouldn't sign a pledge that he 'accepted as a free man' the requirement to sell the synagogue. Thereafter he escaped to Chile, and he became involved in international efforts to rescue Jews." The Schuster family eventually
settled in Argentina.

Alon Schuster said that Salvador Allende was chiefly responsible for rescuing his grandfather and family from Germany. This was the same man who, more than three decades later, became the leftist president of Chile who was killed in a 1973 coup d'etat.

"My grandmother, Lina, tried desperately to get a visa from wherever she could in order to leave Germany," Alon said. "Her relatives in the U.S. couldn¹t help, nor could her relatives and friends in Palestine. The only positive answer was from a friend who was living in Chile."

That friend contacted Allende, having heard that the socialist politician had been using his connections to send several hundred Chilean visas to Germany¹s Jews

"Allende was one of the few around the world who helped the Jews to run away
from Hell," Alon said.

During Allende's presidency, Alon's father was designated as a special diplomatic representative by Israel's Prime Minister Golda Meir. Yehuda Schuster surprised Allende when he told him that he and other members of his family owed their lives to him because of visas that Allende had arranged some 30 years earlier. The two men tearfully "fell into each other¹s arms," Alon recounted.

Yael's own parents, who were socialists and Zionists, had made their way to Argentina from the Ukraine. She became engaged to Yehuda during a May Day celebration at a "model kibbutz" constructed by Argentine Zionists. Yehuda proposed while they were sitting at a campfire, and the couple was married two months before making aliyah to Israel.

Mefalsim, to which they came, was "a very primitive kibbutz," she recalled. "We lived in barracks. It wasn't safe. There were fedayeen (Arab guerrillas) in those days," who were accustomed to using the route from Hebron to Gaza that goes right through the kibbutz.

"They had been using this route from biblical times. There were a lot of thefts. They came over to 'borrow' whatever we would grow — but they were hungry. They also took the ropes that we used to tie up the harvest, to use as fishing lines in the sea. People were afraid that they would be killed, but we had no terrorism here, just thefts."

Reznik, who had been listening, recalled that after the Sinai War in 1956, "I was working on a tractor, and I looked up and there was an entire group of Egyptian soldiers. They had rifles. I had a pitchfork. Before anything happened, a friend grabbed me and we got out of there."

Tzamir recalled that she had been "one time in a wheat field, and the soldiers fired at us, and we crawled through the wheat fields" to get away. "We worked in agriculture those days," Yael Schuster recalled. "I grew vegetables. There was a group of women in the vegetable fields and the vineyards. I liked to grow a mixture of vegetables, but most of the time it was just carrots and potatoes. It was difficult to get the produce to our homes, transporting them to the house was hard. It was easier to send them to Tel Aviv than to the dining room."

She also remembered that "there was no pavement inside the public bathroom, and it would get muddy in the shower. But it was not so horrible, because we were young."

Resnik said he lost 10 kilograms in weight after moving from Argentina to Mefalsim. All those vegetables, he explained. He had been used to the good life in Argentina, where they ate a lot of meat.

Today on the kibbutz, approximately 25 students from Argentina, who have immigrated in advance of their parents, are going through the same withdrawal.

"Most will stay in the country," Tzamir predicted.