If you build it, will they come?
If you build it, will they come?
As the Kibbutz Movement celebrates its centennial, officials say no shortage of foreign volunteers; what’s lacking are kibbutzim to host them.
By SHARON UDASIN
11/11/2010 3:54:26 PM
Photo by: Courtesy
Karin Ya’akobi can still smell the bitter stench of decaying orange rinds from the piles of horse feed that greeted her the night she arrived at Kibbutz Kfar Masaryk in 1979.
“I get up in the middle of the night and I still smell the orange peels,” Ya’akobi said, noting that the rotting fruit odors were a stark contrast to the spotlessness of her native Sweden.
“Then they put us in these houses made of asbestos, but we had the best time in our lives. We didn’t understand; I didn’t know what Israel was.”
Ya’akobi, then 19, had made the decision to try volunteer life on her northern kibbutz after the Swedish kibbutz volunteer program – Svekiv – and similar movements in other countries became increasingly popular, attracting non-Jewish volunteers en masse throughout the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s.
This year, the State of Israel is honoring the efforts of such volunteers as the kibbutz movement celebrates its centennial. More than 350,000 foreign volunteers have taken part in the movement alongside their Israeli contemporaries since the movement’s beginnings, reaching up to 12,000 a year during its heyday, according to Aya Sagi, manager of the volunteer department at the Kibbutz Movement office in Tel Aviv.
Until around the turn of the 21st century, most volunteers hailed from England, South Africa, Sweden, Demark and Germany, she said. Right now kibbutzim only get a fraction of the volunteers they formerly had – about 1,200 a year – and Sagi says that larger numbers now come from both the US and South Korea.
“We will be happy to accept more, of course, but at the moment it’s more or less even,” Sagi said, in terms of space for volunteers. “We have enough volunteers for enough kibbutzim. My goal is to find more kibbutzim. The moment I find more kibbutzim, it will be easy for me to find volunteers, because volunteers want to come.”
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