2003-07-18 Ruhama, Israel—Profile
 |
|
|
Ruhama: Kibbutz of compassion San Diego Jewish Press-Heritage, July 18, 2003 |
|
2003-07-18 Ruhama, Israel—Profile |
||||
|
|
|
||||
|
|
|
By Donald H. Harrison RUHAMA, Israel—Kibbutz Ruhama on the eastern edge of the Sha¹ar Hanegev regional group of communities takes its name from the same Hebrew word root as rachmanut, meaning "compassion." Today, as kibbutzim all over Israel are being forced to become more and more capitalistic, long-time kibbutzniks like Shoshana Harari hope that whatever economic system Ruhama adopts, it will remain a community that treats people with compasson. There are two San Diego connections to this story: Harari is the grandmother of Leetal Ben-Tzvi, an active member of San Diego's Jewish community, and the Sha'ar Hanegev (Gate of the Negev) group of communities is a partnership region for the United Jewish Federation of San Diego County. Harari experienced the satisfaction of practicing rachmanut about a year after making her home in 1947 as a young single girl in the tents of Ruhama. The kibbutz authorities here directed her to take about 50 of the kibbutz's young children away to Tel Aviv and help care for them there while their parents stayed behind to defend the settlement against the Egyptian army during Israel's War of Independence. Situated in the northern Negev desert, close to the Gaza Strip and between Egypt and the Israeli heartland in Tel Aviv, the kibbutzniks of Ruhama knew that their homes would not be a safe place for children if and when Egypt would try to negate the vote of the United Nations that created Israel as a new state. It was ironic, yet pleasing, that the task should fall to Harari, who then was known by her European maiden name of Sonia Borus. Only a few years earlier, she too was a child who was removed from harm's way by compassionate strangers. In 1941, when Harari was just 14, Recha Frier, a deputy to Zionist leader Henrietta Szold, conceived of Aliyat HaNoar, a program to rescue Jewish youth from Europe. Harari and 14 other girls were smuggled from Berlin to Yugoslavia, moving from place to place just one step ahead of the nazis. Eventually they crossed out of Yugoslavia, making their way to the town of Nonantola, Italy, where they stayed for about a year in a place called the Villa Emma. The Italian town protected the children, who had increased in number to about 50 boys and girls. In particular, Nonatola¹s parish priest was sympathetic to the young Jews of Villa Emma, at great personal risk arranging for them to be provided with Italian passports when they again came under threat from the nazis. Using the forged documents, the group passed into neutral Switzerland, where they remained sheltered until the end of the war in 1945. Then they sailed as legal immigrants to Israel. Harari¹s first home in Israel was a kibbutz near the Lebanese border, but she subsequently transferred to Ruhama in 1947. The community has been her home ever since. She told her story to me in two installments — at the compact, 45-square-meter home she shares with her husband Yusef and at the Sha'ar Hanegev Community Center a few miles away, where programs including the Yachdav Club for seniors are underwritten by the regional council. When I first met met Harari at the community center, on the grounds of Sappir College, she was working on handicraft projects that she planned as presents for her three great-grandchildren, including Leetal's 8-month-old son Yanai. When she put her work temporarily aside to tell the story of Ruhama's early days to me and to Alon Schuster, the mayor of Sha'ar Hanegev, other women in the arts and crafts room also laid down their projects to hear her memories. Claudia Bar, director of daily programming for the seniors, also came in to listen. When Harari arrived at the kibbutz, she lived in a tent with three or four other single girls and worked in the nursery. After Israel's Independence War was over, she returned with the children from Tel Aviv and met in Ruhama a recent Jewish immigrant from Russia who had served in the war. She and Yusef Harari married. "When I got pregnant with my first child in 1950, there was snow that year," Shoshana Harari recalled. Snow hasn't been seen since in this desert community. "We lived in a tent. Next we moved to a wood hut, and then to a barracks, where one room had been partitioned. "I went through three pregnancies without an indoor toilet," she said, drawing clucks of knowing sympathy from the other women in the room. Ultimately, she and Yusef had three daughters and one son, all of whom "grew up in the children¹s house" operated by the kibbutz under a philosophy that the children should bond by growing to adulthood together, freeing the adults to do needed work in the fields. "That ended in 1991. Children no longer stay there at night," she said. "In my current house, I have lived 32 years," Harari said. Though it is quite compact, "I have a bedroom, a salon, a kitchen" and, yes, a bathroom. The Hararis still enjoy relatively good health, with Shoshana in her 70s and Yosef over 80. Besides participating in the community center programs, they enjoy strolling over the picturesque, campus-like grounds of Ruhama where occasional artifacts dating back to ancient Byzantine times have been unearthed. The pioneers of the socialist Zionist movement Hashomer Hatzair who preceded Harari to Ruhama in 1943 were refugees in their 20s from Eastern Europe. Idealistic about establishing an Israeli presence at the northern part of the Negev, they were undeterred by the fact that three times before efforts had failed to create a permanent settlement at Ruhama. A dilapidated museum building near the kibbutz's sprawling hen houses is all that is left of the original 1911 settlement from which the Jews were later expelled by the Ottoman Turks. Two subsequent attempts to reestablish the settlement during the time of the British Mandate were curtailed by the Arab riots against Jews in 1929 and 1936. Today, the pioneers who came in 1943 are in their 80s. While some are still in good health, others are ailing, according to Debi Manor, a former kibbutz general secretary. On the grounds of Ruhama is a full-care center for elderly patients. Shift nurse Juanita Hernaez, a Filipina, said the patients suffer from such ailments as Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, dementia, paralysis and stroke. Margalit Shibaz, the director, said the center has 25 beds. When I visited last week, only 10 of them were occupied. Another three ailing seniors were coming regularly from their nearby homes to have hot lunches at the center. Downstairs, there are areas for seniors to drop by and make handicrafts or engage in other recreations. This part of the facility is not as well-developed as the Yachdav program operated at the Sha'ar Hanegev community center, and that is a good thing, according to Manor. As long as the seniors are able to travel to other areas in the Sha'ar Hanegev region, they are encouraged to do so. It enables them to broaden their social contacts. Even though Ruhama is financially hard-pressed, kibbutz members "are absolutely committed to helping our older people," Manor declares. This is no small statement: Agricultural crops do not generate sufficient income to support the kibbutz, nor does its small factory, which manufactures many varieties of brushes. Asian factories produce similar brushes so inexpensively that Ruhama cannot compete. To earn a living, more and more kibbutzniks are required to take jobs outside the kibbutz. Drori Kaplun, the kibbutz's current general secretary, is trying to find new income-producing projects. In the meantime, he said, to make sure that the pioneers who built the kibbutz can continue to live in familiar surroundings—and not be shipped off to some government-run institution where no one loves them— Ruhama's membership has agreed to assess itself to pay for the facility. Pioneers like Harari believed that Ruhama would continue indefinitely under a socialistic system in which people contributed according to the old Marxian theorem, "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs." However, as kibbutzim found themselves deeper and deeper into debt in tough economic times, the resolve of many of their members wavered. In Ruhama, membership dropped from 350 members who had bound their fortunes to each other to the present 210. To pay for such a facility as the full-service senior care center meant not only self-taxation, it required general belt tightening on the kibbutz. Also, Kaplun reported, "we cut community services like the dining room. Now every family cares for itself." For many this decision was symbolic of how greatly times have changed. The kibbutz dining halls were legendary meeting places where families not only ate but could debate. The dining halls were places where everyone came to know each other's children. Now, however, there are relatively few children on the kibbutz. Not all the kibbutzim of the Sha'ar Hanegev region have cut such features as the kibbutz dining hall; each in fact has been evolving its own plan to meet the problems of a changing economy. As always in a kibbutz, every new step is the subject of intense discussion by the kibbutz's residents. Although for some the changes are disturbing, Shoshana Harari says as long as the core of the kibbutz philosophy— caring for others— is maintained, she is willling to adjust her expectations. Growing up, she said, she had not been familiar with the ideology of the Hashomer Hatzair, but after arriving at Ruhama, she became accustomed to socialistic Zionism and built her life around it. "I fit myself to the communinty," she said. "It's not so hard
to change." |
