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Hashomer Hatzair
Fifty Years of Movement Life
Melbourne 1953 – 2003

ST KILDA HISTORICAL SERIES NUMBER SEVEN: HASHOMER HATZAIR

ISBN:  0-9751060-4-X
Author: Becky Aizen
Copyright: Becky Aizen 2004
Publishing Coordinator: Meyer Eidelson
Publisher: St Kilda Historical Society
Address: P.O Box 177 Balaclava, 3183.  Tel: 9690 9584
Web: Publications: www.skhs.org.au

The views expressed and records detailed are those of the author and not of the St Kilda Historical Society. While supporting community history and aware that the author has taken due care, the Society is not responsible for omissions or errors if they exist.

The St Kilda Historical Series is an ongoing project, which is published in hard copy and/or on www.skhs.org.au and also includes:
PLACES OF WORSHIP
CINEMAS
HOTELS
SIGNIFICANT BUILDINGS
GRANNY: A CHILDREN’S HISTORY
ST KILDA HANDBOOK
HASHOMER HATZAIR
THE STORY OF ELWOOD
ORAL HISTORY ELWOOD
NAMING ST KILDA

 DEDICATION
This book is dedicated to the memory of Monique Licenblat, a vivid, vibrant, vital woman whose passion and energy enriched both Hashy and all who knew her.
Also to Solly Lachman, Sam Abrami and Margaret Eidelson.
And to all the other shomrim over the past fifty years whose lives were cut tragically short.
We who remain are far better for having known them.

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FOREWORD
Meyer Eidelson

‘Hashomer Hatzair (was) a transmitter of views and ideals; a vehicle transporting its members out of a conventional, acquiescent relationship with society, and into one that challenges, questions and defies its individualism and conservatism, one that exposes ‘givens’ as constructs in an effort to dismantle greed, racism and injustice.’  Becky Aizen 2004

In 2003 Hashomer Hatzair (The Young Guard) celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the movement in Australia. It also celebrated ninety years since this Socialist Zionist Youth movement was founded in Europe. The movement continues today to foster secular Jewish culture, to promote its vision of social justice and to encourage emigration or ‘aliyah’ to Israel including to collective farms or kibbutzim.

For most of the half century in Australia, the movement operated from its hall (Beth Anielewicz) in Kilda where Jewish kids and teenagers were found thoroughly enjoying themselves in their home away from home.

In my case the encouragement to emigrate to kibbutz was unsuccessful although I later did spend time at Lahav in the Negev desert. My ideals have changed substantially from those I absorbed at seventeen years of age. Many members from my time in the movement were radicalised by the events of the sixties and seventies as Becky Aizen documents in this book.

Despite my defection, I received great benefits from the movement and still retain many values and friendships from that time.  We had the good luck to belong to an organisation devoted to youth and managed almost entirely by youth, still a model for self-organisation in 2004. By sixteen or seventeen years of age, most active members were youth leaders eventually including myself, my two brothers, Nicky and Aaron and my sister Margaret. The movement trusted us to look after others and we returned that trust with passion and commitment.

We experienced secular Jewish culture expressed in folk dance, singing and storytelling. We learned the joy of intellectual debate or sicha. We camped in the bush, girls and boys sharing the same tents. We experienced idealism based on dreams of internationalism and equality.

Hashomer Hatzair arose in Europe amidst turmoil and suffering. My mother, Rita, was a teenage member of Hashomer in the 1930s in Chomsk, a small town or shtetl in eastern Poland. Shortly after she left the town at the age of seventeen, Nazi death squads murdered her entire family and community.  My paternal grandmother, Sarah, was active in the Warsaw Ghetto where Mordechai Anielewicz of Hashomer Hatzair led a heroic if doomed uprising in 1942.

By comparison Melbourne has been a relatively safe and prosperous haven for the Jewish community. There have, however, been eras of turmoil such as the 1960s and 1970s, described by Becky as the ‘era of protest’.  In 1963 I was a twelve-year-old newspaper boy on a street corner selling Herald newspapers headlining the assassination of President Kennedy. In 1967 there was war in the Middle East repeated again only six years later.  I remember being charged by police horses while protesting the Vietnam War outside the American embassy, marching behind Dr Jim Cairns down Swanston Street in a crowd of 100,000 people and waiting for my army draft ‘marble’ to come up. In 1968 Melbourne High School expelled me for producing an underground newspaper. A friend returned from overseas with LSD, the instant enlightenment pill. Abbie Hoffman wrote ‘Steal This Book!’ So I did (my favourite quote being ‘The ground you stand on is a liberated zone. Defend it!’)

In 1973, I abandoned Hashomer and fled to London to pursue the youth revolution.  The shaliach of the movement, David Scharf, tried to reason with me but I was confused and, at the same time, thought I had all the answers. Pursuing Jack Kerouac’s on the road vision, I walked across no man’s land from Iran to Afghanistan on route to nirvana in India. And it was crowded that day – there were another fifty hippies with me!

In 2002 I met Becky Aizen when the St Kilda Historical Society employed her to undertake a history of St Kilda’s pubs. Becky, I learned was also a former, if younger, member of Hashomer. She showed me her honours thesis on the history of the movement which originally focused on the era of protest 1960 –1975, and we decided to assist her to publish it.  With the fiftieth anniversary the book naturally expanded to look at the entire movement.

Australia is largely a land of immigrants fashioning and creating their own home as Jews have been doing for millennium. Becky explores Hashy as home and refuge, a place where young people learn about their past, create identity in the present and debate the future world

In Becky we are fortunate to have a St Kilda historian who has so skillfully recorded the blending of ideas, values and aspirations in this fascinating story of a living and formative movement for others to appreciate.

Meyer Eidelson
President
St Kilda Historical Society
August 2004

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INTRODUCTION

 There’s No Place Like Home (or is there?):

Celebrating Fifty Years

 Hashomer Hatzair: Fifty Years of Movement Life, Melbourne 1953 – 2003 is an investigation into the history of the Socialist­ Zionist youth movement Hashomer Hatzair. The organisation was founded in Poland in 1913 (prior to the establishment of the Zionist state Israel in 1948), and established in Melbourne, Australia in 1953, by a group of breakaway madrichim (leaders) from the Labour Zionist movement Habonim Dror.  Throughout its fifty years in Australia the movement has been led primarily by young Jewish volunteers generally aged between 17 and 23 who have themselves progressed through the movement, with the assistance of shlichim (emissaries) from Israel. This book seeks to examine the objectives and concerns of ‘Hashy’, as it is affectionately known; to explore its daily life as an educational, social and ideological body; and to attempt to bring to life some of the experiences of its participants, within the wider framework of the ever-changing political, social, and cultural backdrop of Australia over the past fifty years.

“Home” – as an ideological construct, as a concept fueled by an emotive negotiation with the past, and as a physical reality dominated by external (and often oppositional) political and social structures – serves as a useful entry into this investigation. “Home” is settlement; it is an investment of security, an articulation of identity. The notion of “home” is central to Jewish nationalism, Zionism, The plurality of meanings of ‘home’ for the chaverim (Heb: literally “friends”, but used in this context as “members”) of the movement is a striking example of the complexity of their experiences as members of a Zionist Movement in Australia in the post-war period. Does ‘home’ mean the physical ancestral home of most of its membership – the ghettos of Eastern Europe from where many of both parents and grandparents of past and present chaverim had fled? (Or increasingly other parts of the world, like South Africa, the former Soviet Union and even Israel?) Or perhaps ‘home’ is a reference to Melbourne, the place where many of the movement’s members were born, and all of them were raised and educated? Yet the basic premise of Zionism is the Exodusian return of all Jews to Zion – implicitly negating the possibility of a ‘home’ outside Israel, although this assumption has been represented variously throughout the movement’s history. This conundrum demonstrates the uneasy and often conflicting dynamics and loyalties that have played out both within the movement and within its external relationships with the adult Zionist organisations, the mainstream Jewish community, and the wider Australian political community, particularly socialist and Jewish student organisations on university campuses. This analysis seeks to probe the subjectivities of the chaverim of Hashomer Hatzair by examining the ways in which the individual functions within the movement that itself functions within a wider political and ideological sphere. Inherent in all constituents of the movement’s collective identity, is a power relation that implicitly subjugated its chaverim – as socialist, Zionist, Jewish youths, they are marginalised by the Zionists for being too extremist and leftist; by the Socialists for their Zionist affiliations; by the Jewish community, in the past at least, for their embrace of “doctrines of brotherhood which exist only in theory, and a political system which uses anti-Zionism as an excuse for anti-Semitism”[1]; and by the dominant hegemonic culture for being both young[2] (although attitudes to youth have shifted dramatically over the past fifty years) , and Jewish (similarly, what it means to be a Melbourne Jew in 2003 is very different to being a Jew in Melbourne in 1953.  My choice of words is not purely coincidental!). Perhaps its position on the periphery, coupled with the energy, activity and passion of youth, has fueled the commitment of Hashy’s members to promoting its aims – planning meetings, running camps, organising speakers, self-education – and fulfilling its ultimate goal – aliya (literally ‘to ascend’ in Hebrew, but meaning emigration of a Jew to Israel) to a socialist settlement (kibbutz).

This investigation chronicles fifty years of movement activity and experience, giving us an opportunity to explore the developments and changes over a substantial period of time. The examination begins with a few disenchanted and disenfranchised members of Habonim Dror who felt that the movement had become frivolous. From only a few members in the early days, Hashomer Hatzair has flourished during its fifty years in Melbourne, and its development must be contextualized within a wider social and political framework in order to gauge both its significance in the public sphere and its personal subjective meaning for its individual members, most of whom have retained fond memories of their Hashy days and many of whom have remained close friends even decades after their years together in the movement. Hashy of the 1960s and 1970s, the subject of a paper I wrote in 1997, was selected as it was my contention that it was during this period, more than any other, that the movement was involved in a series of shifting relationships, both internally (ideological debates, conflicts over the direction of the movement) and externally (with the Jewish community in Melbourne, the Zionist Federation, Australian society, Israel), compounded by the revival of student activism at universities around Australia following the on-campus conservatism of the fifties. I would also assert – based on my reading of the minutes and correspondences of Hashomer Hatzair between 1953 and 2003) that this period marks the development of the movement from an organisation devoted primarily to ‘the Zionist dream’ to a movement marked by its political participation in the public sphere and concern with broader political and social issues.

Each chapter deals with the articulation of the experiences of the chaverim in particular physical and ideological spheres. The first chapter, The Physical Home: Growing Up in Australia examines their family and school lives both in light of the political and social ideology developed in the movement, and in the context of dominant Australian society which, at least until the late 1960s, popularly upheld an image of white-bread ‘Australianness’ that rejected ethnicity and difference, especially under a Liberal government led by an unashamedly Anglophilic and royalist Prime Minister. Robert Menzies, in power from 1939 until 1941 and again between 1949 and 1966, declared his feelings during the royal visit in March 1963, “I did but see her passing by, but I will love her till I die”.  While the 1972 election of Labour’s Gough Whitlam and the simultaneous shift in attitudes towards art, women’s rights, immigrants, race and even what it means to be Australian, were lauded by Hashomer Hatzair, his 1975 dismissal was received as a slap in the face to those chaverim who felt that his appointment signaled a new era in Australia’s direction as an increasingly progressive and inclusive nation.  Nonetheless the past thirty years have indeed reflected and appropriated many of the ideals of the movement of the late 1950s and 1960s, and probably many of the movement’s pioneers would feel validated by the public discussions of ethnicity, gender and power that are now a part of Australian cultural life, as opposed to the behind-closed-doors, not-in-my-backyard short-sightedness that characterized much of Australia’s social history, at least under the White Australia Policy.  Many of the early chaverim recall a feeling of disenfranchisement from school and the wider Australian community, a sense of shame because of their differences – their ‘ethnic’ sandwiches in the schoolyard, their mostly older parents’ heavy European accents, their inability to be freckled, snub-nosed Weetbix kids.  In this sense their experiences can be paralleled with those of other refugees – the Greeks and the Italians – who, like the Jewish kids, were called ‘wogs’ and ‘bloody reffos’ on the sunburnt asphalt of primary school playgrounds around Melbourne in the 1950s and 1960s. The dismantling of the White Australia Policy and a paradigmatic shift in the way in which Australians have reconfigured the notion of Australian identity has meant that today’s chaverim of the movement have much more integrated identities that their predecessors. There is less of a conflict – if any, according to some – between what it means to be a Jew and what it means to be an Australian in 2003.  In addition there appears to be less resistance to the adoption of modern trends (mobile telephones, computers) and previously derided trappings of a decadent adult society (or those of an increasingly permissive youth culture including sexual promiscuity and designer drugs – not necessarily sanctioned by the movement or done within official movement hours, nevertheless not rejected outright by all its bogrim or even made a movement issue as cigarettes and makeup were in the 1960s).  Yet as one chavera of the 1980s commented “Hashy gives you a framework” for understanding and negotiating ones identity within the world, and this has remained an ever-present dynamic of its history.

The second chapter The Vehicle Between Homes: The Movement interprets the movement itself as a home of sorts, in the sense of being both a haven and a refuge, bringing together a group of individuals whose rejection of societal norms (embracing socialism over hegemonic capitalism; aliya opposed to the mainstream Jewish community’s unofficial assumption of dorkeit (Yiddish: literally ‘here-ness’, implying staying in Australia as opposed to going to live in Israel), agriculture over urbanisation, (although, again, it must be reiterated that the degree of these differences have varied generationally and subjectively – and the extent to which it is possible to live a truly idealistic life as a young person within a family and societal structure outside of ones control ) hindered their chances of feeling completely secure in any societal sphere outside the movement. This chapter also views the movement primarily as a ‘vehicle between homes’ as it has offered its participants the dream of another home – in concrete terms, this refers to an Israeli kibbutz, but on an ideological level it conveys “a world built on a life of Social Justice and Equality, a world free from war, poverty and famine”[3]. The idealism underpinning this sentiment is typical of the language consistently used by the chaverim throughout fifty years of movement life, and emphasises the centrality of Hashomer Hatzair’s role as a transmitter of views and ideals; a ‘vehicle’ transporting its members out of a conventional, acquiescent relationship with society, and into one that challenges, questions and defies its individualism and conservatism, one that exposes ‘givens’ as constructs in an effort to dismantle greed, racism and injustice. This necessarily implied a social reconstruction of sorts, one that could ably serve its members in their day-to-day lives as Australian youth, necessitating the introduction of social and behavioural codes of its own. Hashy’s function as an organisation that – by virtue of its political commitments – provided a whollistic social critique (from issues ranging the gamut from war to lipstick) will also be examined in this chapter; as will the movement’s official constitution Ha’Eser Dibrot (The Ten Commandments’), a list of rules created in Poland in 1903, and still considered central to the movement’s philosophy a century later and halfway across the globe.

The Ideological Home: The Homeland – Eretz Israel is the third chapter of this book and focuses on Israel and the multiple meanings that it has held for the chaverim of the movement. Israel was conceived simultaneously as a redemptive dream, a cultural haven, a resolution to the ‘crisis of Jewry’, a politically problematic reality, a hope-filled future to give meaning to a past of persecution and oppression, and the duality of its awe-inspiring fulfillment of the Zionist dream (its national anthem is Ha’Tikvah, literally ‘the hope’ in Hebrew) and the tragic trajectory of its military history. Many of the chaverim spent years in Hashomer Hatzair learning and teaching and singing and writing about Israel, planning to relocate their lives to a place they had not even visited. This chapter attempts to probe the images of Israel and kibbutz presented to the movement while accounting for the often-disparate gulf between image and reality, and examines the conflict of living in one ‘home’ while yearning for another.  This itself is problematised by the fact that Israel – in its short life – has undergone an extraordinary amount of changes since 1953, when it was a mere five years old and bearing little resemblance to the the Israel of today.  The pioneering dream of the 1950s, 1960s and even 1970s is somewhat void in the face of a highly developed, modernised Israeli society.

This investigation into the particular forces that shaped the experiences of Hashomer Hatzair seeks to demonstrate the varying concerns of the movement (social justice, tsofiut, education, gender equality, secular Jewish culture and history) and ground them in specific contexts (its roots in a chalutzik Zionist tradition, the social and political climate in Melbourne between 1953 and 2003) while problematising the often uneasy relationships between ideology and practice; the individual and the collective; the dominant and the marginalised. The following is not a definitive history of Hashomer Hatzair. I do not believe that such a thing exists. There is an old joke that says “Find two Jews and you’ll get three opinions” and I feel that I have come to understand its implications. In my research I have encountered the subjectivities of hundreds of chaverim of the movement’s past ­either in their writings at the time or in interviews – not even mentioning the years that I spent at Hashy and the diverse and interesting characters that I encountered – yet I feel as though have emerged with thousands of multi­-layered images of its past. Hashomer Hatzair or, more explicitly, the experience of belonging to Hashomer Hatzair, implied (and continues to imply) various meanings for each individual. Whether individual chaverim from the past fifty years regard the movement as a social club for Jewish youth, a Radically Socialist Organisation, a Chalutz Movement or a Peace Movement; whether they recall the shirim (songs)  the machanot  (camps), the debates, or the awkward adolescent fumblings under sleeping bags and starry starry nights; whether embracing its activism as youthful arrogance and rebellion or sober political commitment, it is a valid memory, and its voice deserves a place in any account of its ‘history’. I have struggled to allow room for such contesting representations in this paper, and hope that I have succeeded in presenting a view of the past that is open to critical interpretation; and one that avoids making the kind of reductive claims that exclude other ‘histories’ that may emerge of this period.  I urge fellow shomrim to pick up a pen and maybe a piece of fordiograph paper (for old time’s sake!) and commit their unique memories to paper.  The common thread of every account of Hashy past is its relevance in the present – whether the chaver/a is twenty-eight, forty-eight or sixty-eight – its impact as far-ranging as to shape their world-view, lifestyle, social group, or, in several cases, life partner!  Its resonance signifies its relevance and renders it most deserving of a proper place in the annals of  Australian-Jewish history.

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CHAPTER ONE

 The Physical Home: Growing up in Australia

The focus of “‘The Physical Home’: Growing up in Australia” is the examination of the family and school lives of the chaverim of Hashomer Hatzair – in light of the various strands of movement ideology they were to develop – within the context of Australian society. Rather than provide a dissertation of Australian social dynamics of the post-war period, I shall endeavour to explore the realms of public sphere encountered by, or of interest to, the chaverim themselves. Among these are the familial home; school; the mainstream Jewish community (represented by an established body of organisations, Jewish day schools, and the Jewish Press); youth culture in mainstream Melbourne life; the changing political climate; and the Australian protest movement.

Central to Jewish thought, custom and tradition is the notion of the family. It is the unit around which much of Jewish life and ritual is cultivated and consolidated. Thus the ‘home’- in this case, the family life – experienced by chaverim of the movement is an important factor in their involvement in Hashomer Hatzair. As most chaverim begin attending meetings at a young age, their participation continues to be largely governed by their parents and the movement’s ideology was thus usually in accordance with their family’s politics and values. In many cases, the families of the chaverim have seemed supportive of their involvement in the movement, if only because most Jewish parents ultimately want their children to “mix with Jewish kids..,not for political reasons, strictly social ones”[4]. Although there were three other Zionist youth movements at the time of Hashy’s inception- “Betar …the youth movement of the right-wing nationalist Revisionist movement; Ichud Habonim (later Habonim Orot) a Labour Zionist movement founded in Australia in 1940; and B’nei Akiva, representing the Mizrachi religious movement”[5], for many Hashomer Hatzair was and is the only choice – “(my parents) didn’t want me to join a religious…or a military youth movement”[6]. (the Reform Zionist Netzer was founded in Melbourne in 1980, while the mid-nineties saw the establishment of Hineini a modern Orthodox youth group). Its closest ally in the Melbourne Jewish youth scene was Habonim Oror, from which Hashomer Hatzair had split in 1953 (the connection – largely social – between the two movements has been traditionally close, and while some past bogrim concur that their involvement in Hashomer over Habonim was governed by social rather than political reasons, one boger claims that he left Habonim in 1955 because it “was too frivolous”[7].

For other chanichim, however, there were definite conflicts between values espoused at home and those at Hashy:

I remember comparing a lot of the people I met [at Hashy] with the peers and friends and family of my parents’ generation who I considered to be upper middle class and conservative, especially when it came to Jews and Israel.  I grew up to believe in Greater Israel and ____ there was [no concern with] social justice.[8]

One cannot understand the role of family for the first generation of Hashy chaverim without considering it within the context of the genocide of European Jewry during the Second World War. According to historian W.D. Rubenstein, 35-40,000 Jews who emigrated to Australia between 1933 and 1963 had been victims of Hitler and left Europe either to escape Nazism or as survivors of the Holocaust. Within this context, the meaning of Jewish continuity is particularly resonant. One chaver explains the way in which it informed his Zionism:

Reading about the Holocaust, what happened to the Jews in Europe (created) a feeling of identification and anguish with the future of the Jewish people, I wanted to show the world that, notwithstanding everything that had happened during the Second World War, the Jewish people would survive, and, as I saw it, the only way for the Jewish people to survive, as a people, was in their own country.[9]

Rubenstein writes of world Jewry’s state of “spiritual exhaustion and political limbo” following the Shoah and that it was the “creation of Israel (that) began (a) revival of Jewish consciousness, identity and self-assertion”. The impetus for many parents in sending their children to Jewish youth movements in the 1950s and 1960s was more in the hope that they would associate with other Jewish children than develop Zionist or socialist ideals.  While later generations of parents were of different origins- mostly first generation Australian, but also South African, Israeli and Russian – the motivation for ones children – especially those at non-Jewish schools – to integrate socially with other Jews, and by extension, become affiliated with the Melbourne Jewish community. Many a McKinnon, MacRob or Wesley child has heard the familiar refrain “If you don’t start going to a Jewish youth movement, we’re sending you to Scopus/ Bialik/ Beth Rivkah!” (note to parents: this actually works. This author is living testimony…!).  Yet throughout Hashy’s history, an ever-changing core group of politically active parents (from Norman Rothfield in the 1950s to David Zyngier at present) have chosen Hashy for their children on ideological grounds, and this support and enthusiasm – coupled with actual empirical evidence that idealism is more than a merely transient youthful ‘phase’ – has enormously benefited the political life and gravitas of Hashomer Hatzair in Melbourne. Throughout its history there have been several families with strong leftist traditions for whom Hashomer was the only Jewish movement they would ever select for their children:

There was a whole mob of left-wing parents who started sending their children to Hashy…one of the main triggers of the whole ‘lefting’ of Hashy was this influx of left-wing families – there was us, the Jedwabs, the Adlers and a few others who all started going to Hashomer, and we were, even though we were still children, politically precocious.[10]

Before the war, my father was a member of the Communist Party (in Poland) and was in prison many times…My mother had socialist leanings…1 was brought up to know that they were politically aware.[11]

The Jewish experience in Australia, like that of any member of any non-hegemonic group in any society, is defined by the complex multiplicity of roles and responsibilities. “In the world, imitation of and adaption to (hegemonic) norms was a necessity; at home, they were tantamount to annihilation of one’s very identity”[12]. The young chaverim had to integrate themselves into wider society while still maintaining that which made them different. These conflicting norms are best illustrated within the school system – given that a child spends more time at school than at home (or at play), it is within this realm – an integrated, social, educational environment, where ideas – later developed into ideologies – are often formed. It is therefore relevant to examine the values promoted within and espoused by a selection of the schools attended by the chaverim in light of Hashomer Hatzair and the ethics that it represented. A chavera explores her own experiences of ‘difference’ at:

Beaumaris State School, which was probably the most Anglo-Saxon place on Earth. Everyone was blonde and freckled and snub-nosed. I was probably the darkest at my school. By the time I realised that not everyone was Jewish, and not everyone celebrated Passover – which took a few years – it was difficult, because we are talking of the fifties. My parents were Communists, and the Communist part was at that stage their strongest culture, and we are talking Cold War, so what I was hearing at home, and what I was hearing at school…was like another world. At school, the RSL was very strong – that was Bruce Ruxton territory, so you had this anti-Communist thing fed to you (whereas) at home we went on May Day marches and to Hiroshima marches…my parents used to talk about things like the Rosenberg’s execution in the early fifties or what was going on in South Africa and the Holocaust… Everything was different – exactly the opposite (at) school.[13]

My school life and my Hashy life were very very different… I had two separate lifestyles.[14]

Hashy also provided an alternative to the lack of extra-curricular activities available to many children in Australia.  A chaver of the 1980s emphasises the movement’s role in his personal development by relating that

[For] the deadheads I went to school with, their non-academic side of life was riding a bike, drinking, going to the footy, surfing.  Hashy gave me the opportunity to explore [ideas] and … the opportunity to meet a range of people who didn’t fit the mold.[15]

Even the largest Jewish day school in Melbourne was seen as inimical to Hashy’s values and attacked in a 1973 Iton: “Wanted enough explosives to blow up an area the size of Mt. Scopus”[16]. Nearly twenty years later, the school appears no less receptive to the values of the movement.  A chavera of the 1980s and 1990s recalls:

Before I went on Ulpan (the Mt. Scopus Israel program) we were asked whether we were left wing or right wing. This was in yr 10 at school. I don’t remember the purpose of this question but I do remember the Snickers [chocolate bar] directed at me when I sat in the “left wing” side of the room.[17]

Rubenstein suggests that “the absence of a (Jewish) day school oriented around a Labour or Left perspective has had a major role in reinforcing the non-universalistic direction of the comHashomer History 2025munity”24, and it is true that Jews in Melbourne are disproportionately wealthy and that the community’s dominant values do centre on both personal and material ambition, both of which Hashy is, in theory at least, fundamentally opposed.  Yet for adolescents in that environment, Hashy provided a framework for their own understanding of the world and negotiation of their nascent identities:

I vividly remember discussing things at school and when ideology came up, I knew my ideology and it was a powerful thing to have that, to know somewhere you belonged.  I remember coming to the realisation that you had to react to what was happening in your life, have foundations, make decisions.[18]

‘Home’, however, was not merely four walls and a complex series of familial and scholastic inter-relationships, but the ‘national home’ within which the movement operated – Australia. Specifically, Melbourne, Victoria 1953 – 2003 – a broad rich tapestry of social history. An enquiry into the past of Hashomer Hatzair must account for the ways in which the wider Australian context – politically, socially, and culturally- impacted upon the movement. This entails an investigation larger and more thorough than the scope of this one, yet I will provide a very brief sketch of the dominant concerns and trends of the post-war period.

Australia is a democracy, which means that the political context in which Hashy has operated has been an amenable one, as opposed to Hashomer Hatzair in South Africa which was shut down by the government in the 1970s, suspected of subversive activity.  Yet Australian democracy has been shaped by the specific historical circumstances determined by Australia’s size, climate, geographic isolation, and imperialist past.  Within the Australian context, democracy often implies “a way of life, a set of values animating social relations and a certain sort of personality”[19]. Has the movement been motivated by its nation’s platforms, have they always felt part of the Australian people?   Or does the Zionist imperative, which rules out the possibility of living outside the Jewish homeland’, the demands of which negate other nationalist sentiments, necessarily result in a case of conflicting signposts and loyalties that cause the fragmentation of identities? These inconsistencies have been recognised by the bogrim themselves – Jews as the ultimate, most historical ‘Stranger In A Strange Land” is an old and familiar paradigm that is given a new spin in a 1973 iton that features a cartoon satire of “Jewish ‘ockerism” – “Barry McGoldstein”. The potential for comic possibilities is apparent in the title alone; nevertheless, it illustrates the tension between conflicting representations of Australianness and the experiences of the movement’s chaverim as Jewish youth in Melbourne. Given the profound and deep-seated preoccupation with the concept of ‘national identity’, the search for a ‘national culture’ and the birth of a ‘national history’ (thanks to Manning Clark), how ‘Australian’ have the chaverim felt; have they been able to identify with dominant images of ‘Australianness’? One chaver conveys the complexity of this issue:

I did feel myself to be Australian, but I guess in terms of consciousness, my Jewish background and my aspiration to be living in Israel had more allure to me … It was more of a challenge. Living in Australia at that time seemed to me a very easy life…and I was looking for something a little more challenging than just carrying on in the materialist world of Australia. When I grew up in the fifties and sixties, that was the era of political conservatism [under] Bob Menzies… Australia was just a corner of the British Empire; we had to sing “God Save The Queen”, and I didn’t feel part of that.[20]

Hashomer Hatzair’s critique of Australian society was therefore upheld as a more exciting, dynamic alternative to the mainstream in a politically conservative era. A chavera of the sixties recalls that Hashomer offered what she felt was

a really fair way to live, in my own little young mind, and I thought for a while -“Wow! Everyone is going to be equal and everybody is going to get the same opportunities … ln Australia at the time that very much wasn’t the case. They didn’t have the social welfare that they have today.[21]

Social commentators levelled charges of “callousness, complacency, parochialism, racism, ignorance, and selfishness”[22] at Australian society, believing it to be as result of the relative prosperity of its citizens, its geographic isolation and the repercussions of “a capitalist society … the concentration of economic and political power; the alienation of work; and the acquisitive, competitive, aggressive [sic.] values that penetrate deeply into every human relationship”[23].  The movement officially supported these sentiments. A 1961 publication contains a number of allegories about “the shortcomings of our present society” in the hope that “on concluding [reading], [the chanich] feeling may be that here is something basically wrong with our society”.

In addition, the dominant monoculture and archaic conservatism, and “…the absence of alternative life-styles and a critical cultural tradition”[24] were being openly challenged for the first time as antiquated and regressive.  The Australian ‘way of life’ itself was being challenged.  It was suggested that

a profound if banal truth undermines the significance of ideological bickering…in Australia…what unites parlour and street Maoists with monarchistic and even Fascist dairy farmers is more important than what divides them – namely the Australian way of life and the Australian standard of living.[25]

In 1963, visiting Holocaust survivor and Israeli luminary of the Artzi movement Chayke Grossman asked how the movement can possibly develop

in countries where there is no pressure on the Jews – especially in wealth.  In those countries with economic affluence and [those] with anti-semitism, the position is similar … In Australia, take away the self-realisation aspect of Hashomer Hatzair, and the movement would no longer exist.[26]

(Perhaps this is even more pertinent to an increasingly tolerant multicultural society, and an era of globalisation where careerism and materialism define personal success.)

Hashomer Hatzair, while clearly seeking to provide an alternative to the mainstream values of Australian society, was rarely overtly or directly critical of it in the early 1960s. The extent of movement involvement in Australian public life is difficult to gauge. At a Veidat Bogrim in 1961, David Rothfield proposed that the chevra participate in the Victorian State Elections by handing out A.L.P. cards and campaigning in order to generate some political spirit in the movement. This idea was rejected after a discussion during which it was decided that “as a movement we should not associate ourselves with any Australian political party. It would be to our advantage to have visiting speakers and sichot on the current affairs'” giving way to a “General feeling that we must not give a biased view (and a) General agreement not to participate in political affairs.” This attitude was reflected by the movement in the early years of public debate about Vietnam when it held a symposium on Vietnam with Jim Cairns, Philip Lynch, Sam Goldbloom and Mr. Shatin in 1966, and an issue of On Guard (January 1966) featured a debate involving both pro- and anti-war views. It was not until two years later that Hashomer Hatzair adopted its firm anti-war stand that cemented its role within the wider contexts of Jewish involvement in the Left movements and political rebellion in Australia.  The impact of the Vietnam War and the mandatory conscription enforced under the Menzies government cannot be underestimated in the reconfiguration of the movement as a broader political tool. This was an issue affecting all Australian youth, regardless of class or ethnicity, irrespective of whether or not they were part of the hegemonic society or marginalised by it. The bogrim of 1961 could afford to reject political allegiance in Australia but their successors ?given that a change in government would bring an end to conscription ? were literally forced into political activism by a situation of (the banality of the cliche notwithstanding) ‘life or death’:

A lot of members of Hashy were eligible for the draft. Most registered, but luckily, none of them were called up …lt touched our lives …You could see it on television. There was no way of ignoring what was going on.[27]

At the same time, leaders of the movement were going to university and becoming extremely politicised, and this inevitably filtered through the movement in both itonim 66 and sichot. The chanichim were part of a generation familiar with the discourse of revolution, who had experienced ‘rebellion’ in the schoolyard though their involvement with the school movement Students In Dissents?and this certainly informed the development of the movement:

In the sixties and seventies you couldn’t walk around with blinkers …There was so much going on and we were only part of it; Australia was only part of it.

I think when I started Hashy (1964) there was little (involvement in the public realm). It was very much focused on Jewish history , Jewish culture and Zionism, but we brought a lot of those concerns into Hashy . We forced people to deal with those issues because we were used to dealing with them, but also l think my madrichim started going to University and they got involved in the whole sixties culture and the discussions that were going on ….We started having discussions on things like sexuality[28] and stuff which I don’t think would have happened that much in the fifties.[29]

The movement’s shift into a more public realm was partially necessitated by the Six Day War in Israel.  Prior to the war, “(t)he conceptual category of Palestinians simply did not exist”[30] and “Jews…, from time immemorial had been branded as the underdogs”­ as a result of the war, however, “they were branded as the aggressor and the oppressor”.[31]   Israel – and therefore the chaverim of Hasomer Hatzair, both the bogrim who were directly involved on the chanichim to whom they imparted all the issues that were dominating the campuses ? had a new adversary in the shape of Left?wing groups at the Victorian universities who began to champion the cause of the Palestinians.  Augustine Zycher, creator of left?wing Jewish magazine Survival at Monash University in the 1960s illustrates this ideological shift:

After about a year of hectic, non?stop activity, I noticed a change in many of my colleagues in S.D.S.74 I remember coming back to S.D.S. headquarters exhausted after a demonstration and those who came with me sat around and started to tell anti?Semitic jokes, some along the lines of the best way to light up a Jew. Some of them began wearing badges saying “Palestine Yes, Israel No”. I felt deeply hurt. My fellow liberals were not so liberal when it came to Jews”[32]

Several of the bogrim at Monash during this period were involved in the creation of the Radical Zionist Alliance (R.Z.A.), a group which sought to redefine the position of Socialist? Zionism after the Six Day War damaged the Zionist relationship with the Left on campus. While the R.Z.A. was never officially or explicitly linked to Hashomer Hatzair, the concentration of its bogrim in the R.Z.A. leadership suggests an ideological affiliation between the two. The R.Z.A. constitution was published in a 1971 Iton (the cover of which urged the reader to “Support Moratorium”. The constitution outlined the party’ s objectives to:

strive for the establishment of an independent socialist Palestinian state existing alongside and coexisting with an independent socialist Jewish state; oppose the influence in the Middle East (and elsewhere in the world) of the U.S. and Russian imperialists…; support national Liberation struggles throughout the world…Bey [sic.] they in Indochina, Africa or South America; oppose the reactionary tendencies of the Israeli government and her increasing dependence on the US (and oppose) the Jewish Establishment here in Australia …(whom) we see …as working in many ways directly against the interests of Australian Jewry.[33]

The Middle East debate raged at the university and

was very uncomfortable …for those of us who were involved both in terms of the debate on Vietnam and on the debate on the Middle East …We were at one with the others …with Vietnam …and occasionally did feel like pariahs in the Middle East …ln retrospect, you realise how uncomfortable it was, at the time you …vacillated all over the place in terms of your views … I remember …a couple of articles we published in the university magazines where we would try to take a middle line, which was not appreciated either by the mainstream Jewish community or by the left?wing groups, So we were basically betwixt and between.[34]

You had the Left which was really divided over the Middle East ? you had the Maoists and the Trotskyists…you know, “Vietnam=Palestine: One Struggle, One Fight”. We were right in the middle because of the Radical Zionist Alliance. We were trying to say that you can be a left?wing Jew, you can be anti? the Israeli government but you didn’t have to be anti?Israel and anti?Zionist… (There was) the Radical Zionist Alliance which was made up of a core of university students who weren’t all Hashy, but Hashy certainly was very involved in (it); …Norman Rothfield’s group[35]; … the Jewish Council to Combat Fascism and Anti-Semitism[36];…Jack Rezak and the Mapam and Parents and Friends of Hashomer; and then you had Hashy and we were the kids? it was …like we were part of a particular political alignment, and Hashy was really important in that …We were at University and we were studying politics and we were articulate. We were really confronting the Left and the Right on campus”[37]

In this turbulent time, Hashy‘s alliances were constantly shifting:

We used to march at May Day marches… Hashy and Skif used to march (together) ? a Zionist organisation and a very anti?Zionist organisation, but, at that time, we were the closest together because Skif was also socialist. But my parents and their parents were on opposite sides of the barrier twenty years earlier because of the huge fight in the Kadimah over Communism.[38]

The participation of the movement in public life outside of the debate over the Middle East was largely concerned with the conscription debate and apartheid (most notably in the protest against the South African Springbok Rugby Tour in 1971), but in terms of problems particular to the Australian landscape, both their ideological and active concern was minimal. The only mention of Aborigines, for example, in movement archives during the decade that Aboriginal-Australians won the right to vote is a 1964 peulah entitled “The Aborigines – A Primitive Society” which deems their religion to be “superstition steming [sic.] from fear of natural calamities and the unknown”[39]. There is no critique of native persecution. Its chaverim have explained this as emblematic of the time; in that the plight of Aboriginal oppression in Australia was not publicised until later; however, as early as 1947, the Jewish Council to Combat Fascism and anti-Semitism claimed to “accept our responsibility in the wider community of our country” in the “attack (of) the maltreatment of Aborigines in Australia”[40].  Later generations however have redressed this inconsistently and have actively campaigned for Aboriginal causes and since the 1980s (and possibly earlier), taught chanichim about Aboriginal affairs. One group of chaverim even directly confronted Prime Minister John Howard in 2001:

When I was in Israel, about 10 of us held a rally outside a hotel where John Howard was staying, protesting against his treatment of the whole “Sorry” issue in regards to the stolen generation. It ended up making international news.[41]

After the Vietnam era, however, the fever of youth rebellion quickly “dissipated, partly because essentially the Whitlam victory took it out of everybody” in that “the exception became the norm” and “some of the political values which seemed at the edge became mainstream”[42].  It will be interesting to see if, in time, the current war in Iraq and its accompanying renewal of international political fervour and activity will inspire current Hashy bogrim to act as passionately as their predecessors.  At its outset in 2003, however

Opinions were too diverse to reach any unified statement or conclusion, and while some Bogrim and Chanachim involved themselves in anti-war activities, Hashy as a movement remained impartial. [43]

The movement of today has nonetheless been extremely active in campaigning against the Australian Government’s maltreatment of refugees.  On World Refugee Day 2003, a former inmate of the Woomera Detention Centre spoke to the Senior Movement about his experiences.  Hashy has also participated in issues that affect the future of their chanichim, notably in environmental arena (from tree planting on Earth Day to cleaning up the Yarra on Clean Up Australia Day), and, more recently in expressing opposition to the Nelson Reforms – the Federal Government’s proposed reforms to Higher Education which involve the destruction of student Unions. Continued support for Israel has been demonstrated consistently at several rallies since the 1970s, particularly at times of heightened fears, like during the 1991 Gulf War, when many were held outside the Palais Theatre in St. Kilda.  Hashy also attended several anti-Nazi rallies in Brunswick in 1993 (where debates over chanichim participation reached voluminous levels) and continues until today:

I remember vividly going to an anti-Nazi rally in Fawkner. It was amazing to confront these people and expose them for the ignorant people they were. I remember also going to an anti-nuclear protest.[44]

At these protests Hashy would often stand arm-in-arm, placard-by-banner, with other Jewish organisations. From the outset, however, the relationship between Hashomer Hatzair and the wider Jewish community – in particular its body of communal organisations under the umbrella of the Jewish Community Council of Victoria – was fraught with difficulties.  In the early 1950s, the few Machon scholarships available were financed by the Zionist Federation of Australia, and the fierce competition for them meant that preference generally given to chaverim of the older movements, Betar and Habonim Dror. As Zvi Solow, one of the movement’s founders, points out:

The founding of Hashomer Hatzair in Melbourne was, to put it mildly, less than welcome.  We suffered from an image of radicalism both Zionist (Aliya, Kibbutz) and Political (Kibbutz Artzi, Mapam, lefties), which the leadership of the Jewish Organisations in the Diaspora, now matter how liberal and democratic.[45]

This already uneasy alliance was further problematised once the chevrei became more ‘politicised’ or more involved in public protest on secular issues. “The post-war Jewish community was…non-universalistic, deliberately rejecting any universal mission of Jewish people to bring about a wider reform or radical agenda throughout the whole of society” according to Rubenstein. “Australian Jewry”, he writes, “was non­-universalistic in all or virtually all of its central institutions and representative bodies from at least the early mid-fifties onwards”. This attitude is in conflict with the socialist ideology central to Hashomer Hatzair, which often attacked both their conservatism and their “voluntar(y) reghettois(ation)”[46]:

There were frequent times in the Jewish press …when we wrote …to lambast the adult Zionists. This was …part of our demonstrating of our enthusiasm and our dedication …We thought that (their) aim should be to settle in Israel …We took part in various of their activities… Yom Ha’atzmaut and Yom Hashoah…We were only aloof to the extent that we mocked the ‘professional Zionists’ because they were ‘armchair Zionists’.  We were reliant on funds from the Zionist Federation for our activities.[47]

One of the major criticisms of the adult Zionist movement that features recurringly in the minutes and publications of Hashomer Hatzair was their “armchair” approach to Zionism, their ‘all talk and no action’ commitment to Israel as a theory rather than a reality. Helen Wajcman reflects on her attendance at the 1968 Biennial Conference of the Zionist Federation of Australia and New Zealand:

It would appear strange that the Zionist Movement had put fundraising …ahead of aliyah ….This should not be the case …One question I would like to put (to) the adult “Zionists” is “Why didn’t you go on aliyah 10, 15, 20 years ago?” Just on this point Mr. Walter Duffield was congratulated and warmly thanked for his great work and effort that he has put into the Zionist movement over the past 22 years. (I believe I have made my point) …when will they learn that without people in Israel all this money is just so much paper…”[48]

A chavera almost a decade later recalls that an attempt to confront the community leaders met with little success, yet it did consolidate the movement’s role as an ideologically strong

I was on the SZC (State Zionist Council)…We were trying to take on the Jewish community as a whole…There was a bit of tension at Hashy at the time, because some of us wanted to push the community leaders to (confront certain things). They were very right-wing…Even discussing peace in the Middle East was a radical thing…We took (our grievances) to the community leaders…We didn’t really have any success with them…We were completely marginalised, but… I think it was a worthwhile thing to do…(lt was) the first time since the late forties that the communal leaders (were challenged).[49]

There was definitely an element of pleasure derived from being marginalised. Part of it can be attributed to the irreverent joie de vivre, the delight youth can take in rocking the proverbial boat:3part of it was the fact that the “Jewish establishment” was seen as everything that Hashy didn’t want to be and their rejection was seen as legitimising Hashy as a politically rebellious thorn in the side of the ‘Man’:

Hashy didn’t respect the other organisations as much as we should have.  We  … thought we knew best.  I don ‘t think Hashy ever felt a major player in the broader scheme of the Jewish community.[51]

Still the movement was part of the Australian Zionist Youth Council and therefore has featured as an active and vibrant participant within the wider Jewish community, notably as performers in the flag parade and Israeli dancing alongside other movement bogrim at the annual community Yom Ha’atzmaut concert.  The AZYC has united Hashy with the other Zionist Youth Movements in Melbourne.  A contemporary chaver considers Hashy “close to all movements, from Betar to Habo“[52], while his older sister who left the movement almost a decade earlier remembers “We were quite close to Habo and Netzer people, I suppose because our ideologies were similar in some regards, or maybe because the madrichim from those movements were friends”[53].  To another,

There was almost a hierarchy in terms of closeness.  I would rank Habo – Netzer – Betar – B’nei … Habo was for the ‘cool’ people.  In reality, there was nothing cooler about Habo than Hashy.[54]

Conflict has shaped the relationship between Hashy and the other dominant youth organisation, the university campus-based Australian Union of Jewish Students.  This has represented itself in debates over AUJS’s on-campus activities, their politics (or lack thereof) which tend towards the conservative, and the short-term Israel programmes which are viewed with disdain as a kind of Machon-lite:

As members of a youth movement, we always thought we were cooler than AUJS.  We didn’t think living on kibbutz for two days [on the Israel programme Academy] constituted a kibbutz experience.[55]

The trajectory of Israeli history would certainly become a serious bone of contention between the movement and AUJS and, indeed, Hashy and the Jewish establishment in Melbourne.  When Hashy would go on to publicly voice their support for the establishment of an independent Palestinian State and foster relations between Jews and Palestinians in Melbourne, these were incendiary gestures for a largely pro-Israel-regardless-of-anything community.  A recent chaver characterises Hashy’s position in relation to the mainstream Jewish community, or “Jewish Establishment”  as “quite marginalised because of our left wing views, especially in the climate of the intifada”[56]. Another view is more balanced but attacks the conservatism of the Melbourne Jewish community in the 1980s and 1990s:

I think that the community at large appreciated us and what we brought to the community in terms of spirit and commitment, however I do remember being really cynical of the community, refusing to read the Jewish News and such, I guess because I felt that while I knew I was a part of the community, I felt that it didn’t truly represent my values, or Hashy values.[57]

These factors illustrate the varying tensions within the worlds of the chaverim over the past fifty years, illustrating the importance of the existence of Hashomer Hatzair in offering an alternative to those particular values and preferences that have dominated Melbourne Jewry and the wider Australian community.

 

CHAPTER TWO:

 

The Vehicle Between Homes:

The Movement

 

“Help us set up Beth Anilewicz, a haven for Hashomer”[58]

For me, as a kid, Hashy made it easier.  It was a bit of a haven.[59]

The movement itself can also viewed as a home of sorts. It served as a haven for its members who were excluded from outside its structure for their difference – their Jewishness, their youth, their politics. It was a refuge from the pressures of home and school, the dreariness of routine. It offered each individual a group which – empowered by its own song, its own flag, its own spirit – created and nurtured a more stable and cohesive identity than other spheres of their lives were capable of rendering, one that strived to attribute equal power and dignity to its chaverim, regardless of their age and gender. As nationalism itself – and indeed the Zionism embraced by Hashomer Hatzair – is an ideology of social unity, the movement served to create for its members a sense of kinship, the security of a collective identity. In order to foster this sense of community, the movement provided a seemingly whollistic critique of society that reinstated its own social and moral codes, irrespective of the prevalent trends of society. Makeup, for example, was considered antithetical to the movement’s ideals given its implications of vanity, appearance­ orientation, and artificiality, one chavera remembers that”…every Veida, a lot of time was spent on smoking and makeup”.[60] This was considered a weighty issue and certainly impacted upon the chanichot whose “makeup may have become a little more subtle or we may not have worn it to meetings or camps”.[61] There are several details of daily behaviour that Hashomer Hatzair insisted upon that one may consider beyond the movement’s juristriction. On one hand, there were so many matters of administration with which the bogrim laboriously dealt that the movement seems to have been rather ‘corporate’ in its strict and meticulous organisation. The titles of the positions held by the bogrim reflect this very formal and distant element: Rosh Gizbar (‘Head of Finances’), Rosh Tarbut (‘Head of Culture’), Mazkira (‘Secretary’). The movement, however, was not a business. Ultimately, the force driving its chaverim was, in part, political committment and Jewish identification with Israel, but it was also driven by the feeling of community, warmth and security that belonging to Hashy engendered.

If Australia represents the ‘physical’ home, and Israel the ‘ideological’, then Hashy is the provisional home; perhaps the most apt metaphor describing its role is that of the caravan that one may inhabit while one’s old home is being demolished and before the new one is built. It provided a socialist critique within a capitalist society, a Zionist dynamic in Australia, an embrace of agriculture within an urban world. It pointed its chaverim towards a place where their socialist and Zionist dreams could be realised – a Hashomer Hatzair kibbutz in Israel. One of the most fundamental tenets of movement ideology was the futility of Jewish life in the Diaspora and thus it demanded a committment to aliya, facilitating the literal transportation of its chaverim out of one national home and into another.  It moved its members, literally, to physically move – to participate in scouting activities: outdoor camping, hiking, scouting.  These activities have been enjoyed by half a century of chaverim, and the unparallelled delight of today’s city kids take in leaping around the bush is equally palpable in the memories of one chaver in his recollection of the 1950s:

Hikes and camps were always the best combination in maximising enjoyment.  I remember with an inner warmth a famous Night Hike where each group was given instructions, food rations, water, a compass and map and were told that following a “drop” off at a truck at a specific point on the map, we were to make it back to camp on our own.  The fearless group of Barkai were determined to be the first back at camp and go off to sleep before any of the others made it back! … We walked all night … and arrived back at camp around 6am only to find that the rest of groups did the only decent thing – they hitched a ride back to camp on the back of a truck.  They arrived back around midnight and [had] been fast asleep ever since.[62]

Yet especially from the period of the late sixties and continuing until the present – when the “Israel mystique” that saw the State as infallible was beginning to be demythologised – ­ the movement began to ‘move’ its members in another sense. It moved them to challenge convention, dismantle the status quo that they felt the Melbourne Jewish community had established, criticise government policies, condemn the excesses of youth culture. It moved them to write songs, learn Hebrew, attend meetings, participate in vociferous debate. It moved them above all to aspire to the ideals set by the movement, as outlined in Ha’Eser Dibrot, on a more global scale. For this to occur they needed to deconstruct the ‘norms’ set by other societal spheres (for example, those fostered at school, or within university life – which itself was deemed, in 1961 when bogrim were starting to study, “a contradiction to movement education…Uni-life has a cynical atmosphere about it, (its) ethics and morals”[63] and in their place, instate other frameworks of social and ideological conduct that could both accommodate and propagate the ideas and values of the Movement.  This site for debate, argument and discussion was well-entrenched in Hashy‘s origins as one of the first chaverim recalls:

the pet hate in the movement was a long and drawn-out Veida (defined as a talk-fest for those who suffer from ‘loose verbal motions’).  The first such event was a shock to a young and enthusiastic fully uninformed cleanshaven youth!  Little did I suspect that the well-intentioned expressions of co-operation, harmony and do-good for all mankind did not transfer well to reality.[64]

within the movement has continued to the present; as one chavera of the 1980s and 1990s remembers, “every hanhala was a political activity”[65]!

From a young age chanichim are encouraged to form opinions and speak out.  The movement provides a forum for learning, discussing, brainstorming and acting.

Hashomer Hatzair itself has a vast and politically-loaded history.  Hashomer, a scouting movement, was created in Poland in 1913. After the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, its headquarters moved to Vienna where it merged with Tzeire Tzion, a Jewish intellectual Viennese student union, and the movement developed its Zionist socialist ideology. In 1919, the first Hashomer kibbutz was established in Israel, which was followed by the establishment of the International Hashomer Hatzair headquarters in Warsaw (1924) in order to cater to the needs of the individual movements which were spreading throughout Europe. In 1927 the Hashomer Hatzair kibbutzim in Israel formed the Kibbutz Artzi – Hashomer Hatzair Federation. During the Nazi persecution of the Second World War, several of the movement’s chaverim were actively involved in Jewish resistance (of these, the most well-known include Mordechai Anilewicz, Tosia Altman and Chaviva Reich).  The movement did not exist in Australia until a breakaway group from the more moderate Labour Zionist Habonim Dror decided to introduce the movement in Melbourne. This situation emerged when a number of Habonim’s senior members decided that they wanted to settle on kibbutzim of the Artzi movement (the kibbutz movement affiliated with Hashomer Hatzair) and” Habonim was not willing to accept that…so (the group) started a new movement…which was more militant, with more political consciousness”[66]. Its ideological fervour at the time is evident:

Hashomer Hatzair has arisen here due to a need and culmination of growing differences within Zionist youth ranks. Zionism in this country has ceased to be the dynamic movement of the era preceding the establishment of the State and has found its raison d’etre solely in the collection of monies in Israel.[67]

The tone of the movement was reactionary, caustic, proud:

We believe that Zionist youth have a role to play in the upbuilding of our State… Hand in hand in our work for National upbuilding and independence, we participate in the struggle for a world built on a life of Social Justice and Equality, a world free from war, poverty and famine.[68]

That initial group started Hashomer with a feeling of militancy and dedication to the movement and political radicalism…When the last of that small group left for Israel which was in ’56, it was natural that the character of the movement slowly began to undergo a change. It didn’t retain that same…radical devotion to the movement. It slowly waned, and in so doing, in terms of political and social orientation, the differences between Hashomer and Habonim also…slowly decreased. During ’55 – ’64, the movement grew in size      The Healesville Camp was a turning point... I was probably the last of those who really felt fully devoted to the movement, and I had a feeling that when I left, the movement would lose something of its drive and purpose. I think it changed a little bit of its orientation, part of that was…probably due to the events that took place in Australia after that. Things in Australia started to liven up; young people had more hope that Australian society was going to change for the better. The appeal of staying in Australia became a real option for…those with a feeling of idealism who wanted to do something useful with their life. They could turn those feelings of idealism to good use here in Australia, whereas in my stage, I just didn’t see what I could do in Australia.[69]

Hashomer Hatzair was ‘an unknown product’ in those days.  Feared by the Beth Weizmann powers at the time, by parents who feared that their children would leave home to live on Kibbutz.  The newcomer was regarded as a break-away rebel amongst the entrenched movements of the day.[70]

But not a rebel without a cause.  Beyond the informal education of Socialist Zionism and Secular Judaism, Hashy has been an unparallelled haven of peer-support for half a century.  Every member of Hashy belongs to a kvutza, a group, named for an Artzi Kibbutz. It is with these peers that they experience the movement from Grade 3 until Machon and beyond.  Friendships have lasted lifetimes – “Forty years of friendship I’ve nurtured”[71], marvels one of the movement’s earliest chanichim.  Another from the 1980s illustrates the depth of this affiliation and camaradarie:

The other night we had a guest from America who used to be in Hashy and I asked her what her group was called.  She couldn’t remember.  I couldn’t imagine ever forgetting I was in Eli Faz.[72]

The role of the group and the attention given to “group dynamics” and authority afforded to group decisions cannot be underestimated in the lives of the chaverim. The personalities of a particular group could therefore make or break one’s future as a shomer or shomeret.  One chanich of the 1980s recalls that “there were some intimidating characters in the group” when he started, although this was alleviated by the fact that “the madrichim were very friendly”[73].  One of his chevrei concurs with

My group was very big and very loud and we all took great pride in this. I think we had a collective ego that could topple Hollywood A-listers. Each person knew “their place” so I suppose we became caricatures of ourselves. I remember that we once got lost on our overnight hike and when we were finally found our mads had warm schnitzels waiting for us. I also remember one summer camp, the camp where we came up with our eliphaz song, at each tent inspection in the morning we had to make up a little skit. But instead of simply presenting a new skit each day, we chose to add on a skit each day, so that by the end of camp our group tent inspection lasted quite a while and everyone had to sit through about eight little eliphaz numbers, but that was us…we loved being the center of attention.[74]

My impression is that many of the people who went through Hashy thought “My group was Hashy”.  We were the dynamics that kept the ball rolling.  We were the biggest group [and] as a result of being the biggest group, we were a more charismatic group – at least I tend to believe that!  We had a lot of different personalities, but we all had a common passion – Hashy.  We had security and fun.[75]

” A movement is such a cult of personality”, as a chaver of an earlier decade points out.  It is indeed the case that groups at Hashy, and indeed all youth movements, are formed at a young age, seven or eight, and often those who begin young become the ‘old guards’, often complicating the integration of newcomers.  The social atmosphere of any group is dependent on the characters of the individual which, in this context, is bolstered by a consciously constructed collective identity. “You remember the strong personalities”[76]: the memories of those who stayed and felt part of the Hashy family are clearly far more fond than those whose transient stay at the movement was possibly due to feeling alienated by the group or specific individuals.  While probably the exception rather than the rule, during my time at Hashy, more than one person was made to feel unwelcome.  This was not often a deliberate act, but a result of the fact that the youth movement can often be boisterous, irreverent, and full of in-joke humour:

Our group was mainly dominated by boys. Because of this, we were mainly given female madrichim. I guess there was a bit of a hierarchy in our group in the earlier years, but as years progressed and our group became smaller, the people who were not necessarily in the “cool” crowd began to hold an equal position within the group. Skit nights often brought out the characters of the quieter kids. I remember one skit night in particular when one of the boys who wasn’t so popular was encouraged by us to wear a full long-john suit. He was ridiculously skinny and he looked hysterical. But rather than laugh at him, we laughed with him and from then on he held the position of the “class clown” in a way. [77]

The youth movement culture itself must be examined before any understanding of the impact that as Hashomer Hatzair had on its chaverim can be gained. It is a unique space, one where young people – relatively powerless in the public sphere (governments and education, for example) – are autonomous; it is they who plan meetings, make critical financial/ ideological/ administrative/ cultural decisions; it is they who type up the minutes, print out the flyers, argue about politics, and walk about as if the weight of the world were on their collective shoulders. It is a space where males and females grow up together and thus accept the changes that take place to each others’ minds and bodies as natural. It is a space where debate is encouraged and critical thought is revered. It is a space where no­ one is ever told “You are too young”. One chaver who began Hashy as an eight-year-old in 1981and remained until 2002 cites “the atmosphere of inclusiveness” as the determining factor in his movement longevity.   Hashy provided a space where he felt “able to be who I wanted to be without being judged, but rather … encouraged”[78].  It is a collective experience, one that is focused primarily on the group that inevitably emerges “when you have a group of like-minded people…We became very involved with the way the movement was running, what was expected of us as members…so it drew us together as a group”[79].  And while “the group” is considered central to ones Hashy identity, the movement affords the unique opportunity to mix with “a conglomerate of ages.  My year didn’t just hang out with my year”, remembers one chaver of the 1980s, “The older guys were like heroes.  They were cool”[80].

I remember being wowed by all these people.  They were so confident and cool.  Everybody belonged – there was a big sense of family, everyone was included.  From a shy outsider’s point of view, I just [felt] ‘I want to be part of this’.  Everybody was so together.[81]

With its emphasis on equality and togetherness, Hashy also removed much of the stigma associated with stereotypical gender roles.  From an early age, boys and girls share tents at camps:

There was never an issue with the girls and the boys in the tents.  Even the younger kids didn’t have major issues with sharing – maybe [their] parents did!  It probably did work wonders.  That was definitely a great experience.[82]

I had been at an all-boys school for three years and then all of a sudden I was sharing tents with girls [but] I was comfortable – I was still pretty young.[83]

The platforms of Hashomer Hatzair are Socialism, Zionism and Secular (also referred to as Cultural) Judaism. In 1975, a list of the twenty most-used words in the movement was published. These words give some indication of the ways in which the movement has been consolidated as an active force in the chaverim’s lives with its detailed organisation and designation of uniform, ritual and roles. It contained:

mifkad – ‘count-off’; ritual ceremony held at weekly meetings.

chultza – shirt; a blue cotton shirt with white lace.

kvutza – group; each chaver belonged to one; they were named after kibbutzim in Israel.

semel – symbol, also ‘badge’; special smalim (pl.)were presented at different stages reached within the ranks of the movement.

chaver – member; friend (m).

shikhva – a cluster of two to four groups of similar ages who shared camps and some activities.

ken – a ‘campus’ or branch of an organisation; prior to the establishment of its centre in East St.Kilda, Hashomer Hatzair had several kenim, in Camberwell, Northcote, Caulfield and Kew. Between 1994-1997? a ken was operating in Glen Waverly.

moadon- club, clubhouse. Beth Anilewicz was often referred to as the moadon.

degel- flag.

machaneh- camp.

shira- song.

rikud- dance.

peula- activity. molechet yad- equipment.

iton- newspaper. sicha- discussion.

cheder-ochel- dining room.

echad, shtayim,shalosh, arba, chamesh, shesh, sheva, shmona, teysha, eser­

one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten.

Everything was normalised – shlochy [Yiddish: ‘scruffy’] clothes, dancing to daggy music … In isolation that would have been more difficult … Doing Israeli dancing at Hashy was just mucking around.[84]

The movement’s hero was Mordechai Anilewicz, a young boger of Hashomer Hatzair who had emerged as one of the leaders of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943, an event which has since become a paradigm of resistance. The ‘ideal’ archetype of the movement was the Chalutz, the resilient pioneer and hero of the early days of Israeli independence, the brave, strong, brawny figure planting seeds, digging dams, building the homeland. Indeed, as a 1952 publication of Hashomer Hatzair, London, puts it: “The story of Israel’s colonisation and upbringing is a revolt”[85].  It is a strikingly masculine picture, given the amount of females in the movement and the gender equality that one would assume implicit in a socialist ideology. However this must be viewed within the context of a society that had not yet been exposed to the new methods of understanding and interpreting gender relations which was brought about by the popular literature and academic essays of the second wave of feminism in the early seventies:

Hashy was very sexist … [in] the sixties. We fought to be allowed to go on Pioneer Camp because Pioneer camp had been something that boys did and girls didn’t. Boys went to Pioneer Camp and dug the doovas and set up the tents … it was almost like a guy’s ritual … One year Jennifer [Jedwab] and Hanna Schulsinger and I went … We were there to cook … and we got … bored cooking, so we said “We want to do something else”, so [the boys] said “Alright you can dig the doovas”… [It was] really patronising, like: “We’ll give you the shittiest job to do just so you can show that you can’t do it”, That was what it was like to be a girl, a teenager in those times. Probably Hashy, by letting us go on camp, and giving us the space, was more liberated than most … [I]n terms of the things that we thought were most important, which were the discussions, we were always equal. There was never any question on the ideas level, that there was any difference … Helen Wacjman was ‘head honcho’ for quite a few years … She was one really tough woman…and it was never an issue…ln terms of sexual politics…, there was sexism, but on the actual work of Hashy, there wasn’t.[86]

There would have been certain roles that the males would take…The gizbar was seen as a position that a boy would take…Things that had to do with chinuch were seen as more female roles…Now we’d call it sexist. I don’t know if at the time we’d even question it…ln terms of (the image of) the chalutz, we assumed that because we were all wearing chultzot, we were all wearing jeans (that) we were all the same.[87]

We can see the image of the chalutz lingering over ha’eser dibrot. Not only are virtue (honesty and courage) and nature prescribed, but so too is a healthy lifestyle which was actively pursued by the bogrim of the movement. Amongst the motions passed by a Veida Klalit in 1960 was “That chaverim be made to realise the importance of the Ten Dibrot and to enforce them”. This was accompanied by another approved motion that demanded that every chaver who smoked would be given six months to quit smoking, or may otherwise face expulsion”[88]. The ‘anti­smoking ethic’ within the movement was, in part, a result of “smoking being seen as an imitation of adult society and…to youth (whose) aim it was to create a new way of life, not smoking was seen as a revolt, as not accepting the values of the older generation, and forging (their) own identity”[89]. In 1962 a letter was sent by the hanhaga to the Anti-Cancer Council, requesting sixty pamphlets on smoking, indicating that the issue was also one of health. During a hanhaga several months after the motion was passed, it was acknowledged that smoking amongst the chaverim was still a “huge problem”. According to a letter from the merakez of Hachshara to the movement in 1963, the situation was yet to be resolved. One chavera ruefully admits: “We were the smokers. We were the culprits of anti­-social behaviour”. [90] My memory of several heated veidat and hanhalot of the early 1990s indicates that these are issues that will probably never be resolved.

It is possible to view this as the result of the competition between Hashomer Hatzair and external influences in their chanichim’s lives, and draws our attention to the conflict between that which the movement aimed to instill in its chanichim and its ability to always maintain and enforce certain standards, values and approaches:

you were basically an adolescent and not quite sure about where you wanted to go and what direction you were going to take. We did have outside influences…The movement took up a lot of our time, but basically, we were aware about what was going on outside as well. Especially for the females…it was often the males that would say “Why are they wearing makeup?” or “Why do they care about their appearances?”…The girls were obviously influenced by not only what was going on in the movement, but by what was going on outside as well.[91]

On a regular basis (excluding camps which generally ran for ten days in winter and 8 days in summer), madrichim only spent two hours of the entire week with their chanichim. During the rest of the week, the chanichim went to school, ate meals with their families, and ‘hung out’ with their friends. Three major influences- school, family, peers ­and often espousing values completely oppositional to those of the movement: “it is important to work hard so that you can grow up and make a lot of money”; “You have to go to shul. You’re a Jew, aren’t you?”; “Go on…Just have one drag…it’s not going to kill you!”

At the age of sixteen, seventeen, you see things in black and white…There were a lot of discussions about things that were considered ‘anti-social’ or ‘anti­movement’ behaviour…We were not quite sure where we belonged in society or where we belonged in the movement.[92]

Discipline was a central concern of the movement in the early sixties. There are many references in the archives that indicate the control – or lack of control – that madrichim exercised over their chanichim. “Behaviour itself must be attended to, and with some exactness, because it is through the flow of behaviour – or more precisely, social action ­that cultural forms find articulation.”[93] Complaints were made by the merakez of hachshara regarding the lack of supervision of the chanichim that resulted in their misbehaviour during a weekend camp. Discipline was also seen as a necessary component of a commitment to aliya, and the hanhaga of 1963 had no qualms about using any means to enforce the ideology of the movement onto the chanichim; they were “glad that chaverim who live (in Australia) have a sense of guilt because they would then try to redeem themselves by remaining active in the Zionist organisation”. The movement of the early sixties clearly wanted to provide an alternative to the present mainstream youth culture and, in doing so, create responsible, committed shomrim.. In 1962, a motion was passed, declaring that “The Hashomer Hatzair rejects the social trends of today’s youth and tries to encourage a deeper and more constructive form of social and cultural activities within the framework of the movement”.[94]

This was difficult to maintain in an era of increasing permissiveness where youth mischievousness and rebellion was entering into the mainstream popular consciousness: both symptomatic and resultant of “the seismic shifts in the cultural landscape (was) the new protest music, the Pill, sick humour, the stirrings for Aboriginal rights”. Voices of dissent found their place in popular discourse. The cover of OZ#8 “showed Robert Menzies touched up to resemble Adolf Hitler (accompanied by the words) ‘This man is an Australian Liberal. His party advocates: The White Australia Policy, IIegalisation of the communist Party, Capital Punishment, repressive Literary Censorship…’”[95]. The chaverim had to maintain a complex ideology which embraced only a selection of the freedoms offered by the ‘permissive’ revolution – They supported the increasing public expression of youth, for example, while rejecting some of the results of ‘new youth culture’ – smoking, drinking, partying and promiscuity. The tenth dibra did, after all, state that “A Shomer is clean in thought, word and deed (A Shomer does not drink, smoke or abuse sex)”, and “Hashomer Hatzair had strong elements of Stalinism…and the manifestation (of socialism) in the kibbutzim … was very puritanical”[96] . This ideological stream is reflected in the writings of the movement in the early sixties: “to them it was very clear: no smoking, no drugs, … no drinking”[97], but seems to have been replaced by “a far more libertarian view of socialism”[98], one that embraced the “softer, … humanist element of socialism” towards the end of the decade. Even so, the movement did not descend into Dionysian debauchery:

When I got to Israel on Machon, I was really naïve … 1 think Hashy kept us really innocent in a lot of ways. The culture of Hashy at the time was very intellectual.  Most of the leaders were very intelligent; we had lots of rational discussions; we took various clear-cut views. We didn’t give into ‘weaknesses’. There just wasn’t any (sex), as far as I knew anyway! .. [no] drugs and drinking … There was that puritanical streak and I thought that was part of Hashy [until] I spent time with English Hashomer who were into everythlng! That was a bit of an eye-opener, that you could be in Hashomer and not be so rigid and dogmatic.[99]

The libertarianism of the 1960s swept across western democratic societies, and this social shift, from which Hashy is not immune, has flourished in an increasingly permissive society where the shattering of the taboo is commonplace. The leaders of Hashy became increasingly ‘alternative’ to the ‘mainstream’  – at least the mainstream Jewish community – in their hippie-ish garb (flannel shirt, faded jeans, boots) and liberal attitudes towards drugs and sexual openness, creating a situation where the movement itself became part of a kind of “cool” subculture, where madrichim boasted about their ‘tallies’ on Machon, figures which became benchmark for their impressed, eager chanichim and the soft drug use of the bogrim was known to the younger chaverim.  A chavera, who was involved between 1983 and 1994, recalls that

Hashy exposed me to more “subcultural” elements that I wasn’t aware of.  Just how authentic that exposure was I really don’t know. As a result, I felt pretty cool about who I was and what my associations were.[100]

The definition of “cool” and the values espoused by Hashy at any given moment are therefore entirely dependent upon its leadership which changes annually, although leaders are encouraged to contribute for a few years, ideally until they make aliya. The movement is therefore a shifting construct – it “is not some nebulous being, it consists of its members, is only as strong as its members” and is thus subject to change.  While its official ideology of socialism, Zionism and secular Judaism has been maintained throughout its history, the ways in which it has been incorporated into movement life has varied depending on the cast of characters and its specific historical position on the ever-shifting trajectory of Australian youth culture.  Not everyone felt pressures though:

I didn’t have a personal conflict with [those] issues.  I was too clean-cut![101]

Different stages of the movement require different levels of commitment, yet could almost shape the entire week.

I looked forward to Sunday and then spent the Monday remembering the Sunday.  Tuesday was ‘Forget Hashy”.  Wednesday was building up again and looking forward to the weekend.[102]

One chaver dates the growth of his active devotion to Hashy to Year 9, where he “had more time up his sleeve, was more dedicated to the cause, liked the people in the group better, and … became a bit more involved”[103].  “Commitment” is a major buzzword of the movement and often used, sometimes pejoratively, as a yardstick of one’s ‘authenticity’ as a shomer/et.

We were doing HSC and Hashy was pushing us “If you’re not coming to a meeting the Sunday night before an exam, you’re a failure”.[104]

The leadership years are especially demanding, for both the Year 11 madrichim, who juggle their schoolwork and their Hashy responsibilities, and the bogrim, the majority of whom have just returned from Israel, commenced university and have part-time jobs.  Often with so many balls in the air, it is university that suffers, both in terms of contribution to and participation in uni life and politics (how many bogrim rush through union buildings avoiding on-campus activity in order to get to hanhala or to meet their co-madrichim at the cafe to plan a meeting?!) and the work itself:

[Hashy] was the detriment of my uni life and how well I applied myself and subsequently performed, and that limited my chances of getting a job immediately after uni.  Uni wasn’t my number one focus.[105]

Absent in most memories of the movement is the fact that, ultimately, the leadership of Hashy is young and relatively inexperienced.  A chavera of the 1980s remembers that, on camps,

we got two hours sleep, drove the kids around the bush at night [and] left the kids.  We were not completely responsible.  In Year 10, we got dropped off and had to hitchhike.[106]

Yet it is precisely that youthful spirit of adventure, of excited spontaneity, of enthusiasm for debate and celebration that has carried the movement through fifty years in an ever-shifting social and political climate.

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CHAPTER THREE:

 The Ideological Home: The Homeland – Eretz Israel

Our lack of ideology in the past has led to chaverim losing the main idea in the movement, and falling by the wayside. We must constantly remember that we want the Jewish people to survive, and that hachshara, aliya and kibbutz are the best means of ensuring that survival”[107]82

There was so much pressure put on [to make aliya] it was quite frightening.[108]

Israel is the ultimate ‘imagined’ home of the chaverim. Underlying all of their public moments ? their involvement in Australian political life, their attempts to ‘revolutionise’ the Jewish Establishment in Australia has been a deep love of Israel that until recently at least meant committing to fulfilling the chalutzik dream of life on kibbutz. This was a dream of personal fulfilment, but by no means a personal commitment, it was a collective one, enforced as a condition of entry to the higher echelons of the movement. In order to be a boger/et, one was required to commit to aliya. During a Veidat Bogrim in 1961, a chevra (only identified as Frances) “feels that she wants to become a meumedet, but not (a) bogeret, because her potitical opinions are not defined as yet.”[109] The whole process was taken very seriously by the chaverim, and there were many instances where the suitability of individuals endeavouring to ‘progress’ in the movement was brought into question. This commitment was neither arbitary nor fixed, and the changes in Australian society have appeared to redefine the movement’s platform on Zionism.  Today’s movement appears to have elevated the role of the Diaspora Jew, the very creature that the early chaverim of the movement despised, by dismissing aliya as the ultimate goal for everyone.  This is a very different world than the one in which Hashy, Australia was born.  In 1953 Israel was a five-year-old nation still aglow with its stunning and unexpected victory of the War of Independence.  Zionist fervour throughout the Jewish world meant actually physically going and building and contributing.  It was a physically undeveloped and culturally undefined nation that relied on the finances and immigration of Diaspora Jewry.  Israel today is a highly modernised society, at the forefront of technological and scientific research with a strong national identity (a necessary response to perennial adversity) as evidenced in its arts, literature, culture and political discourse.  Its population is bulging; the original mix of post-war Ashkenazi refugees, Sephardim from places like Morocco and Egypt and Western olim joined by Jews from Russia, Ethiopia – and generations of native-born Israelis – many of whom, themselves, have left Israel for places like the US and, probably to the dismay of Hashy‘s founders, Australia.

It is difficult to conceive the Hachshara, for example, existing today. The Kibbutz Training Farm was a property in Toolamba that was owned by the Zionist Federation of Australia and New Zealand, and used as both an agricultural `training-ground’ for the preparation of olim and a campsite for the machanot in the 1950s until the mid-sixties and it was compulsory for members of both of Melbourne’s kibbutz-oriented youth movements, HashomerHatzair and Habonim Dror, to spend eighteen months at the farm, which was established to promote

Avoda  that is, not only learning the actual work, but mainly mental attitude to work. The young prospective chalutz has little chance to learn a trade in the short period of 18months which we insist upon. But the former city dweller and schoolboy can adjust his mental attitude to physical work.

Chevra  which is the spirit of communal living and pioneering necessary for the upbuilding of the State of Israel. The training of chalutzim on hachshara to live a communal life is a very important aspect of this principle.

Tarbuth which is Jewish education and culture and Hebrew language. This is a very important part of hachshara and hardly anywhere else in this country can be given with the same amount of success as on Hachshara.[110]

Hachshara was central to the movement’s practical application of ideology. The chaverim on Hachshara were under pressure from the movement to ‘perform well’. A 1961 report states that: “(The) Bogrim on (the) farm don’t realize [sic.] what it is to be on Hachshara. (They) require some ideological [sic.] education”[111] The centrality of the Hebrew language was cemented in the movement through its practice of using Hebrew instead of English in the description of constantly?used movement terms ? including structures, groups, uniforms, activities, and buildings. It was believed that in: “learning the language we make the main step in Jewish identification … we have a common bond with Israel. It used to be a duty in Hashomer Hatzair of the past that the seniors of the movement would speak fluent Hebrew; they were proud to be pioneers in Jewish society by achieving this aim”[112].

It was of value. I enjoyed the year I spent on Hachshara (1963). I didn’t see it as losing a year of my life as many people possibly would …it was a valuable social experience …living with other people, but also learning how to take on responsibility. In Australia young people tended to be ‘mollycoddled’ and not have to take responsibility for anything …Does it serve a purpose in preparing someone to live on kibbutz – I think it did, but from the point of view of [the fact that the majority of chaverim who were trained at Hachshara are not living on kibbutzim today], it didn’t succeed.[113]

After Hachshara and before Aliya came Machon Le’Madrichei Chutz La’aretz – The Institute for Youth Leaders from Abroad.  This year-long programme includes time spent on an Artzi Kibbutz and an undertaking of a youth leadership programme (alongside other Australian Zionist youth movements as well as those from New Zealand and South Africa) in Jerusalem.  (A new programme, Ma’aleh, was added to the traditional Machon programme in 1992.)

Every year, Hashy encourages its Year 12s to spend the following year of their lives … in Israel.  They are encouraged to defer a university course or job prospect, and instead fly half-way across the world and live in a country one-third the size of Tasmania, speaking a language that most of them can’t speak, and eating foods that their stomach may not be in total agreement with.[114]

The adjustments were not always easy, although most memories of this Israel experience are overwhelmingly positive.  A chavera on Machon in 1992, in response to how the year measured up to her expectations, explained that it “was difficult at first to come to terms with the feeling of isolation on kibbutz, but once I got used to it I loved it”[115].  This was already in an era of increasing globalisation where access to Israeli culture was much more immediate and the world media provided a window (albeit often a scratched one) through which it was possible to ‘see’ Israel.  For earlier, less disingenuous generations, though, misrepresentation was much more commonplace.  A chavera on Machon in the early 1970s recalls that

as presented to us as an ideal way to live where people were all treated as equals, where people were given the opportunity to do their own thing without many restrictions, rather than needing to go to work …You could expand your horizons, and do what you wanted to do because the mundane side of life would be taken care …[like] cooking and washing and cleaning …ln return you had to work but..you gained honour and strength..in your work …A society that you gave to, but they gave you a lot more back. You never questioned the fact that the children were separated from parents, but we all thought …that was a wonderful idea. We didn’t have children, we didn’t know how people who had children in children’s houses were feeling, so we just saw it as an ideal way of living. We never really questioned or thought about it, it was just that we were going to go to Israel and we were going to live on Kibbutz Lahav and live happily ever after.

We are of that generation that said “We are going to go to Israel after our (university) graduation”, which meant there was no fixed time …We belonged to a garin, but nobody came up and said to each individual, “When are you going?

In the movement, when we talked about Israel, we talked about kibbutz. (There was) this image of people dancing in the street ,…this image of the sun always shining and people always smiling, even (though we knew about) the soldiers (they were) on the periphery …And suddenly we got to this place, and it was raining …and it’s a city like any other city, so there wasn’t this feeling of “I’m Home”, or “I’ve come to the Promised Land”… I don’t know that we really knew what we were going to, we’d heard about kibbutz, but …didn’t have a clear idea of what was going to be expected of us and where we fitted in …As it turned out ….machonikim were on the lowest rung on kibbutz … I suppose I expected to be welcomed with open arms and that didn’t happen. Basically I came down with a real thump because nobody had ever told me that kibbutz life was boring and mundane, and that you get excited about the kind of biscuits that they have in the moadon. I suppose we went with this semi?idealised picture but we came down with a real thump.

Still the motivation behind participation in the programme has shifted in the past fifty years.  Originally conceived as a stepping-stone to aliya, the attitude of the bogrim in 2003 neatly illustrates the paradigmatic shift within the movement with regard to Zionism:

Today, the emphasis is not so much on Aliyah but on creating a strong relationship with Israel, the centre of Judaism … The current [sic.] ideology of Hashy Australia specifies Aliyah as the highest ideal of our Zionism, however it is not assumed (or implied) that it is this [sic.] only aspect … Hashy will continue sending its chanichim to Israel … so that when they return as bogrim, their experience will make Hashy a better movement. [116]

Still Australia has had the highest rate of aliya from Western Diaspora countries, and many Hashy chaverim are living in Israel, several on Artzi Kibbutzim, such as the movement’s founders Zvi Solow and Dov Golembowicz (both on Kibbutz Nirim) and Daniel Layton (Kibbutz Gazit). There were, however, just as many that made aliya and have since returned to Australia.  One oleh “had misgivings” about Kibbutz Barkai where he spent the first fifteen months of his aliya in 1965:

Why did I leave Israel? [It was motivated by] a feeling of disappointment and disillusionment, instead of going forward in the twenty?seven years that I’ve lived there, I feel its gone backwards …in the sense of social development …living in Israel is really difficult and the easy life in Australia was a lure. I spent most of my adult life in Israel. I don’t regret living in Israel for the period of time that I had, but I also don’t feel the imperative of staying there. It’s a big wide world and there’s a lot to see and do and also to fight for.[117]

Changes that took place in Israel would inevitably demand a reassessment of the movement’s platform of Zionism. Between 1956 (the Suez Crisis) and 1967 the Australian attitude to Israel was “as close to ‘normalcy’ in Zionist terms, as any in history, with pro?British Arabism into the past (and) pro?PLO radicalism still in the future”[118]. The 1967 war changed that, and the movement suddenly had new issues with which to contend. A madrich of the late sixties and early seventies reviews the situation of hiss hanhaga in comparison with that of the movement in the earlier sixties:

Life was a little simpler (for them) … Most of their formative views predated the Six Day War and the world looked fairly simple. You would … go through the movement, you’d actually do Hachshara … By the time we were there, I don’t think it was there anymore, so this notion of preparing and going straight on to kibbutz was not really an issue for us. The Six Day war had some impact. The Six Day War happened when we were sixteen and …not yet in any authorative positions in the organisation, and I remember being bombarded …with the divisions of the Six Day War and what it all meant …and of course the issue about the Palestinians only became an issue after the Six Day War. There wasn’t a debate beforehand, so it was always the debate around our national existence which was simple, but after the Six Day War, you had to think about the debate about the rights of the Palestinians, and that …, over a period of time caused a real split between us and the shlichim in the movement. I remember …a number of significant agreements between the shlichim who had …come out of … leftwing Kibbutzim (but) basically had standard views of the Israelis which, at the time, was generally very anti-­Palestinian,…very much in the Golda Meir line.[119]

Even prior to that, a gulf was identified between the ‘ideal Israel’ projected by the madrichim and the reality of the nation.  A heated anonymous letter to an Iton of the early 1960s reveals a not-so-charmed perspective of a chanich/a  who had recently visited the troubled nation, and whose disillusionment with the movement is palpable:

For five years now I have been coming to Hushie and every week and at every camp I, with the rest of my group would sit down and listen to the madrichim say how good Isreal [sic.] is …that it is full of milk and honey and that the only trouble is a minor (and very occasional) squabble with the Arabs. Recently I visited Isreal [sic.] and found out how it realy [sic.] is …lf it is so good then why is there so much poverty and mistrust among the people. While we were touring I became more depresd [sic.] …The cities just made me sick.  What about the young kids [in the movement]? What are they going to think when they reach my age and find out how Isreal [sic.] is realy [sic.] like …will they feel the way I do or will the madrichim change their ways of showing what Isreal [sic.] is like. Do they think that the younger ones are going to believe that a few devoted people turned beach sand into fertile soil and the land of milk and honey. It might just be me, but I fear not, and until Hushie realises this I won’t be coming back.

The changes that have taken place since 1967 have only further problematised the movement’s definition of Socialist-Zionism.  The lofty ideological hopes idealistically underpinning the first few decades of Israel’s existence revealed futile in the face of a land that wasn’t flowing with milk and honey:

While the dominant expression of Zionism in the Diaspora is that of unconditional solidarity, this does not sit too comfortably in the socialist environs of Hashy.  Rather than blind love, we show our support of Israel through a critical engagement with the country’s politics and society.[120]

By positioning themselves at a distance from the manifestations of Zionism, today’s chaverim are able to take a pragmatic approach to the different world that Hashy now occupies without rendering void the philosophies behind Hashy‘s ideology:

The State of Israel is created but occupies another nation, now struggling for its own independence.  The country has been ravaged by the effects of extremist action on both sides and is exhausted with grief.  Unemployment, inequality and intolerance abound and anyone will tell you that daily life is a struggle.  Resistance is needed against terrorism, which is destroying Israeli families almost every week, but also against Israeli government policies that humiliate, deprive and impede Palestinian development – factors that provide a fertile ground for terrorist activity.  We cannot boast of our role in the creation of the State without acknowledging the repercussions of that history. [121]

The commitment to Zionism and aliya was also challenged by the movement’s increasing involvement with secular issues.  This led to internal debates regarding the movement’s involvement in non?Jewish or non?Israeli issues.  One chaver of the late 1960s and early ’70s explains the differences between his madrichim, the first chanichim of the movement and his own generation.  His madrichim, he says,

were still of the old school where you really really pushed aliya to kibbutz, and that was the generation of the Hachshara. This was … the focus; this agricultural type lifestyle. By the time we came back from Machon, we all went to Uni, so … even though we had a garin, most of us thought we would like to work in some kind of profession …The shlichim that were coming out …recognised that they were dealing with different people … We weren’t pushing kibbutz, but we (still recognised that we had) a future in Israel. We were more concerned with giving the chanichim an awareness of the State of Israel ? the history … the political situation … ? … but also aware of what else was going on, so it wasn’t just educating them in one area , … we were becoming more aware of things, and obviously that translated to our chanichim, so sichot weren’t just about Israel and kibbutz, they were about what was happening in the world, and making things relevant to them.[122]

We were very involved in Vietnam and the anti?nuclear movement … There was a time when we wanted to go to a peace march …in our chultzot …and the shaliach at that time (Scharf) was very angry … (and) was reluctant for us to go representing the movement … and we said “No we’re going! … He lost.[123]

Over the years, the shlichim have had considerable influence on the movement and its chaverim and have acted as a living embodiment of Zionism. As the current shaliach Ofer Doron has said:

The Shaliach is coming to bring Israel into the movement … The Shaliach should have influence over the decision-making process.  He or she should point towards the new direction, but through challenging the Bogrim with questions not via pushing towards the so-called “right” direction.[124]

The shift in their attitudes towards aliya is reflected by contrasting the attitude of Scharf in the 1970s with that of Avner Barzelai in 1980s, who a chavera of that time recalls as influential in Hashy becoming less dogmatic about the involvement of bogrim who didn’t commit to making aliya – “He said it was okay, you’re not a failure”[125].  A decade later, schlichim Akiva and Rivkah Villand would write that “missing in today’s movement … is the spirit of rebellion … Aliya is the first priority, but without the spirit of rebellion it is … difficult to reach the goal of aliya“[126].  Still “the vital role Schlichim play in maintaining Kesher (Communication) with Israel”[127] is also felt on a personal level, in that chevrei since 1959 have been exposed to a different dynamic – that of a family.  The warmth of “Yankele (Kirsch, 1989 – 1992) and his family left a big impression”[128], recalls one chaver of the 1980s and 1990s. Yael and Menachem Bezner, on shlichut from 1995 until 1998, claim that “not a week goes by that we don’t receive telephone calls and letters from Australia or entertain Ozzy guests”[129].

In 1993, during Hashy‘s 40th anniversary celebrations, its commemorative yearbook paid testimony to the courage of Yitzchak Rabin and “the unprecedented steps towards peace that is [sic.] taking place in Eretz Israel today”[130]. Two years later, Rabin was assassinated and eventually in May 1996,  a Likud government, led by Binyamin Netanyahu, came to power.  The intifada  and subsequent tragedies of the Palestinian struggle for autonomy of the1990s that continue to this day (suicide bombings, assassinations, the situation in Iraq) have inflamed public (Jewish and secular) discourse on Israel and Hashomer Hatzair has often been at odds with the Israeli government, which destabilizes its relationship with the mainstream Jewish community in Melbourne which tends to support Israel regardless of its particular political measures and actions.  An Israeli landscape that is forever shifting – culturally and politically – renders all forms of Zionism in general, and that of Hashy, Melbourne, subject to constant negotiation and renegotiation.

*********************************************

CONCLUSION

 Coming Home: The Past and the Future 

 … we had a hope of surviving the next few years.  Four maybe, not forty.[131]

Ten years ago, from his home on Kibbutz Nirim, Zvi Solow, one of the founders of Hashy, marvelled at its success and longevity in Australia.  Today, as the movement celebrates half a century in Australia, the possibility that a book like this will appear in 3003 to mark a century of movement life in Melbourne appears very likely. The fiftieth celebrations, as well as providing a stomping ground for old shomrim to reunite and reminisce, were testimony to a thriving movement with a solid membership and that irreverent Hashy ruach (spirit) that seems to have been an unchanging feature throughout its history.  “

Kama Tov Lihiyot Ba’Hashomer!” – “How Good It Is To Be In Hashomer!”.  How good is it?   In fifty years, Australia has undergone enormous changes – politically, socially, culturally and ideologically.  Life in Melbourne 2003 often bears only slight resemblance to the same place half a century earlier.  The early fifties

was an era without fax machines and televisions, [when] newspapers took two weeks to arrive air mail, phone calls were prohibitively expensive, and transport was by sea … Our live contact with Israel, the World Movement and the Kibbutz was supposed to be with the schlichim … who didn’t arrive until 1959…[132]

The movement was founded when Israel was five years old, a land of abstract possibility rather than the reality of a living, breathing country, complete with, to paraphrase Ben-Gurion, its own thieves and prostitutes, that would, in time, become a war-ravaged territory and the focus of the world media.  When there, in essence, was no difference between ‘Israeli’ and ‘Jew’, no real concept of what the word ‘Diaspora’ would come to signify. When Melbourne Jews were predominantly lower to middle-class refugees with more in common with the ‘Aussie Battler’ than the faces on the BRW Richest 200 List. When socialism was still tainted with images of the Red Menace.  When children were seen but not heard.  The reality is very different today, yet, week after week, decade after decade, Jewish youth have gathered together to essentially do the same things.  To dance, debate, sing, laugh.  In blue chultzot and white string.  Something bizarre and wonderful has bridged the vastly different generations, and cut through the supposed cynicism and world-weary Nintendo-playing, Eminem and Britney-loving jaded precociousness of today’s youth, to sustain Hashy in contemporary society.  Why the longevity?  Why is it still “so good to be in Hashomer“?

There is the support, the sense of community, and the cushioning of the alienation of the adolescent experience.  This was as true in a pre-Oprah culture of “listening” to children, as it was in a less youth-centric, although, arguably simpler world.  For a chanich of the 1950s,

Growing up in general can be a stressful and difficult time, but somehow the experience was a little easier because our peer support structure was well established within the group and also outside group meetings.[133]

Hashy also engendered irreplaceable life skills – confidence, self-esteem, the ability to form opinions and articulate them – in adolescents in the most important stages of their development:

[Hashy] made me less shy.  The feeling of belonging, [being] part of the bigger picture – it wasn’t just you in St. Kilda, but you in Australia, and people all over the worlds with similar philosophies – you weren’t alone. [134]

This security enabled participants to take on roles they otherwise wouldn’t.  How easy in life is it to avoid taking on certain responsibilities because you’ve accepted that that’s simply not where your strengths lie?  Hashy forced the disorganised to get their act together, the timid to speak in front of a crowd, the uncoordinated to do the hora, the uninformed to learn something, the apathetic to engage, the unmusical to sing a chorus, the lazy to complete a hike.  (And that’s just me…)

The skills – getting in front of people, organising – I think it’s invaluable.  [Those are] life skills I wouldn’t have gotten anywhere else.[135]

Even recognising weaknesses in a healthy, constructive way is a positive effect of Hashy  on its chaverim.  Not everybody is good at everything, but by providing the opportunity to at least try out a variety of roles, Hashy has helped individuals determine their strengths and weaknesses:

I don’t think it was a great strength of mine, running the movement, but I think I contributed in other ways, which made my contribution valuable – the planning of the meetings, the behind-the-scenes organisation, the camps, the finances.  I was very good from 5pm Sunday [the end of the meeting] until 3pm the next Sunday [the beginning of the next meeting]![136]

Unique to spaces like the youth movement is the opportunity to mix with a variety of people, unavailable to most youth:

As a 15-year-old, you can be friends, on some level, with kids who are eight years-old and people of 22, and you get to learn from a young age to deal with people who are adults but not parents.[137]

The feeling of a newly-arrived-at independence, yet one that could be shared with peers

Putting on the army pants and grey coat and getting on the tram when it’s dark and going out for a cappuccino with your friends – for me [that] was really important.[138]

In the words of chaverim of the past:

Hashy had a huge influence on my moral fabric, on my social life (my dearest friends are “hashy-ites”, and the way I engage with people. I think I was politicized from a very early age and this still feeds into my thinking today. [139]

It was such an integral part of my life on all levels and it still has ramifications today … I deal with Hashy people a lot … When I think of close friends, I always come back to the youth movement.[140]

We are a very special group with specific goals and ideals, imbued in us as we gained maturity and experience to be passed from generation to generation.  Never say that chalutziut is dead: it exists in a new and different form, pioneering ideas, thoughts and actions if not the actual land we hold as our own.[141]

Looking back, I remember Hashomer Hatzair as the best part of my childhood and adolescence.  The movement gave me Judaism of song and dance of Zionist yearning and of love of Israel, and an enduring passion for social justice.[142]

Hashy definitely shaped the person I am, instilling within me an ability to function as part of a group as well have the confidence to stand alone.. I will definitely send my kids to Hashy because in terms of character building, I think it is invaluable.[143]

I made lifelong friends, had inspirational role models, and the tzofiut skills are helpful in my parenting![144]

It has shaped my values and therefore who I am.[145]

Hashy created a blueprint or framework for me to build the rest of my adult life.[146]

Although within the movement there have always been frictions revolving around issues of what Hashy should ideally be, and certainly chaverim from different periods may shake their heads, with amazement, amusement or despair, at the trajectory that Hashy has taken, this is inevitable:  we are, after all, talking about a movement. The room to develop, change and adapt; the space to venture outside the norms created by the founders of the movement in order to both borrow from and exchange with the external world is not only implicit, but is at the very heart of this history, the lifeblood that flows through its veins. A movement cannot remain stagnant: the raison d’etre of a youth movement is ultimately to serve the youth and, thus, it must always remain relevant and exciting. That Hashomer Hatzair, the dream of a tearaway bunch of kids in the 1950s has continued to inspire, educate and shape the lives of half a century of Jewish youth in Melbourne, is testimony to its success in adapting to contemporary society, while maintaining the Hashy spirit, on camps and at meetings, in song, dance, and debate, with lessons in leadership, organisation, commitment and participation.  Clearly ze yoter me-tov lihiyot ba’Hashomer – ‘It is better than good to be in Hashomer‘!!

******************************************************************************

[1] Pamela Ruskin, The Australian Jewish News, November 1^st 1968.

[2] Richard Neville writes of a “grim gerontocracy in Australia under Menzies in Hippie, Hippie Shake: The Dreams, the Trips, the Trials, the Screw-ups, the Sixties (William Heinemann: Victoria 1995, pp. 32-3).

[3] Hashomer Hatzair 1953, (A magazine celebrating the founding of the movement in Melbourne), p. 4.

[4] Interview with Mina Galpern, 8/5/97.

[5] W.D. Rubenstein, The Jews in Australia: A Thematic History (Volume Two: 1945 To The Present), William Heinemann: Port Melbourne 1991, p. 69.

[6] Interview with Mish Beker, 7/5/97.

[7] Interview with David Rothfield,10 /5/97.

[8] Interview with Danny Blay, /1/04

[9] Interview with David Zyngier, May 97.

[10] Interview with Karen Milgrom, 8/5/97.

[11] Interview with Mish Beker, 7/5/97.

[12] Partha Chatterjee, Colonialism, Nationalism and Colonized Women, American Ethnologist,  16:4, November 1989, pp. 624-5.

[13]Interview with Karen Milgrom , 8/5/97.

[14] Interview with Mish Beker, 7/5/97.

[15] Interview with Danny Blay, 1/04.

[16] What this Iton Needs Is A Clean Pair of Socks, 20/4/73.

[17] Interview with Sharonne Blum, 4/04.

[18] Interview with Sandy Khazam, 1/04.

[19] Geoff Stokes (ed.), “Introduction”, in Australian Political Ideas, University of New South Wales Press: Sydney 1994, p. 15.

[20] Interview with Karen Milgrom , 8/5/97.

[21] Interview with Mina Galpern, 8/5/97.

[22]Peter King, “Beyond the National Interest: Australian Foreign Policy in the Late 1970s and After”, pp. 42-7, in Henry Mayer & Helen Nelson (eds.), Australian Politics: A Fourth Reader, Longman Cheshire: Melbourne 1976, p. 42.

[23] Humphrey McQueen, “The Suckling Society”, pp. 65- 70 in Mayer & Nelson, ibid., p. 65.

[24]ibid., p. 66

[25] ibid.

[26] Plenary Session with Chayke Grossman, 1963.

[27] Interview with Karen Milgrom , 8/5/97.

[28] “of camp they freak out, ‘cos they know not of love, they know of sex but love is sex + love …when camp is spoken of in hushed voices they laugh …but camp is not wrong, to love is to love, and they should not care whether it is for a man or a woman” – “Of Camp” (poem) in Camp Iton 1969?1970.

[29] Interview with David Zyngier                    Mendes, op. cit., p.438.

[29] Rubenstein, op. cit, p.537.

[29] ibid.

[29] Augustine Zycher, cited in interview with Phillip Mendes (28/11/90), in Mendes, op.cit, p.**`*

[33] AI Hamishmar.. On Guard, June 1971.

[33]1nterview with Yehuda Blacher, 7/5/97.

[35] ‘Paths To Peace’ was formed “in the early 1970s ….lts program consisted of mutual recognition of Israel and the PLO, leading to the creation of a West Bank Palestinian state and an overall Middle East settlement …in 1984 (it became) the Australian Jewish Democratic Society, with a much wider left?wing agenda including the advocacy of nuclear disarmament, opposition to uranium mining, and Aboriginal land rights ? in other words, precisely the ‘universalistic’ progressive agenda the mainstream Jewish community has eschewed” (Rubenstein, op.cit., pp.560?1.)

[36] Formed in 1942, the Council “contained the chief secular political expression, within the Australian Jewish community, of a universalistic social and political philosophy, reaching out from the Jewish community to other (in its view) oppressed groups in order to fight ‘reaction’, injustice and racism.

[37] Interview with David Zyngier.

[38] Interview with Karen Milgrom , 8/5/97.

[39] Mordechai, “Mifal: Tzofim and Kivshim – Man and Society”, 27/11/64.

[40] “New Year’s Message from Norman Rothfield”, Australian Jewish Review, September 1947.

[41] Interview with Arik Blum, /4/04.

[42] Interview with Yehuda Blacher

[43] Jepi Epstein, Rosh Politica, Fiftieth Anniversary Iton, 2003.

[44] Interview with Arik Blum, /4/04.

[45]Zvi Solow, “How It All Began”,  Fortieth Commemorative Yearbook, 1993.

[46] Rubenstein, op. cit., p. 6.

[47] Interview with Yehuda Blacher

[48]“Report: Zionist Federation of Australia and New Zealand: 1968 Biennial Conference, Pesach? On Guard, April 1968.

[48] Interview with Karen Milgrom , 8/5/97.

51 Interview with Danny Blay, 1/04

[51] Interview with Josh Kay, 1 /04.

[52] Interview with Arik Blum, 4/04.

[53] Interview with Sharonne Blum, 4/04.

[54] Interview with Josh Kay, 1 /04.

[55] ibid.

[56] Interview with Arik Blum, 4/04.

[57] Interview with Sharonne Blum, 4/04.

[58] ZIK #2, 11/5/65.

[59] Interview with Danny Blay, 1/04.

[60] Interview with Mish Beker, 7/5/97.

[61]Ibid.

[62] Uri Krieser, “A ‘Trip at a Trot’ Down Memory Lane”, Fortieth Commemorative Yearbook, 1993

[63] “8^th Veida: Veidat Bogrim”, 10/2/61.

[64] Uri Krieser, art. cit.

[65] Interview with Sharonne Blum, 4/04.

[65]Anna Dorevitch, “Resistance”,  Fiftieth Anniversary Iton, 2003.

[65] Hashomer Hatzair 1953, 1953, p. 4.

[66] Hashomer Hatzair 1953, 1953, p. 4.

[67] Ibid.

[68] ibid.

[69] Interview with David Rothfield, /5/97.

[70] Uri Krieser, “A ‘Trip at a Trot’ Down Memory Lane”, Fortieth Commemorative Yearbook, 1993.

[71] ibid.

[72]Elly Bloom, cited in Becky Aizen, “Ba-Boker, Eli Faz;  Ba’Erev, Eli Faz; Le’Olam, Eli Faz”,  Fortieth Commemorative Yearbook, 1993.

[73] Interview with Josh Kay

[74]Interview with Sharonne Blum, 4/04.

[75] Interview with Josh Kay

[76]Interview with Danny Blay, 1/04.

[77]Interview with Arik Blum, 4/04.

[78].ibid.

[79] Interview with Josh Kay, 1 /04.

[80] Interview with Danny Blay, 1/04.

[81] Interview with Sandy Khazam, 1/04.

[82] Interview with Josh Kay, 1 /04.

[83] Interview with Danny Blay, 1/04.

[84] ibid.

[85] Yisrael Ellman, Forging the Link: A Handbook of Hashomer Hatzair, London, 1952, p. 24.

[86] Interview with Karen Milgrom, 8/5/97

[87] Interview with Mish Beker, 7/5/97.

[88]“Veida Klalit”Minutes”, 7/2/60.

[89] Interview with David Rothfield, /5/97

[90] Interview with Mish Beker, 7/5/97.

[91] ibid.

[92] ibid.

[93] Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, Basic Books: London 1975, p. 17.

[94] “First Annual Federal Veida of Hashomer Hatzair, Australia”, 29/12/62.

[95] Neville, op. cit.

[96] Interview with Yehuda Blacher, 7/5/97.

[97] ibid.

[98] ibid.

[99]Interview with Karen Milgrom, 8/5/97.

[100] Interview with Sharonne Blum, 4/04.

[101] Interview with Josh Kay, 1 /04.

[102] ibid.

[103] ibid.

[104] Interview with Sandy Khazam, 1/04.

[105] Interview with Josh Kay

[106]Interview with Josh Kay

[107] “Report of Tzofim Bogrim and Tzofim Benonim, Veida Report, February 1967.

[108] Interview with Danny Blay, /1/04.

[109] Minutes, 8th Veida: Veidat 8ogrim, 10/2/61.

[110] 10 Years: Hachshara Australia, published jointly by: the Hachshara Department of the Zionist Federation of Australia and New Zealand, Federal Maskirut of Hechalutz, Australia, The Chevra on Hachshara, 1955.

[111] Minutes, 8th Veida: Veidat 8ogrim, 10/2/61.

[112] Iton: “New Year Edition”; (29/10/68)

[113] Interview with David Rothfield, /5/97.

[114] David Rozenbes, “Why Does Hashy Send Kids on Shnat?”, Fiftieth Anniversary Iton, 2003.

[115] Interview with Sharonne Blum 4/04.

[116] David Rozenbes, art. cit.

[117] Interview with David Rothfield, /5/97.

[118] Rubenstein, op.cit., p.532.

[119]Interview with Yehuda Blacher, 7/5/97.

[120] Anna Dorevitch, “Resistance in Hashy”, Fiftieth Anniversary Iton, 2003.

[121] ibid.

[122] Interview with Yehuda Blacher, 7/5/97.

[123]Interview with Karen Milgrom, 8/5/97.

[124] Ofer Doron, “The Role of the Shaliach”, Fiftieth Anniversary Iton, 2003.

[125] Interview with Sandy Khazam, 1/04

[126] Rivkah and Akiva Villand, “Shlichim Report”, Fortieth Commemorative Yearbook, 1993.

[127] Roni Krieser, “Merakez Report”, Fortieth Commemorative Yearbook, 1993.

[128] Interview with Josh Kay, 1/04

[129] Menachem & Yael Bezner, “The Bezners”, Fiftieth Anniversary Iton, 2003.

[130] “Editorial”, Fortieth Commemorative Yearbook, 1993.

[131] Zvi Solow, “How It All Began”, Fortieth Commemorative Yearbook, 1993.

[132] ibid.

[133] Uri Krieser, art. cit.

[134] Interview with Sandy Khazam, 1/04.

[135] Ibid.

[136] Interview with Josh Kay, 1/04.

[137] ibid.

[138] Interview with Danny Blay, 1/04.

[139] Interview with Sharonne Blum, 4/04.

[140] Interview with Josh Kay, 1/04.

[141] Vanessa Eckhaus, “The Hoarder”, Fortieth Commemorative Yearbook, 1993.

[142] Ronny Eidelson, “A Blue Shirt and the Impossible Dream”, Fortieth Commemorative Yearbook, 1993.

[143] Interview with Arik Blum, 4/04.

[144] Sivan Shapira, “Memories Through The Ages”, Fiftieth Anniversary Iton, 2003.

[145] Elinor Porat “Memories Through The Ages”, Fiftieth Anniversary Iton, 2003.

[146] Mikey Burrows, “Memories Through The Ages”, Fiftieth Anniversary Iton, 2003.

**********************************

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The early schools of St Kilda provide fascinating insights for anyone interested in schools and how our  education system evolved. Prior to 1872 there were perhaps fifty schools clamouring for students in a loosely regulated system. Many quickly failed after a year or two. Others changed their names and/or relocated several times Teachers often shifted to other schools. Sister siblings such as the Goldsteins, Murphys, Mouchettes and Garrows banded together to teach. Private homes competed with churches and entrepreneurs. All one needed to hang out a shingle apparently were ‘good references’ but in a fashionable suburb like St Kilda it paid to be Swiss or French. Secular schools struggled in the face of zealous Catholic and Protestant congregations keen to bind  the young to the faith. This eccentric crowd of auspices ended with the radical 1872 Education Act.

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