Bernie Sanders and the kibbutz conundrum

[Alfresco]

82. Bernie Sanders’s Kibbutz Found. Surprise: It’s Socialist.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/06/us/politics/bernie-sanders-kibbutz.html?_r=0

By STEVEN ERLANGERFEB. 5, 2016

JERUSALEM — Senator Bernie Sanders volunteered on an Israeli kibbutz in the 1960s, but he has always been vague about the specific location. Now, the mystery about the Democratic presidential candidate’s past appears to have been solved, in the archives of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

Yossi Melman, a longtime Haaretz writer, remembers an interview he did with Mr. Sanders in 1990, the year he was elected to represent Vermont in the House. Haaretz dug up that clip, in which Mr. Sanders said he had spent several months in 1963 working on Kibbutz Sha’ar Ha’amakim, near Haifa in northern Israel, as a guest of the Hashomer Hatzair youth movement.

The movement, whose Hebrew name translates to “The Young Guard,” was a socialist, Zionist secular Jewish youth group founded in 1913 in Galicia, Austria-Hungary, and shared the name of a workers’ party in pre-1948 Palestine. The original 1990 article was titled “The First Socialist” and said that after spending time on the kibbutz with his wife at that time, Mr. Sanders seems to have lost his connection “to Israel, Zionism and Judaism,” Haaretz reported this week. Mr. Sanders has long described himself as a democratic socialist.
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The kibbutz was founded in Romania in 1929 and established in pre-state Israel in 1935. It saw the Soviet Union as a model, and often flew the red flag at outdoor events.

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http://forward.com/news/332946/revealed-at-last-inside-the-kibbutz-where-bernie-sanders-lived-and-learned/

Revealed at Last! Inside the Kibbutz Where Bernie Sanders Lived and Learned Socialism

Sanders’ time on the kibbutz, where he lived for a few months with his ex-wife, Deborah Messing (born Deborah Shiling) is referenced in virtually every profile of the candidate.

But the Sanders campaign has been tight-lipped about name of kibbutz, leaving journalists in Israel and the U.S. searching fruitlessly for months. On February 4, national security journalist Yossi Melman unearthed a 1990 interview with the candidate in the Israeli Haaretz newspaper, where he revealed that it was Shaar HaAmakim.

On Friday, the typically sleepy kibbutz in the shadow of the Carmel Mountain was swarming with Israeli journalists searching for memories or photos of the presidential hopeful.

“The kibbutz was a full commune,” said Irit Drori, a 72-year-old former secretary of the kibbutz. Typical of the time, children were raised in a dormitory apart from their parents, who lived in small apartments.

The kibbutz founders had a strong admiration for the Communist system in the Soviet Union.