Summary
Kibutz ‘Ein-Shemer, founded in 1932 by Hashomer Hatza’ir members from Poland, where the second Egyptian gar’in was settled as a reinforcement (hashlamah) in 1949 against its own wish to found a new kibutz, and from which most of the Egyptians were expelled or departed in the Sneh affair of 1953 — Chapter 5 of The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry’s central case of the Egyptian graduates’ fate in Israel (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 2336-2407).
Details
- The gar’in arrived in June-July 1949 after three months at the La Roche training farm in France and resisted remaining at ‘Ein-Shemer as a point of honor; movement discipline led it to accept ha-Kibutz ha-Artzi’s ruling, with tension. The Polish veterans tended to define every expression of difference between the Egyptian newcomers and themselves as a moral and political flaw on the newcomers’ part: the Egyptians’ elegant clothing under komunah alef, their New Year’s Eve parties — a fashionable custom in Egypt among Europeanized Muslims, Jews and Copts — regarded as bourgeois and goyish, and their protests at the kibutz selling produce on the black market, hiring ma’abarah immigrants below the Histadrut minimum wage, and feeding shelter-program children less generously than veterans’ children (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 2336-2388).
- Ninette Piciotto Braunstein, who arrived in October 1951 after a month imprisoned in the Cairo Citadel for Zionist underground work, recalled that her comrades told her how lucky she had been to remain in Egypt — “At least you ate” — and that the gar’in members had already begun calling the veterans “anti-Semites” and “racists”: “They received us with a great deal of contempt” (Chapter 5, notes 31-32). Assigned to allocate work at the Karkur labor office, she was rebuked for assigning work to applicants who were “not ours” — not MAPAM members — and replied, “I am a Zionist. They are Jews. Don’t they deserve to work too?” (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 2358-2388).
- In the referendum of March 14-17, 1953, held under the Sneh affair, twenty-three members of the Egyptian gar’in voted against the clauses; the following day the general meeting removed their names from the work schedule, tantamount to expulsion. On March 28 the Egyptians declared a hunger strike, the sealed-off kibutz saw an exchange of blows, and twenty-two Egyptians signed an agreement to leave; most of the other gar’in members left in the following weeks and months, and by 1993 only ten members of the original Egyptian gar’in remained at ‘Ein-Shemer (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 2390-2407).
Related pages
The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, Sneh affair, Hashomer Hatza’ir, Kibutz Nahshonim, Mapam