{"id":97601,"date":"2022-08-24T17:05:52","date_gmt":"2022-08-24T15:05:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=97601"},"modified":"2022-08-15T06:42:33","modified_gmt":"2022-08-15T04:42:33","slug":"24-05-78","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=97601","title":{"rendered":"The New Kibbutz"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>The New Kibbutz<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/span><\/h5>\n

MATTI FRIEDMAN<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Kishorit, a self-described neurodiverse kibbutz, is redefining Israeli communal living at a time when these communities are on the decline.<\/strong><\/span><\/h4>\n

\n.
\nKISHORIT VIA FACEBOOK<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

The kibbutz, one of the greatest ideas ever put into practice, has fallen on hard times. Having pioneered a new country and wrought a revolution in Jewish history, most of these communes no longer subscribe to radical Zionist egalitarianism and have resigned themselves to life as suburbs, leaving a hole at the center of the country\u2019s consciousness that we haven\u2019t managed to fill with anything better. I\u2019m always happy to hear a pulse\u2014like the few kibbutzim that have prospered and stayed socialist, or like the scrappy guerilla activists of the \u201curban kibbutz\u201d movement, who pool resources and work for the common good but live in cities. For the past few years, I\u2019ve been hearing about one unique evolution of the idea on a hill of grapevines near the border with Lebanon. Last week I drove up to visit.<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Kishorit was founded 25 years ago, just as the kibbutz movement finished its remarkable 90-year run. By that year, 1997, the Israeli free market was conclusively on the rise, and by 2000, Palestinian suicide bombers had blown the old Labor Zionist peace dream into oblivion. The next year, the last kibbutznik prime minister, Ehud Barak, was voted out of office, and the movement largely faded to the margins of Israeli society. This community was founded on the site of an abandoned kibbutz, Kishor, which had dissolved itself after years of failure.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

I passed the goat-milk operation, the country\u2019s third-largest, and the winery, which produces 50,000 bottles a year. There were the usual bomb shelters, a reminder that the Hezbollah missile crews were just a few miles to the north and were unlikely to make an exception for the people here. In the members\u2019 meeting room near the communal dining hall, a man named Oren asked me if I\u2019d like to sit down and discuss a book. The greenhouses here looked like the ones you\u2019d see at any other kibbutz, with rough tables and hanging tools and sweaty workers in cargo pants. I noticed signs of cognitive disability only when two of the workers walked over to say hi and see how I was doing; one of the differences between Kishorit and a typical kibbutz is that the people here are much friendlier. Not far from the goat sheds, a man in a red T-shirt stood in the shade of a terebinth, jerking his arms as he carried on a forceful discussion with himself.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Kishorit thinks of itself as a kind of neurodiverse kibbutz\u2014that term, \u201cneurodiverse,\u201d being the one preferred here to older ones like \u201cmentally disabled\u201d or \u201cspecial needs.\u201d Many communal decisions here are taken in a plenum by democratic vote, in the kibbutz style, including both the 186 neurodiverse members and the 45 member families who are \u201cneurotypical,\u201d the term for what most people might call \u201cnormal.\u201d Some members can work full days, others can barely work at all\u2014the place runs on the old kibbutz precept that you give what you can and get what you need. In the winery, for example, I met Yaron Biran, 50, who was born in Emek Hefer on the coastal plain. He was hauling a crate of bottles and stopped to chat. His job changes with the seasons, he said\u2014pruning, picking, packing. He was busy, and had to go. In the kibbutz grocery, an elderly worker named Haya encouraged me to try the cherry tomatoes. Another member is an adherent of Chabad, and has decided that his job is to help other members perform religious commandments like putting on tefillin. That\u2019s OK too.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Yael Shilo, one of the two founders of Kishorit, was born in 1948, the same year as Israel, at Kibbutz Kfar Szold in the Galilee panhandle. The idea for a neurodiverse kibbutz came to her after she married a man whose son fit that description, and she has dedicated the rest of her life to making it work. Shilo\u2019s parents, like the other founders of her own kibbutz, had escaped places like Germany and Poland for lives of physical hardship in the Land of Israel. They spent a full decade hauling basalt rocks just to clear fields so they could start farming. \u201cThey worked themselves into the ground,\u201d Shilo said. Her father was from Vienna, her mother from Krakow. Back in Europe, most of the founders\u2019 families had been removed from physical labor, but that world was gone, and the kibbutz and the nation needed a generation that was muscular and hardy. There wasn\u2019t going to be much room for the weak or disabled. That was Shilo\u2019s world as a child.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n

The capable body was always a preoccupation of the kibbutz and of the Zionist movement: the bronzed pioneer of the Jewish National Fund posters, or the old newsreels with hundreds of brash New Jews performing calisthenics in unison under the blue-and-white flag. \u201cYour first glance when you meet a young native-born man will reveal a flourishing, muscular, tall body,\u201d wrote the pioneer Yaakov Cohen in 1933. \u201cThe hunched back and the bent gait that many scholars have identified as almost racial trademarks seem to have vanished, and the anxiety and fear of the \u2018gentiles\u2019 and the feeling of inadequacy and inferiority that were the lot of the young Jew in the Diaspora seem to have been pulled out by the roots.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Just as the sabra, the prickly pear adopted as a symbol for the native-born Jews of Israel, grew wild here, wrote the historian Oz Almog in his book\u00a0The Sabra<\/em>, \u201cso were the native-born Israelis growing, so it was said, naturally, \u2018without complexes,\u2019 in their true homeland.\u201d My own first kibbutz memory was at a swimming pool at Kibbutz Kfar Blum in the late 1980s, when I was 11 years old, visiting Israel with my family from our home in Toronto. I was standing on the blistering stone floor by the pool when my attention was diverted by the sudden arrival of a raucous horde of boys and girls\u2014it was kibbutz gym class. They hit the water like a dolphin pod and churned it like beautiful torpedoes, another lap and another. They were all foam, tan, and muscle, and to my Canadian eyes, they seemed like another species. It was like being a house cat wandering into a zoo and happening upon the cheetah pen.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Shilo remembers the kibbutz as a wonderful place, even if the community was never as equal as it strove to be. \u201cIn our kibbutz, like anywhere, there were strong and weak. The idea of equality is a dream\u2014in reality, there are people who are charismatic and strong, the leaders, and people who are more marginal, and it\u2019s naive to think that everyone was equal and loved each other.\u201d But the kibbutz was nonetheless a great thing:\u00a0davar gadol<\/em>, as she put it several times in our conversation. You were never alone, and you always had someone to help you. So what if a new kind of kibbutz could be created, one that would revolve around people who hadn\u2019t been magically cured of \u201ccomplexes\u201d and who\u2019d never be invited to star in those glorious calisthenic films, one that would harness the power of community but put it at the disposal of people who\u2019d ordinarily be out of the frame?<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\n

The idea crystallized when she met her stepson\u2019s social worker, Shuki Levinger, at Kfar Tikva. This was a village for special-needs Israelis that was cutting-edge when founded in 1964 by an irascible nonconformist, the German-born educator and agronomist Dr. Siegfried Hirsch, on the site of a failed kibbutz near Haifa. The young state already had institutions for Israelis suffering from mental disabilities, but they resembled hospitals, with people\u2019s conditions medicalized and their lives regimented in almost every way. Ignoring much of the common wisdom, the German doctor declared Kfar Tikva to be a village not for charity or babysitting, but for professional training, like the agricultural villages where he\u2019d taught in the past. According to Levinger, the doctor used to joke that he founded the village mainly to get his neurodiverse stepdaughter, Yehudit, out of the house; except he didn\u2019t say \u201cneurodiverse,\u201d of course, he called her \u201cretarded,\u201d in the style of those times. \u201cHe seemed crazy on the surface,\u201d Levinger recalled, \u201cbut that concealed a deep understanding.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Levinger and Shilo developed the idea together and spent a few years wrangling the Israeli bureaucracy, which had a hard time understanding what they were talking about. But by the end of the summer of 1997 they\u2019d been given the site of what had once been Kibbutz Kishor and the first four members moved in. Today members range in age from 18 to 71. Some have physical disabilities as well. About two dozen couples live together. Members have their own apartments\u2014they get the medical help they need, but live as they wish. There are no visiting hours or unnecessary limitations on anyone\u2019s independence. The village is meant to be a permanent home: A member named Arik Gilad, who\u2019d lived here for 15 years, recently died of a heart attack at 59 and became the first person to be buried at Kishorit. The kibbutz\u2019s agriculture doesn\u2019t turn a profit, although that, too, doesn\u2019t make it much different from a regular kibbutz. Most of the funding comes from Israel\u2019s Welfare Ministry, with smaller sums coming from private donations.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Outside the winery, I met Mark, 34, originally from New Jersey. (He preferred not to give his last name.) He accompanied me on a tour of the bakery, past a half-dozen people kneading around a metal table. Their mental condition wasn\u2019t clear, and didn\u2019t seem to matter. All I could see is that they were covered with flour. Mark has been here for 13 years. In the U.S., he said, his family put him on a waiting list for a home and was told it was likely to be 30 years. \u201cThere\u2019s nothing like this in America,\u201d he said. It\u2019s not just the community, he said, or the beauty of the location, but the fact that it\u2019s not run for profit.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

I wondered aloud if this place could ever be reproduced in other countries. It would be nice to think the answer is yes, but Israelis have a communal attitude and a talent for improvisation that they often take for granted, but which is unique and hard to imitate. Mark didn\u2019t think so. \u201cA place like this takes so much heart,\u201d Mark said. \u201cYou can\u2019t just copy it.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n

Kishorit is an innovation of the kind Israelis like to celebrate among themselves and display to outsiders, along with pioneering successes like the rehabilitation village known as Adi Negev, founded a few years later in the southern desert by Doron Almog, an IDF general, father of a son with severe mental disabilities, and, as of last month, the new chairman of the Jewish Agency. But in housing neurodiverse adults, Israel actually lags behind other Western countries. In many European states, particularly in Scandinavia, there are no longer large institutions for people with mental disabilities, and nearly everyone is housed in the community, said Dr. Lital Barlev, an expert at the Jerusalem think tank JDC Brookdale. In Israel, by contrast, of 11,286 mentally disabled Israelis who live outside the home, according to her research, about two-thirds are still in institutions. Even the United States is ahead of us.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

\u201cThe trend is moving people to regular residences, not to neighborhoods of disabled people or kibbutzim of disabled people, but to life like everyone else,\u201d said Barlev. \u201cYou\u2019ll have a regular neighborhood in the city, and every once in a while you\u2019ll have an apartment with people who have disabilities. This is correct not only for people with disabilities, but for everyone else, who need to see these people as part of society.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

But life in the city can mean acute isolation. \u201cIf we put people in apartments, then they\u2019re alone in their apartments,\u201d said Levinger, Kishorit\u2019s co-founder, when we spoke on a bench outside the village\u2019s little office. \u201cThe kibbutz is one solution for loneliness.\u201d Dalia Peleg, a counselor and resident, moved to Kishorit after her daughter Tal, 50, came to live here 20 years ago. \u201cWhat these people lack most is company,\u201d Peleg said. \u201cAt home people are nice to them. They\u2019ll say hi. But no one will ever invite them over for coffee.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

A short walk away, in the swimming pool, a man with twisted limbs lay on his back in the water, moving with the help of an instructor. A tractor puttered between the rows of vines: The old kibbutz may be gone, but the grapes are growing. At the greenhouses the tools went down. It was time for a coffee break.<\/span><\/p>\n

\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n
\n

Matti Friedman<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0is a Tablet columnist and the author, most recently, of\u00a0Who by Fire: Leonard Cohen in the Sinai<\/a>.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n
\n
\n
\n

Zawarto\u015b\u0107 publikowanych artyku\u0142\u00f3w i materia\u0142\u00f3w nie reprezentuje pogl\u0105d\u00f3w ani opinii Reunion’68,<\/em>
\nani te\u017c webmastera Blogu Reunion’68, chyba ze jest to wyra\u017anie zaznaczone.
\nTwoje uwagi, linki, w\u0142asne artyku\u0142y lub wiadomo\u015bci prze\u015blij na adres:
\n<\/em>webmaster@reunion68.com<\/span><\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The New Kibbutz MATTI FRIEDMAN Kishorit, a self-described neurodiverse kibbutz, is redefining Israeli communal living at a time when these communities are on the decline. . KISHORIT VIA FACEBOOK The kibbutz, one of the greatest ideas ever put into practice, has fallen on hard times. Having pioneered a new country and wrought a revolution in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[26,24],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97601"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=97601"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97601\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":97613,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97601\/revisions\/97613"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=97601"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=97601"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=97601"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}