From Farm to Table – Organic Israeli Judaism

0:42 – GS:

So join me in conversation with Iran Yarkoni, Anna Gilboa, and Ari Bar-El.

0:54 – Iran Yarkoni

So this archive was established by a man called Aryeh Ben-Gurion. Aryeh Ben-Gurion was the nephew of the first Prime Minister of Israel. Aryeh was born in Ukraine. And his father was murdered. And after this, Tzipora (his mother) took her two sons. One of them was Aryeh, and the other one was Immanuel. And because of the… Because of Ben Gurion, he was the head of the Jewish Agency. They got the certificate to go to, to arrive to Israel, and they arrive in the early 30s to Haifa. And Aryeh studied there in the Reali School.

1:46 – Iran Yarkoni

And after he finished 12 years, he decided that he wants to be a pioneer. He was a part of the youth movement, the one who settled in Beit Hashita. And because he was the one who graduated 12 years at school, the only one who graduated 12 they said, OK, you graduated, you will be the educator in our kibbutz for the first group that was born here. Because Aryeh got the job of the educator from the perspective of an educator, he started to collect answers how to deal with the first generation of young Jews who were born in Israel.

2:36 – Iran Yarkoni

But you know that kibbutz was the first Jewish settlement without a synagogue…. because they had the Cheder Ochel (Dining Room) and they had…

2:46 – GS

Maybe in 2,000 years.

2:50 – Iran Yarkoni

Yes. So he looks for the right way how to connect them to the roots and to the tradition on the one hand. On the other hand, they were secular. He wanted them to stay secular. And he started to find the right combination how to deal with this. And from this perspective of an educator, he started to collect answers for different other educators from other kibbutzim.

And he collected and collected.

3:25 – Iran Yarkoni

And actually, he collected most of his life. And when he died in the late 90s, he left behind more than one million documents. Now, all the documents deal with a culture that was created in the different kibbutzim, with two sections, a section of holidays, the annual cycle, and a section of ceremonies, of life cycles. And this is what we have here on the upper floor, and we will show you later. So this is the story, the short story of this place. I will tell that in the early 2,000s, this, after a hard decade of this kibbutz, of this community, they decided to quit from the responsibility of this archive, and then we heard about it, and a minute before they decided to throw it away, we said, okay, there is…

4:47 – GS

Who’s we?

4:48 – Iran Yarkoni

We. Okay, yeah, it’s a long story, but we are… We were from… A youth movement, we were elder, but we were a youth movement, we called them HaMahanot HaOlim, and we already settled in Kibbutz Naaran to create an elder movement for our groups after the army, and we were seeking for missions to do and to create for the society in Israel, and to renew the ideas and ideals of the kibbutz movement. And from this area, with this scope, we heard about the story about this place. And we knew one year before, and we decided to take the responsibility on this place.

5:43 – Iran Yarkoni

Because we understood that this is kind of a treasure trove, that according to all the challenges of the Israeli society, here there are a lot of answers that can be relevant. So, we start to open it, and we found that it’s much bigger than we thought. Because to open a trove with one million documents, it takes years. And also, to build for us a place in schools …., we will tell you about it later. So, it takes years, but this is what we are doing here.

6:29 – GS

Now let’s start to talk a little bit about the Haggadah because this is what you came

GS: I can just say as someone who comes from the goal of it especially America where there are so many variations of judaism and you come to Israel and you see the monopoly of the orthodox and more importantly the Hilonim (Secular Jews) who when they look for spirituality, they might go to uh… What they call hodu (the Far East) … They look elsewhere because they’ve been robbed of alternatives and then you look at uh…

7:03 – GS

Things like conservative Judaism and Reform Judaism, and you say, they might work in America, but why would they work here because they weren’t grown here? They’re exports from outside. And what excites me about the kibbutz and what you saved is that this was an organic creation of Israeli Chilutzim (pioneers), secular, of their interaction with Judaism. And I think that’s the value of this archive and what you’re doing is extremely important.

7:38 – Ari Bar-El

If I can just add.

7:39 – Ari Bar-El

So, my name is Ari and I’m one of the archive staff. I’m one of the members of the archive staff, and just referring to what you said, I came here about two or three years ago, so I’m not from a machanot ha-olim, which is, Eran didn’t say it, but as an outsider I can say it, this is, in a way, the new avant-garde of the kibbutzim. They are the ones that now, think in these terms of contributing to the society as a whole, et cetera. But when I came here and I was, this is not the area.

GS: What is your background?

8:28 – Ari Bar-El

I’m a historian. I wrote my PhD on David Ben-Gurion’s attitudes and policy towards science and technology. So, Zionism, I taught about Zionism, so that was close enough to come here. And when I came here and I saw this, the second thought I had that this is like a fourth church of Judaism. If you’ve got Orthodox and you’ve got Reforms and Conservative, this is in a way a fourth church. And I think that connects to what you’ve… Not the church, a stream. How do you say it?

9:10 – Multiple Speakers

But how do you… Okay, so…

9:12 – Iran Yarkoni

It’s a stream. Kibun, or…

9:15 – Ari Bar-El

Zerem.

9:17 – Multiple Speakers

Zerem, yes.

9:17 – GS

The reform started in Germany. The reform is…

9:20 – Multiple Speakers

In America, we call them movements.

9:22 – Ari Bar-El

Movements.

9:22 – Multiple Speakers

So this is the fourth.

9:23 – GS

Unfortunately, some of the movements don’t move very often. Okay. They’re supposed to be movements, and we have Reconstructionism, we have alive Judaism. Much more. But Lut has been a Petri dish. Of alternative ways. And Israel, unfortunately, has been robbed of that. So whether it’s a fourth or I think it’s unique is what you can definitely see.

9:48 – Ari Bar-El

I heard your podcast, so I know you would agree with us that this is a remarkable, a remarkable culture and a remarkable thing. And as an outsider, this is not a usual archive. The founding fathers did not just collect material. The main job was to do cultural job and educational job. So, it’s, they didn’t do, I mean, in archive terms they, you know, you would find Aryeh Ben-Gurion cutting papers and doing all things, documents, but he had a mission of educating and spreading this kind of Judaism.

10:42 – Ari Bar-El

And this is why this archive is organized differently than classical archives. The classical archive would be organized around the principle of provenance. Okay, so if you document an organization, the archive would document, as it is, all the different divisions inside. And most archives are, this is the classical archives, this archive is a thematic archive. So, it follows the needs of this cultural activist and the needs were, I need material for holidays, I need material for life, all kinds of life ceremonies, and I need material to document the kibbutz as it evolves.

11:35 – Ari Bar-El

So these are our three main sections that will be the circle of the year or the year circle, circle of life and kibbutz culture. And then within these sections we will have, if it’s the year, the circle, so it’s different holidays and the circle of life would be different life ceremonies, birth, death, and all and all that kibbutz culture and and then they would we have different kinds of material within this Different sections, I’ll give you some of them. But the first one which is Maybe the prime material.

12:22 – Ari Bar-El

I don’t know what the translation in English. So maybe say Masechet Hag…  So Haggadah is a Masechet Chag of Pesach. But this kibbutz, or the kibbutz movement, has developed Masachtot for many holidays.

12:42 – Orna Stern

It’s like the program, the description of the holiday.

12:46 – Ari Bar-El

Tractat is a Masechet.

12:48 – GS

You’re a word that comes from the Talmud, which is Masechet.

Ari Bar-El Exactly.  Okay.

12:54 – GS

And the idea is, if you look on YouTube, you see that for Shavuot and Pesach, they had programs. If you have programs, you have people writing texts. You have people writing songs. And so what you’re saying is that it was grouped into…

13:10 – Ari Bar-El

So the Massechet is taking all these parts and putting it into one… Like a ceremony. ….one ceremony with all the instructions how to do the ceremonies and the content. So this is like, that would be the prime material in a way, and the Pesach is the prime of the prime, or… And then we would have, like, you can envision it as parts of this Masechet. We will have sections dealing with blessings and all kinds of ceremonies, but…

13:48 – GS

They had a Tekkes.

13:49 – Ari Bar-El

Yes.

13:49 – GS

They had a ceremony, and because they were kibbutzim, they weren’t in individual homes. They were typically all public. That’s right. So even it’s the, it’s a form following function. Yes. And because they were all public organized, they had a committee and the kibbutz, everything was by committee. So you have a lot of thought, you have a lot of archival material, I’m sure.

14:09 – Ari Bar-El

That’s right. And now you understand why in the 80s and 90s when the kibbutzim got into trouble, these ceremonies were less and less, and the production of this material deteriorated as well. So again, form and content. Exactly. And then they would have like, there is a section about sources, different sources, biblical or from Mishnah, Talmud, or from Chalutzim. And then thoughts and essays. That would be another. A lot of illustrations and graphic material. Beautiful.

14:51 – Ari Bar-El

And, you know, even a six-year-old kid that draws the Haggadah or something. A lot of this kind. This is… The archive is from the… Melematah ad lemalah..

15:02 – Multiple Speakers

From the people… From the bottom up.

15:05 – GS

And correct me if I’m wrong, but some of them were published. And some want a mimeograph machine that might be changed every year. So it’s very fluid.

15:16 – Iran Yarkoni

Most of them, until the 70s, would change every year. I will give you some examples.

15:22 – Multiple Speakers

It’s a part of the idea that it must be relevant.

15:27 – GS

That in and of itself is a radical idea for anything that is close to religion or culture, because it’s changing. In terms of the culture of the kibbutz, the first thing I do when I get a Haggadah, I want to see if it’s traditional or if the kibbutz has changed it, is I look at the Ma Neshtana. And typically in the Ma Neshtana, You can say, why in all other nights the children live, separately from the adults. But it references the kibbutz culture. And that’s the first place where you say, okay, this one’s going to be interesting.

16:01 – Ari Bar-El

That’s right. And there are other sections and other kinds of material. One more kind of material that might be interesting is the one that has two, reports on the conduct of the holiday. Ben-Gurion, in a way, Aryeh Ben-Gurion was like a cultural, not dictator, but commissar, and he would ask every kibbutz, to report what happened, what was good, what was bad, what worked, what didn’t work. And following these reports, he would, I think some of the Haggadot they have conducted later, they have set up later, refer to that, and many of their publications were then…

16:51 – Ari Bar-El

So this is a very interesting, and the other interesting kind of material is ideas and suggestions how to celebrate a holiday.

17:03 – Iran Yarkoni

Yes, the traditional Haggadah is based on Midrashim.

17:09 – Iran Yarkoni

And the Kibbutz HaKadah is based on the Bible.

On the Bible. The Tenach

17:15 – Iran Yarkoni

Yes, the book of Shemot, Exodus, and the book of Devarim… How do you say that?

GS: Deuteronomy.

Iran Yarkoni : Both of them are the basics. Why? Because they understand that what we missed in the traditional Haggadah is the story. And they wanted to bring the story back into the Haggadah, because this is the main command of the seder to tell the story of Exodus from Egypt. So, they brought the story into the Haggadah, the two parts of the story, the part of the slavery and the part of the Exodus. I want to show something interesting.

18:12 – Iran Yarkoni

The main midrash of the traditional Haggadah is called Arami Oved Avi. Arami Oved Avi is a paragraph from Sefer Devarim.

GS: Deuteronomy.

Iran Yarkoni: It’s a very unique paragraph that tells, in a few sentences, the whole history of the Jewish nation.

18:38 – GS

But the context is the Bikurim.

Iran Yarkoni :Nachon. Nachon.

GS: Of bringing the first fruits, and you come in front of the Kohen, and this is the statement you say. So it’s a quote within the Bible, which many people feel is fairly ancient. In reference to other things in the Bible, things like the Shirat HaYam, Oz Yashir, is considered fairly ancient, and this is certainly one of those.

19:04 – Iran Yarkoni

Yes, and now this Midrash, when it comes on the traditional Haggadah, First of all, it divides into parts, so it’s hard to understand it, but never mind. It ends, yes,

אֲרַמִּי֙ אֹבֵ֣ד אָבִ֔י וַיֵּ֣רֶד מִצְרַ֔יְמָה וַיָּ֥גׇר שָׁ֖ם בִּמְתֵ֣י מְעָ֑ט וַֽיְהִי־שָׁ֕ם לְג֥וֹי גָּד֖וֹל עָצ֥וּם וָרָֽב׃

וַיָּרֵ֧עוּ אֹתָ֛נוּ הַמִּצְרִ֖ים וַיְעַנּ֑וּנוּ וַיִּתְּנ֥וּ עָלֵ֖ינוּ עֲבֹדָ֥ה קָשָֽׁה׃

וַנִּצְעַ֕ק אֶל־יְהֹוָ֖ה אֱלֹהֵ֣י אֲבֹתֵ֑ינוּ וַיִּשְׁמַ֤ע יְהֹוָה֙ אֶת־קֹלֵ֔נוּ וַיַּ֧רְא אֶת־עׇנְיֵ֛נוּ וְאֶת־עֲמָלֵ֖נוּ וְאֶֽת־לַחֲצֵֽנוּ׃

וַיּוֹצִאֵ֤נוּ יְהֹוָה֙ מִמִּצְרַ֔יִם בְּיָ֤ד חֲזָקָה֙ וּבִזְרֹ֣עַ נְטוּיָ֔ה וּבְמֹרָ֖א גָּדֹ֑ל וּבְאֹת֖וֹת וּבְמֹפְתִֽים׃

This is all a quote from Dvarim. It’s like in the origin. Here on this point, the quote from the traditional Haggadah stops.

וַיְבִאֵ֖נוּ אֶל־הַמָּק֣וֹם הַזֶּ֑ה וַיִּתֶּן־לָ֙נוּ֙ אֶת־הָאָ֣רֶץ הַזֹּ֔את אֶ֛רֶץ זָבַ֥ת חָלָ֖ב וּדְבָֽשׁ׃

Okay? When he took us out from Egypt, but What we missed here, we missed the last sentence. And the last sentence is, This part is missing in the traditional Haggadah. Now, when it’s missing, it’s just a miss all the idea, because the idea of this story is, Va Yotzienu, take us out, and Va Yevienu El HaEretz Hazot. (And he took us into this land)

20:35 – Iran Yarkoni

But what is the problem? The problem is that the traditional Haggadah was created during the exile. So, they could not say around the table, Va Yevienu El HaEretz Hazot, because they are not sitting here.

They didn’t sit there.

20:50 – Iran Yarkoni

And when the first generations of pioneers came to Israel, they could not put this text on their table because they are sitting here. And so, they need to renew it and to add the missing sentence that was not a part of the Haggadah for 2,000 years. And this is, I think, one of the main renewals that they did. And because they were part of the history, they needed that the text will be full “Shalem”. So, this is one of the main changes that they did.

21:35 – GS

But let’s just stop there for a second, because you say it’s very easy to say a change, but the truth is they made a better Haggadah that was more loyal to its source, because Magid is the most important part and it’s telling the story, and the traditional Haggadah doesn’t tell the story. And then in terms of the last part of the Bikurim, the Mishnah in Pesachim says you have to say it “ad hasof”. And they don’t do it. Yes. And so what’s ironic is that the kibbutznikim, as Chiloni as they were, were actually fulfilling the original intention of the Haggadah more than the quote-unquote traditional Jews.

22:15 – Iran Yarkoni

This is it.

Yes. This is it.

22:17 – GS

But all the three Regalim were agricultural holidays initially. And the other thing that the Haggadah does, which I’m sure you’ll get into, is it gets into Tal (The prayer for rain/dew) and it gets into Aviv and celebration. So they again brought it back to its source. At the traditional Seder, you say, why is there salt water and parsley? And you say, because it’s aviv, or egg aviv. But they put it back into the Haggadah. So everything that they did was actually authentic and going back to the original roots.

22:52 – GS

You said in the beginning that they took us back to Tanakh and the story, but they did actually add two midrashim that are not part of the traditional Haggadah, but a lot of people discuss. One is that when the Egyptians were drowning, the angels started to sing, and God says, why are you singing when my children, meaning the Egyptians, are dying? So, I always thought that was a reform movement in America of a Western humanist, but this is part of Haggadot that are from Nitzuli Shoah (survivors of the Holocaust) that Seconds later, they’ll have talks about Shavuot Hamadka and actually talk about the Holocaust or talk about members of the kibbutz who were killed in guard duty.

23:41 – GS

So they weren’t, these were not kumbaya pacifists, but nonetheless, they brought this amazing midrash. At my seder, we always take a little bit of the wine and we dip it on the side. When we talk about the plagues, for the Egyptians that drowned. So that to me is always amazing. And then the other Midrash that they always bring is about Nachshon Ben Amin Adav, which again, in the Torah itself, it says Moses prayed right before the Yom Suf split. And the Midrash says, God said to Moshe, what are you praying for?

24:20 – GS

This is not a time to pray, it’s a time to act. And Nachshon, was the one who walked into the water and opened it up. And he was a chalutz, so when Ben-Gurion created the campaign to break the matzur, the siege of Jerusalem, that was Operation Nachshon. And there are at least three other operations in the military that are named after Nachshon, and they were Nachshonim, they were kibbutzim called. He was a critical semmel. For the Zionists, and they put that into…

24:56 – Iran Yarkoni

This is one of the first Haggadot that we have. This is from the group who established Beit Hashita, before the time of Reu, in 1928. There were a group that trained themselves to be pioneers in Hadera, and Passover arrived, Passover Eve, and they decided to write to themselves an Haggadah. Now, During the 20s This is the first generation of the Kibbutz Haggadot. The situation was that every Passover Eve there was only one generation around the table. Because they didn’t have sons yet.

25:41 – GS

And their parents might still be in Europe.

25:44 – Iran Yarkoni

Yes, their parents were in Europe. And they didn’t have children. So the main idea of Passover VeHigadata l’bincha (and you shall tell it to your child) didn’t fit. So, they decided to write a special text that it will fit to them and will tell them the story. It’s become a kind of a idyllic booklets with all the typical text and the ideological ideas that they wanted to promote. And because this is the holiday of redemption. So the brought all their ideals of the redemption into this booklet called Haggadah. So this, listen, we have here more than 2,000 copies of Haggadot, of different Haggadot.

26:44 – GS

So, you know, the collection is huge.

26:45 – GS

That’s just the first. But this is the reason that we’re here.

26:49 – GS

I buy Haggadot at auction. And this is, I bought this year the first edition of the Haggadah from Be’eri. In 1938, so I have this at home, and I looked at the notes that came with it from the auction house, and it was the first time I learned about your institute. It’s crazy that I hadn’t heard about it before, but this is what brought me here.

27:18 – Iran Yarkoni

Because I told you about the only one generation that sat around the table, so after a decade more or less, then when they already had children, they had a question what to do now, because from one hand, on one hand, this became the main holiday of the group when they brought all their, as I said, all their important texts into the Haggadah and they didn’t want to miss it. On the other hand, You can’t bring children to sit around a seder that takes two hours of reading and talking. So, they had to decide if they are going to quit from their seder or find a different solution.

28:17 – Iran Yarkoni

And they found a radical solution that during the Passover Eve, they will separate from their children. And they created a Haggadah for children. And you can see here the story from Sefer Shemot, from Exodus, and you can see here all the symbols of the Seder, just for children. So, the children had their own seder with their educators, and the adults sat in the Cheder Ochal (dining room) and did their seder with… (In Hebrew Aya Gur “But that contradicts the whole point of the seder?”)  because, as I said, it’s a radical idea to separate it. I mean, it’s less educational.

29:04 – Iran Yarkoni

All the education people were very qualified and they took it very seriously as a mission to make it a different Haggadah for the kids to how you teach it and educate and it’s not like it’s not important.

29:18 – GS

But what it did was, it made it from a pedagogic point of view, if a typical kid sits through the traditional service, they get nothing. And so they created, they realized that, I mean, we’ll get to another part of the Haggadah, the four children. In the Kibbutz Haggadah, you see different types of pictures. You see the Rasha (evil) sometimes dressed as a bourgeois in a suit and tie like a yeka (German – Bourgeois Jew) . And the Chacham is, doesn’t studying books, he’s out in the fields. So, they’re all using it for teaching, and that is a great segue into what this institute does, where it’s not just historical data here, it’s how do we continue the pedagogy, the teaching of what was behind the Haggadah.

30:09 – Iran Yarkoni

We talked before about the Man Nishtana. This is from 1915. Gvar Am. Gvar Am is one of the kibbutzim that today is still evacuated. And you can see about the Man Yishtana here. “When all the Jews will come to Israel?” “Why we held weapon?” “When will there be peace in our land and in the whole world?” This is from the 50s. Because they said that if we have an opportunity to ask questions, we need to ask the most difficult questions.

31:04 – Multiple Speakers

Banal and difficult.

31:06 – GS

So last year, when the demonstrations were going on, they created a Haggadah. Yes. But they used a traditional Haggadah and they supplemented it.

31:17 – Multiple Speakers

And it was such a lost opportunity. Yes.

31:20 – GS

But it’s because to write a Haggadah like this you have to be very knowledgeable. And the kibbutznikim were very knowledgeable because they were just one generation away from very strong Jewish learning.

31:33 – Iran Yarkoni

And you need a community that will come with you. And I think this is it because people are afraid not to use the traditional Haggadah or I don’t feel comfortable with this. And this is something that you have a large community

GS: And they don’t feel comfortable changing it.

The joke about Israelis is that the synagogue they don’t go to is Orthodox. Or the God they don’t believe in is Orthodox. As opposed to saying, that’s your Judaism, this is mine. And they’re afraid to change the Orthodox because somehow, they think it’s authentic. And they (the kibbutzniks) didn’t have that problem. You mentioned rites of passage. How did the kibbutz handle marriage? Did they write their own ceremonies?

32:25 – Ari Bar-El

Yes, yes. I mean, this is a part we haven’t yet reached organizing, but they have their own ketubot and they have their own ceremonies.

32:35 – Iran Yarkoni

This is Haggadah for Independence Day. This is not for Passover. Now, this was written by Aaron Meged, one of the famous authors in Israel, and he wrote it in 1949, after the end of the Independence War. Now, one of the questions or one of the challenges he wanted to deal with is what will be the text of Independence Day? Because he was afraid, and you’re also right, that if we will not have a text, This important holiday will be empty and we will stay only with the barbecue.

GS: Like July 4th in America.

33:33 – Iran Yarkoni

So, he creates a Haggadah. That takes of the same template of the Haggadah, the Passover Haggadah, but the story is not the Exodus from Egypt, the story is the Independence War. According to the different stages of the Independence war this Haggadah was copied to Tzahal because the IDF, they asked for a text for Independence Day. This Haggadah was copied to the Army because the Zahal asked for a text for Independence Day. But what happened in this Haggadah, he created on the same language of the Passover Haggadah, he created a new Haggadah. Now, one of the paragraphs, it said,I and not an Angel

לֹא עַל־יְדֵי מַלְאָךְ, וְלֹא עַל־יְדֵי שָׂרָף, וְלֹא עַל־יְדֵי שָׁלִיחַ, אֶלָּא הַקָּדוֹשׁ בָּרוּךְ הוּא בִּכְבוֹדוֹ וּבְעַצְמוֹ.

 Now, because of this, The Rabbinate of the IDF.

35:03 – GS

So just to translate, he took a very traditional saying that when the Jews were redeemed from Egypt, it wasn’t by the hands of an angel. It wasn’t by any intermediary. It was just from God alone. And here they quote the whole text verbatim, except at the end, they say at the hands of the defense forces of Israel, Tzahal.

And so you’re saying the Rabbanut was not happy. So what happened? The Rabinate was not happy?

35:31 – Iran Yarkoni

The Rebbinate decided to destroy all the copies of this Haggadah, and this Haggadah never arrived to soldiers. And we have here in the archive only one copy.

Dror Zilberstein: How much? (laughs)

Iran Yarkoni : And for the Fiftieth anniversary of Israel, we decided to print it again. So, this is a copy of the first original. But till we did it, it was, you know, ganuz (hidden) nobody knows about this text. Only because of this paragraph.

36:14 – GS

Okay, so that’s amazing, but we just threw out a word here, ganuz. In Jewish studies, there’s the Cairo Geniza, changed everything about a study of traditional texts, because in the Geniza, which is an archive, but in traditional societies, instead of throwing out a book that had a terror in it and God’s name, they would put it into the Geniza. But that is what you’re doing here, and this has the potential of change, just like the Cairo Geniza changed. So we’re not going to tape everything.

36:49 – GS

What I’d like to do, just to end our podcast, is to segue into how the institute, your institute, …. what your plans and activities are in terms of spreading the thoughts, the ideology, the creativity of the kibbutz movement in Judaism around the rest of the country and the world.

37:17 – Anna Gilboa

Basically, so we have talked a lot about the past and the history and the legacy. But we’re here now and there is a very strong connection between the past and the future. We cannot have the future without the past, obviously. So based on all the amazing collection that we have here, we’re doing educational work in several levels. And I must say that our work has become much more relevant than ever after the events of October 7. And so just to name a few and then we will elaborate later.

38:00 – Anna Gilboa

We work with educators and agents of change. So, this is, for example, army IDF officers and teachers and cultural coordinators in the kibbutzim. And so, we work with them to train them to bring into the study also humanistic and Zionist values, and pluralism also, so that everyone can find their own voice within the variety of Judaism. This is exactly what you were talking about, Geoffrey. So this is one level. Another type of work that we are about to do now is the restoring the resilience of the evacuated communities from Western Negev and this is a new project that was we’re launching now actually this Passover due to the terrible events and we’re about to work with 12 communities, the Kibbutz community that were evacuated from Western Negev and the Gaza envelope.

39:15 – Anna Gilboa

And the ultimate goal of that is to bring them home eventually as a community, not just as individuals, with hope, with the values of settling the borders, of taking responsibility for this region and healing and rebuilding. And this is something that you can do with means of culture and cultural work. And our work will be based on a unique model that we developed with the help of two leading mental health professionals on the field that deal with post-traumatic growth. This is Dr. Miriam Shapira and Professor Yossi Levy-Belz, who are specialists in this field, how to implement cultural and Jewish-Israeli texts and content. In order to build resilience in a society that was really obviously very distorted and shaken up. And to bring more cohesion, more feeling of belonging, of togetherness, and to build the communities back again from this abyss.

Note from Anna:

As to Dr. Miriam Shapira and Prof. Yossi Levy-Belz (this is the exact spelling of their names) – our model is based on the extensive research of Prof. Levy-Belz – please see here more info about him and his research. In addition, we received professional guidance from Dr. Shapira, who is a clinical psychologist and a leading scholar in the field of resilience and post-traumatic growth. Here is an article about her and her work (in English), maybe you will find it interesting. 

40:40 – GS

I mean, everywhere you go, you see signs of the b’yachad yinatzeach together we will be victorious. Unity is so important, but to have unity, you need a safa meshutepeh, a shared voice and our texts. Since everybody, one way or the other, is going to be celebrating Pesach or Shavuot or whatever, it’s the opportunity to bring us all together, which is becoming more and more important. So there’s an exhibit that you’re putting on in Palma in Tel Aviv that’s opening up?

41:10 – Anna Gilboa

Yes, we’re participating in an exhibition, a unique exhibition, and our part is the part of the Haggadot, that it will be open to the public and some of the evacuated community, that the exhibition will travel to them, and present them the collection and also have some experiential activity for the community.

41:37 – GS

Well, I’m sure that our seders this year will be different than every other year. For sure. And what you’re doing will enrich it and I think even this conversation will enrich how we conduct our seders this year.

So, thank you very much.

41:51 – Anna Gilboa

Thank you.