Ben Shemen Children's and Youth Village

The children's and youth village Ben Shemen ( Kfar Hanoar Ben Shemen ) is a 1927 by the German-Israeli physician and educator Siegfried Lehmann founded and for many years led children and youth Republic on the grounds of Ben Shemen . As the Ben Shemen Youth Village , it celebrated its 90th anniversary in 2017.

prehistory

The Jewish people's home in Berlin , the Jewish children's home in Kowno and the Ben Shemen children's and youth village are three institutions that are closely linked to the name Siegfried Lehmann and mark the stages of his socio-educational work.

Lehmann, who came into contact with Martin Buber through his brother Alfred , first visited Palestine in 1914 and at about the same time, during his first semester in Freiburg, made friends with Walter Benjamin and got to know Gustav Wyneken's reform pedagogical ideas here . Under Buber's influence, Lehmann turned to Eastern Jewry, which he understood as a return to “his people”.

“For us, the people were the Jewish people in the east, in Poland, in Lithuania, in Russia. We wanted to reconnect with these masses, from him we wanted to learn the Jewish language, Jewish (is) customs, Jewish (is) songs. On the other hand, we were Zionists, we were under the influence of Buber, we were among the thousand young Jews in Germany whom Buber showed the right way, the way to E (retz) I (Israel). "

In addition to this attitude criticized by Gershom Scholem , “Western Jews with a national Jewish attitude, who tended to Zionism, but had only very embryonic knowledge about Jewish things”, there was a further formative element of the proximity to the settlement movement . Lehmann's model here was the Charlottenburg housing estate founded by Ernst Joel as a connection between “the idea of settlement and Jewish social ethics”.

The Jewish People's Home in Berlin

The Jewish people's home , founded by young students and business people of both sexes by Lehmann and his helpers , opened on May 18, 1916 with a speech by Gustav Landauer on Judaism and socialism . It developed into an important focal point for Jewish youth and social work. The combination of social work and productive work practiced there was a kind of blueprint for what Lehmann later developed further in Ben Shemen.

Siegfried Lehmann was only able to actively take part in the work of the Volksheim he initiated for a short time, as he was drafted into army service in October 1916 and also had to complete his medical studies. He passed the medical state examination in November 1919 at the University of Frankfurt am Main. The Volksheim survived its initiator, but when “the well-connected Lehmann, whose work was financially supported by a number of sponsors”, finally left the Volksheim after his doctorate in order to take on a new task, this step brought some serious cuts . “From then on, a number of supporters financed the work in Kovno, the starting conditions of which were even worse than they had been in the Scheunenviertel four years earlier. [..] But not only the financial situation changed. There were also innovations with regard to the employees and the content of the work. Some helpers left the people's home and went to Palestine. Others followed Lehmann to Kovno and worked in the local orphanage. [..] In addition, some helpers from the early years died in the war. "

The traces of the Jewish People's Home can not only be traced to Kovno, but also extend to Palestine. Beate Lehmann refers to a lecture by Siegfried Lehmann, in which the latter had pointed out in 1950 that the majority of the former pupils of the Volkshaus would now live in Israel, especially in Givat Brenner , Ramatayim and En Charod . “Fifty years after the Jewish People's Home was founded on Dragonerstraße, former people from the People's Home met in Tel Aviv. Many of them had come to social work through voluntary work in the Volksheim and after the closure had worked in various organizations in the field of social work. ”For many of them, the Ben Shemen Children's and Youth Village had become a new place of work.

The children's home in Kovno (Kaunas)

According to Beate Lehmann, Siegfried Lehmann made “in the Jewish people's home his first steps on the path that would later lead him, as he had wished, to Eastern Europe and finally to Erez Israel”. But, even if this may have been the desired path, the departure from the Volkshaus also seems to have been frustrated. "After the end of the war, Lehmann also hoped to make progress with the expansion of the Volksheim idea, but soon had to resignedly realize that he could not establish an independent Jewish community in Berlin." From this point of view, it should have been the chance for a fresh start for Lehmann. when he was asked in 1921 by the “Jewish National Council in Lithuania to organize child welfare for the Jewish population”.

When exactly Lehmann made the decision for himself and a group of young people to emigrate to Palestine is not known, but it must have taken concrete form by 1925 at the latest, as the following quote shows: “A wave of arrests of teachers in Kovno in 1925 thwarted the plan of a 'dramatic group' that was supposed to finance the Aliyah through public performances, and at the same time made it clear that a future could only be imagined in Palestine. ”As a result, Lehmann founded the Jüdische Waisenhilfe EV Society for Promotion in Berlin in 1926 the upbringing of Jewish orphans for productive work . This association, in which many prominent Jews were involved, was supposed to support the children's home in Kovno and financially secure the emigration to Palestine. At the end of 1926, Siegfried Lehmann set out for Palestine with the first group of young people. They made a stopover in Berlin at the Ahawah children's home for four weeks because they still had to wait for the entry certificates.

At the beginning of 1927 Siegried Lehmann and his second wife, the doctor Rivkah Rebecca Klivanski († 1959), brought the first group to Palestine, followed in July 1927 by the second under the direction of Akiva Yishai (Akiba Vanchotzker) and his wife Chaja Radin. Probably her first point of contact was not yet Ben Shemen, as Lehmann wrote in 1926 before she left: “In the near future, an older group of children's homes will be going over to Palestine to prepare the ground for a children's and youth settlement there in Emek Israel; younger groups, along with their guides, will follow. They are [..] form the nucleus of a children's and youth village. "In this nucleus for the later children's and youth village Ben Shemen in Emek Israel, the Jezreel Valley in what is now Israel North District , it could be around the children's village in Giwath Hamoreh traded have, about which its founder and leader, Sch. S. Pugatschow, following Lehmann's article From the street horde to community in the magazine Der Jude reported. Why Lehmann did not go straight to Ben Shemen is not known, but his vision of the germ cell became reality. A children's and youth village gradually emerged in Ben Shemen, "which was to become the most prestigious institution of its kind in Israel".

The children's home in Kovno was given up in 1930. His last director and Lehmann's successor was Hans Lubinski, who then directed the Jewish youth and apprenticeship home in Wolzig .

Ben Shemen

Arrivals

View of the central village square (2012)

The central square of the children's and youth village (2014)

Siegfried Lehmann had known Ben Shemen since his first visit to Palestine in 1914. However, it remains unclear what prompted him in 1927 to realize his ideas of a children's and youth village here in particular. Bückmann reports on three previous attempts to find a suitable location in Palestine before Lehmann was then able to buy into Ben Shemen. The seller was the Jewish National Fund ( JNF or JNF-KKL ).

Shortly after acquiring the land, Lehmann met Hans Herbert Hammerstein (Yisrael Shiloni) by chance in Tel Aviv and invited him to go to Ben Shemen with Moses Calvary. In his memoirs, Shiloni reported on this first visit there: “Lehmann said with a beam: 'Here from the main street to the children's village we will plant two rows of palm trees. That will make anyone who comes in feel uplifting. ' Calvary replied, 'You'd better think about where your kids should sleep first.' 'Oh no,' said Lehmann, smiling as always, 'you won't be able to forget that [sic]. But such things of aesthetic importance, which have a great influence on life, have to be decided in good time so that they are not neglected in all the hustle and bustle. '”According to Ari Shavit, it was winter before Lehmann and his followers finally arrived in Ben Shemen : “On a rainy winter day, Lehmann [..] moved into Kiryat Sefer with his wife and a dozen orphans from Kaunas , into the buildings that Israel Belkind had erected twenty years earlier for the children who were theirs during the Kishinev pogroms Lost parents. "

The visions of the early years

Review and outlook 1929

In an essay from 1929, Siegfried Lehmann describes the newly acquired children's and youth village as follows:

“The children's and youth village Ben-Schemen is an agricultural settlement in Judea , not far from the Arab city of Lydda , where children of all ages live, learn and work together with teachers and workers. The settlement lies in the middle of grain fields. Orange gardens, vineyards, olive plantations; in the farm yard there are stables for horses, livestock and poultry. The residential houses are surrounded by beautiful old trees, cypresses and pines: a home for small children. a school children's home and the houses of the youth community; behind it, next to the sports field, the open-air swimming pool planted all around with cypress trees, the center of life on hot days. "

As a result, Lehmann takes up descriptions of everyday life from Ben Shemen in order to develop his ideas of a Zionist upbringing that focuses on productive work . It ties in with the young people who moved from Kovno to Ben Shemen in the spring of 1927 and who formed the prelude for the younger children from the children's home that followed. This preparatory work had been completed by the time the article was written, and after the new construction and renovation of solid stone houses, “there were already 150 citizens in the village (together with 28 children in the neighborhood), children and young people aged 3-17, one of whom Some came from the Kovno house, some from Palestine and some from other countries. According to the plan, the village will include 350 children and young people over time. "

The anti-pedagogy

For Lehmann, young people aged 14-17 are “the real educators for the younger children in the village”. They see their work in the village not as “gymnastic work”, i.e. secondary employment, but as a fundamentally important contribution to securing the livelihood of the village provide "child economy" adapted to their possibilities. Lehmann explained that this had already proven itself in the difficult and strenuous construction work, since the underlying idea had been recognized, “that the young people who build their village with their own hands do not see this village as a foreign 'institution', but rather feels as her own home, as her own work ”.

The way upbringing and work (education through work) go hand in hand here, there is no room for a pedagogy that pretends “as if the boys act independently, but where they are moved from above like puppets behind the scenes ". Lehman's model is based on self-administration in which all people over 13 years of age living in the children's and youth village, including adults, organize their coexistence themselves and on an equal footing, and the highest authority is the village community . It is “the society in which young people learn to feel that they are citizens with certain rights and obligations”. At her side there is a system of elected councils for special matters, for example for cultural or economic matters. Lehmann does not fail to recognize that this can sometimes be connected with problems, that an upbringing to be in awe of others may not be mature enough, but it is precisely then that he recommends that older people, when living together with boys, "take the autonomy of young people more important. than the autonomy of the idea ”.

If the village community is to a certain extent the political level on which coexistence is organized, then the kwuzah is the level of personal coexistence to which, according to Lehmann, one is “connected by inclination”.

“Such a Kwuzah consists of 25-30 boys and girls aged 14-18. Some teachers and workers also belong to the group. The group (the word 'Kwuzah' expresses a stronger feeling of solidarity among the members than the German word) has its own house, and soon it will oppose its own small economy. This would fulfill a wish that the Palestinian boys and girls really love, a kwuzah, where the girls and boys work together (not the girls alone, do the kitchen, the vegetable garden and the chicken coop, where the Boys work in the fields and you study together in the evenings or discuss questions about a common future (because the core of the group wants to stay together later in life and settle down as a community) - or you dance. "

Nevertheless, in the group houses mentioned by Lehmann there was “a 'housemother' (Metapellet) who was responsible for health and hygiene and individual conflicts in the house, and an 'educator' (Madrich), who was more of a personal advisor and mouthpiece outward and arranger of activities. An even further differentiation consisted of the individual 'comradeships' within the individual communities around an adult living with them as a reference person. "

Coexistence with the Arab neighbors

Under the subheading Environment and Profession , Lehmann first describes an idyllic area if you consider the current location of Ben Shemen between Ben Gurion Airport and the motorway junction ( Lage ) adjacent to the children's and youth village : “Ben-Shemen is surrounded by Arabs Villages. A caravan road goes past our village, every night we hear the bells ringing of the camels and the low, monotonous singing of the guides. ”But Lehmann's focus is not on this idyll, but on living together with the Arab neighbors. Oelschlägel described him as a moral rigorist “when it came to the idea of peace, especially peace with the Arab neighbors”, and Lehmann confirms this with his commitment to wanting to approach this strange Arab world “because we in Ben-Shemen believe in the meaning of brotherhood between peoples. That is why we cultivate neighborly relationships, the Arab children in the area are sometimes our guests and our children are with them. ”And just as he mocked traditional school self-administration as puppet theater and school work offers as high school student work , he also connects this commitment to Jewish-Arab cooperation with a criticism of reform pedagogy , because through the lively exchange between Ben Shemen and his neighbors, “the youth in the youth village does not grow up in the isolated idyll of a country home , but in lively contact with the world as an adult one day it will become his ".

In Lehmann's report there is no reference to an event that would later be of great benefit to Ben Shemen: the help for the earthquake victims in Lydda (see below: The other year 1929 ).

“Half a year after Lehmann founded the youth village, an earthquake destroyed a large part of the old town of Lydda and killed numerous residents. Lehmann rushed into town to take care of the survivors. His work had a profound impact, and over the years he made friends with the Palestinian notable of Lydda and the dignitaries of the neighboring Arab villages of Haditha, Dahariya, Gimzu, Daniyal, Deir Tarif and Bayt Nabala. He made sure that the villagers who came to and from Lydda in the summer heat received cool water and refreshing shade at a well that he built for them at the gate of the Zionist youth village. Lehmann directed the local clinic to provide medical help to the Palestinians who needed them. "

Religion and people as guiding principles

Roni Hirsh-Ratzkovsky points out that it was important for Lehmann “to bind the students to the Jewish tradition and to develop a religious sensitivity and respect for the transcendent; he also wanted to encourage them to create their own rituals and emphasized the agrarian dimension of the Jewish holidays ”. At the center of this religiosity in the form of a religious reconsideration (“return to Zion”) was “the 'education in reverence for the sacred', in which the symbolism of Jewish customs and traditions took on a greater value than the meaning of the spoken word”.

Lehmann's ideal, to which he would like to educate, is that of the farmer, in which motifs of the youth movement and the early concepts of shifting are mixed with religious ones.

“Life as a farmer in Palestine gives the young Jew something of the happiness of unity, of the totality of life that the earlier religious families had and that the people of the youth movement of our day strive for. [..] This tremendous attraction, which the occupation of the peasant in Palestine exerts not on individual but on large parts of the Jewish youth, is only understandable if we are able to recognize the religious background of this longing, if we use the same religious energies that the Jews of the previous generation committed to God the Father , seeing them at work here again, in the desire for a new bond to Mother Earth. "

All this is part of a struggle "against an unhealthy and dishonest intellectualization," in which a religious myth of originality is also invoked as an equally mystical excessive popular term, which people values , folk tales , folk poets , folk music and folk dance should join. Enlightenment is with him, referring to Ernst Haeckel, turning away from “the immoderate overestimation of the natural sciences” and “opposition to a dreary materialism”. From this the hope grows: “The tendency towards authenticity and the self-confident emphasis on a certain proletarian simplicity, as it is in which is common in the workers' settlements in the village, will show us the way to new forms in faithful memory of the artistic traditions of Western Europe. "

Expressionist Zionism

What Lehmann propagated in 1929 was an anti-urban and anti-modern mood that sees salvation from the evils of modern society in retreating from the modern city and returning to physical and metaphysical roots . For Roni Hirsh-Ratzkovsky, this attitude of a specific connection between German Expressionism and Zionism arises , which manifested itself above all in the thinking of Lehmann's brother Alfred Lemm , but in which a theoretical construct remained, while it did not fully develop until the founding of the children's and youth village. And Lehmann also had to take note of this rooting of his ideas in European thinking when he reflected on the experiences of children and young people who did not immigrate from Europe: “The Jewish boys and girls who come from oriental-Jewish families are of the world the concepts that are valid for us are so abysmally separated that it would be wrong to approach them with our standards. [..] No doubt that the educators have not yet found a way to these children and that it will probably take a lot of time to get to know each other. "

The other year, 1929

It is not known when Siegfried Lehmann wrote his previously quoted article about the children's and youth village in 1929. One can assume, however, that this must have happened before August 1929, because one event is not mentioned in the article: the Arab riots of 1929, which are mostly only associated with the Arab massacre in Hebron , but also in led to clashes in many other Palestinian locations. Ben Shemen was also affected.

In the early hours of August 25, 1929, the residents of the children's and youth village, in which around 100 children and young people were staying at that time, were secretly warned by an old Arab and advised that about 1000 Arabs were attacking Ben in Lydda Shemen and other Jewish settlements in the area would prepare. Defense measures were immediately started in the village, the entrances were barricaded and an attempt was made to organize outside support. In the afternoon there was a meeting in Lydda, as a result of which a group of attackers made their way to Ben Shemen. Older youths from Ben Shemen opposed this and received support from an Arab boy who had worked in Ben Shemen and had friendly relations with the youth village. An attack could be prevented and around 6 p.m. two sheikhs from Lydda came to assure the residents of Ben Shemen that they would not have to fear an attack from Lydda that night. However, other Arab villages had made a covenant to destroy Ben Shemen that night.

Direct support from the English was not to be expected, but an Arab police officer stationed in Ben Shemen managed to arrest a village elder from one of the enemy villages as a hostage. Negotiations about his release took place during the night, but no attack, and now an English officer went to the Arab villages and persuaded them not to attack Ben Shemen.

The next day the situation came to a head again because many residents of Lydda were also killed in an Arab attack on Jaffa. They were now to be brought back to Lydda, and at the same time a new attack on Ben Shemen was propagated as revenge for these dead. In the meantime, news of the other riots and the Hebron massacre had also arrived there, causing panic. But at noon the all-clear came from Lydda again: the village elders had taken responsibility for the safety of Ben Shemen. This was expressly linked to the advice to the people of Lydda to remember that during the earthquake of 1927, Ben Shemen provided the first medical aid (see above).

As a result of this news, the situation eased for the residents of Ben Shemen, and English sailors came to Ben Shemen in the afternoon. These did not stay overnight, but Arab sheiks took over the guard at the gates of the children's and youth village.

On August 27, the residents of Ben Shemen were warned by their Arab friends from Lydda that news of alleged atrocities committed by the residents of Ben Shemen against Arabs had been spread in several Arab villages and that there might be attacks, if not from, the following night Lydda, to be expected. English sailors, who also drove to the Arab villages to demonstrate that they would protect Ben Shemen, once again eased the situation. The night remained calm - and so did the following day.

The last part of the report is from August 29th. Ben Shemen is still barricaded, but life is beginning to normalize. An Arab car with a white flag on the radiator drove past Ben Shemen to demonstrate peacefulness, and a meeting was scheduled for the first time that evening to discuss what had happened.

A preliminary remark was added to this report, in which it said: “We in Ben Schemen were saved by our policy of neighborly friendship that we have been pursuing in recent years. Every single good deed that we have shown the Arabs over time is remembered and has now borne fruit. If all Jews in Palestine had acted like this, our situation would not be so desperate today. ”This preliminary remark aroused so much displeasure among the readers of the Jüdische Rundschau that the editorial team felt compelled to clarify. It was assumed in letters that this sentence would have said that bad treatment of the Arabs by the Jews was a kind of justification for the crimes committed against Jews - a completely erroneous interpretation in the opinion of the editors. After referring to examples that showed “that despite the good relations between individual Jews and Arabs that had prevailed before, enmity and violence suddenly erupted in the days of struggle”, the editors come to what they consider to be the central point of the Ben Shemen report: “What but what was meant by the letter from Ben Schemen, and what is undoubtedly correct, is the fact that not enough attention has been paid to the conscious cultivation of neighborly relations between Jews and Arabs. [..] Certainly that is not all, there are certainly other things that matter, and luck may have played a role in Ben Schemens' case too, in spite of good relationships the troublemakers can gain the upper hand in all places. Nevertheless, this point of view seems so important to us that we thought it appropriate to give it space in connection with the characteristic report from Ben Schemen. [..] The need for a good relationship between populations living close together cannot be emphasized enough. "

For Siegfried Lehmann himself, the non-violent realization of the Zionist idea was only conceivable "if the Jewish national movement recognizes and respects the law of the national movement of the Arab people and if the Arab national movement relates to our just national demands with equal respect".

Child and Youth Aliyah

Ben Shemen continued to maintain friendship with his Arab neighbors, held Arab Weeks and organized a pacifist youth day in 1931 , "which wanted to be a beacon against all chauvinism in memory of the people who died in the 'mass murder of the peoples' ".

The first youth Aliyah group on the way to Ein Harod. She then moved on to Ben Shemen.

But only two years after this pacifist youth convention , Ben Shemen was forced to grapple with the serious political changes in Germany in the wake of the National Socialist takeover . In October 1932, in the run-up to these events, Recha Freier had brought twelve unemployed young people from Berlin to Ben Shemen. The experience she gained in this way led her to found the children's and youth aliyah at the end of January 1933 in order to be able to help as many Jewish children and young people as possible to flee to Palestine. The first group supervised by Freier after the founding of their organization arrived in Palestine in February 1934. “The kibbutz Ein Harod, located near Lod, initially agreed to take in the threatened young people, but then it got concerns. In the threatened Eretz Israel, 14 years before the state was founded, they had enough problems of their own. In this emergency, Recha Freier got to know the Berlin-born pediatrician Siegfried Lehmann, director of the Ben Shemen children's village. [..] Lehmann accepted the idea, but made the condition that the young people's funding must be financially secure during their two-year training in the youth village. A friend of Recha Freier then sold her jewelry. ”The fact that more than 300 children and young people lived in Ben Shemen in 1934 was also a result of the Aliyah; in 1937 there were 330.

It was not only S. Yizahr who described in his story Gilda that the coexistence of so many children and young people with very different roots does not go smoothly . (See S. Yizahr under Employees ). Channah Katz, too, who came to Palestine with her mother as a nine-year-old in 1933, felt the “recurring emphasis on independence and initiative” was more of a burden and judged in retrospect: “None of the adults understood that a child was made from a completely different person Milieu and from Western Jewish circumstances perhaps had to slowly adapt. ”Consequently, there was a contradiction between Siegfried Lehmann's ideals and their actual effects, at least with regard to Ben Shemen's children's community. And it was not only children who had to struggle with these difficulties, as the fate of the Darmstadt- born sisters Hilde and Hanna Freund shows, who traveled to Palestine in the winter of 1936 and lived in the children's and youth village for about a year. However, they had difficulties getting used to life there and moved to Tel Aviv.

Chanan Choresh, who came to Ben Shemen in April 1939 with six or seven other students from the Kaliski Private Forest School (see below: Students ), also refers to the feeling of being a stranger that the group in Ben Shemen had to deal with :

“Our group was at the beginning in the strangeness, torn out of the family milieu. It was better to stay afloat if you kept together with acquaintances and at that time they came from the immediate vicinity - from the PriWaKi. Time did its part and for various reasons the ways parted, why, what, who and when did it, I don't remember today. The people have scattered in all directions. "

In his book Born in Germany, Walter Laqueur described in detail the adjustment difficulties that immigrants from Germany in particular had to deal with. This also applied to those who had come to Palestine with the Youth Aliyah and were now living in Ben Shemen. Laqueur quotes his future wife, Barbara Koch from Frankfurt (see pupils ), who was less bothered by the simple living conditions than by the ideals propagated in the facility, which for her was a "spirit of arrogance and distance from life" embodied.

“This referred to the educational ideals of Dr. Siegfried Lehmann, [..] who had developed a doctrine of ›Dorkultur‹, by means of which German-speaking children were to be transformed into Hebrew-speaking, highly cultivated agricultural workers. Lehmann's enthusiasm, writes Naomi Koch, only aroused cynicism in the students. There was a mighty, deepening gap between the great ideals (of village, culture and Hebrew humanism) painted on the wall and the realities of life, the hard work in an agriculture that was not motorized at the time. Such an approach might have worked for an elitist and highly motivated Hebrew-speaking student body, but it was not there. "

- Walter Laqueur : Born in Germany , pp. 213–214

Laqueur illustrates what he castigates as “cultural narrow-mindedness” using the example of a planned theater performance. One group had been practicing a Shakespeare comedy for weeks - in German. The performance was forbidden by those responsible because it was not to be presented in Hebrew.

But without prejudice to many understandable criticisms of the contradictions between the ideals of Ben Shemen and everyday life, what the Jewish Daily Bulletin wrote about Ben Shemen at the end of 1934 applies with regard to the youth aliyah: “This specifically for the settlement of The village of Ben-Shemen, founded by young people, opened its door to these children in an extraordinarily generous way, especially during the first onslaught of German immigration. "

The early 1940s

Overall, the information available on Ben Shemen's development in the 1930s and 1940s is not very abundant, and it is only with the controversy over Israeli independence that the evidence increases again. This was probably also due to Ben Shemen's location near the road connecting Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, through which the children's and youth village was involved in the bitter clashes between Arabs and Jews.

After the unrest of 1929 already described above, further Arab uprisings followed in Palestine between 1936 and 1939 . It is not known to what extent these also affected Ben Shemen, but they seem to have left their mark there anyway, because it was precisely the Arab-friendly Siegfried Lehmann who, along with some of his employees, was arrested in January 1940 on charges of possessing weapons has been. A British military court sentenced the defendants to up to seven years in prison. After international protests, for example by Albert Einstein , Lehmann was released after just three weeks in prison.

After the end of the world war, children and young people who had survived the Holocaust then streamed from Europe to Palestine. For them, as the social worker Siddy Wronsky, who emigrated from Germany, describes in an essay from 1945, “In Palestine a new form of youth education has developed in the children's villages, which is in Meir Schfeya on the slopes of the Carmel , in Ben Schemen at Lod, in which Ahawa can be found in Haifa Bay and in Kfar Noar Dati in the Emek plain. These children's villages represent communities in which the children are brought up for rural life and in which the administration and the work are mainly in the hands of the children. The whole of life: lessons and leisure, festivals and business, culture and care is primarily determined by the children, and responsibility for community life lies in their hands. These children's villages, which take in 100-500 children and in which the children are educated in all branches of agriculture and housekeeping, have emerged as a happy form of new working-class education and represent a new example of modern social pedagogy like no other Form of education to promote the development of the sense of community and the social character in the children. "

Chaya and Gitta Horowitz, who found a new home in Ben Shemen, were among those who benefited from this “modern social education”. Chaya (later married Horowitz Roth) reports on this based on her own experiences and that of her nine years older sister (later Gitta Horowitz Fajerstein-Walchirk) in her book The Fate of Holocaust Memories . In the spring of 1945 the two girls were in southern Italy with their mother and an uncle and were in contact with members of the Jewish brigade . One of them, who had been a teacher in Ben Shemen, advised the mother: "You have to send your children to Ben Shemen, it is the best educational institution in Eretz-Israel." The two adults who wanted to stay in Europe themselves followed this council and decided "with the support of this Shaliach (envoy), whose name was Aryeh Simon, to send Chaya and me [Gitta] onto one of the first youth aliyah ships that started from Bari ". Aryeh Simon was later the Madrich in Chaya's group in the children's village Ben Shemen and from 1964 its leader.

Her longer Ben Shemen chapter provided Chaya H. Roth with the title Ben Shemen - Trauma and Adjustment ( Ben Shemen - Trauma and Adjustment ). The two came to Ben Shemen via the Atlit refugee camp , and that, says Gitta, “was our salvation. We had healthy living in Ben Shemen for a year and a half. I was placed in the Kvutzat Noar (the youth group) and you, Chaya, were placed in the Kfar Jeladim (Children's Village), but you and I were in the same place. Even if we didn't live really close together, we saw each other often. ”But for Chaya the arrival and the separation from Gitta that came with it was initially a shock; she felt lonely. In her memoirs, however, she describes the arrival in Ben Shemen very precisely, the showering, which was just as compulsory for the newcomers as the subsequent control of the head lice with gasoline and then the new clothing, and she provided a detailed description of the village structure.

“We stood in a large, dusty courtyard; an old, gnarled carob tree stood in the middle, providing shade for the entire square room, but it didn't cover us. We, the newcomers, stood in the sun with the yellow, gold, orange and red Mediterranean flowers that grew in front of all four ranch-like buildings. These were made of heavy, irregularly shaped bricks, which I would later get to know as Jerusalem stones. Behind us were the showers and a two-story brick building that housed the teachers who lived here and were to become my teachers. On the other side of the yard, behind the carob tree, were two other two-story brick buildings. That was our school then. A large iron gate separated the two buildings. To the left of the school building, facing the showers I was standing in front of, was a long line of one-story rooms: these were the children's rooms. On the right side of the square was another row of low-lying buildings, but they were made of wood. These were the quarters of the day laborers. The white dust that covered the floor came from the fine, white gravel that would give us the opportunity to thoroughly clean the stone floors of our rooms with water plus gasoline, at least twice a week of course. What else but gasoline to disinfect against all kinds of crawly animals that roam our quarters? The flowers, of which there were so many, were not as outstanding as they could have been because their bright colors were covered in most of the seasons with the same white dust that spread evenly over the entire square. "

She also remembered her living environment well:

“The rooms were pleasant: whitewashed walls, light stone tile floors that were cool in summer and freezing in winter nights. There was a narrow bed against the wall, a small side table by the bed, and perhaps a place to store our clothes; I don't remember if we had a closet to hang our clothes in. I say 'we' because every girl had a roommate. My first roommate's parents lived in town. Having parents close by was a status symbol. Perhaps this was where my problems began to show. Since I didn't belong to anyone, I felt poor. I was ashamed that I didn't have a family to visit. "

This is followed by further descriptions from the dining room, about the food and finally about the school lessons that Chaya enjoyed a lot, especially those with Siegfried Lehmann's wife Rebecca: “She was tall and dark-haired, older than our supervisors; she was serious and imposing, but not scary because she was a great teacher. Whatever she taught was so interesting that the subject of the lesson never got boring, and my curiosity grew the more she taught. "

Chaya also reported that in Ben Shemen the children's past was usually not addressed:

“Nobody ever asked where anyone was from. Children and even adults just didn't talk about it. They didn't want to know about your past, they just wanted to be in the present, and they wanted to know what you were thinking, doing, studying, eating and the like. And that suited me very well. "

The two sisters stayed in Ben Shemen for 21 months, but Chaya in particular suffered from homesickness and the separation from her mother. Nonetheless, both sisters agreed that their time in Ben Shemen "brought them the healthiest life experiences since the beginning of the war," and when they were finally supposed to return to their mother in Belgium they were unhappy about it, as Chaya reported:

“When we came back and saw what was going on in Antwerp with the survivors and their children, we saw the difference between the life we had left behind and what we were supposed to adapt to: a conventional, petty bourgeois way of life City life that was blatantly different from the free environment we had left behind in Ben Shemen, where exploration, study and friendship were encouraged; where we were surrounded by culture, readings, theater, music and dance performances, each related to the specific topics we learned in class. The Jewish holidays were celebrated like so many other living performances in which the main actors were the children themselves. I haven't seen anything like it in my entire adult life. "

Chaya H. Roth also tells about the children who arrived in Ben Shemen after her, for example about Yehudit, who survived the Warsaw ghetto and became her second roommate, or about new children from Bulgaria and from the DP camps . That was also the background of Helmar Lerski's film ADAMAH (ERDE), which Siegfried Lehmann had suggested in 1947, of which he was the author and which was shot in Ben Shemen in 1948.

“Helmar Lerski's film ADAMAH (ERDE) from 1948 tells the story of the arrival and settling in of the young Holocaust survivor Benjamin in the children's and youth village Ben Shemen in the British Mandate of Palestine. Benjamin arrives on a bus in Ben Shemen with other children. He and the other newcomers are assigned to their school class. The burden of painful memories of his experiences in the Holocaust stand in the way of his integration into the new community. Benjamin refuses any communication or cooperation. He hoards bread, although there is no shortage of it in Ben Shemen. He certainly recognizes the creativity of the other students, but only as an uninvolved outsider. His teachers decide to help him by making him one of the torchbearers in the Hanukkah ceremony, but the boy is still a prisoner of his traumatized past. When he happens to pass a barbed wire fence surrounding a herd of cattle, his memories of the concentration camp he survived catch up with him. He digs the fence, destroys it and releases the cows, which then devastate a vegetable patch that his classmates laboriously tilled. As the film progresses, Benjamin realizes how precious his new environment is. Classes, work, social celebrations and Zionist and religious ceremonies increasingly form the context of a meaningful 'new' life for him. Two years later, Benjamin is finally seen as the leader of a group that sets out to found a new settlement. By cleaning the earth of stones with the sweat of his brow, Benjamin proves himself to be an active member of a pioneering Jewish society, the Yishuv. "

The film was made with financial support from Hadassah , the Women's Zionist Organization of America , and was intended to support fund-raising in the USA. For Ari Shavit he portrayed “an almost impossibly idyllic commune: boys and girls who had hardly fled Europe in a progressive, democratic educational institution; a kind of convalescent home for the uprooted youth of an uprooted person in the land of the Bible. "

Ben Shemen and the War of Independence

Shortly after filming for ADAMAH was over , the armed conflict surrounding Ben Shemen escalated.

The youth village was evacuated to the Chefer Valley in 1948 and this evacuation formed the basis for the establishment of the Hadassah Neurim (Ne'urim) youth village . On the website of the aforementioned Hadassah , under the subsection Our Villages, it says: "Hadassah Neurim, near Netanya, was founded in 1948 as a refuge for children who had to flee from the shelling during the war of independence." In contrast, writes by Wolzug, a new children's and youth village has meanwhile been built in Kfar Vitkin (not far from Hadassah Neurim ) ; “Not a copy of the old one, as Lehmann expressly emphasized. They returned to Ben Shemen in 1951 at the latest. ”However, Kfar Vitkin is an older establishment from the 1930s, and there is no reference to a children's and youth village there. In 1948, Kfar Vitkin was the scene of the clashes between the Israeli Defense Forces and the IRGUN over the ship Altalena and the weapons carried with it.

1948 was also the year of the Lydda massacre and the subsequent expulsion of the Palestinian population from Lydda and Ramle . Ari Shavit has dealt with this in great detail. He describes the fighting that preceded the expulsion of the Palestinian population, but has a different focus on the events: He is not least interested in the fighting in which graduates of the children's and youth village were involved, i.e. Jews who were there in the spirit of friendship with Arabs had been brought up.

In the late afternoon of July 11, 1948, Moshe Dayan launched an attack on Lydda from Ben Shemen. The battalion lost 9 men in the process, but quickly brought the city under its control and locked thousands of Palestinian civilians in the Great Mosque. The next day, two Jordanian armored vehicles entered the city, but this did not pose a threat to the Israelis as these two vehicles operated far away from the Jordanian army. However, some Palestinians apparently thought these two vehicles were the harbingers of the liberation of the city from the Israelis and opened fire on some Israeli soldiers near a small mosque. “Among the young fighters who took shelter in a nearby trench were Ben Shemen graduates, now in uniform. The brigade commander was also a Ben Shemen graduate. He gave the order to open fire. Some of the soldiers threw hand grenades into Arab homes. One of them fired an anti-tank shell into the small mosque. Two hundred and fifty Palestinians were killed in thirty minutes. Zionism had committed a massacre in the city of Lydda. ”As a result, Yitzhak Rabin gave the order to deport the Palestinian population.

Ari Shavit's judgment is harsh: “Lydda is the black box of Zionism. The truth is, Zionism couldn't stand the Arab city of Lydda. From the beginning there was a significant contradiction between Zionism and Lydda. If Zionism were to exist, Lydda could not exist. If Lydda should exist, Zionism could not exist. ”And he especially accuses Siegfried Lehmann of turning a blind eye to it:

“When Siegfried Lehmann arrived in the Lydda Valley in 1927, he should have seen that if there were to be a Jewish state in Palestine, an Arab Lydda in its center would not be able to exist. He should have known that Lydda was an obstacle blocking the way to a Jewish state and that Zionism would have to remove it one day. But Dr. Lehmann saw nothing, and Zionism chose not to know. For decades the Jews managed to hide from themselves the contradiction between their national movement and Lydda. For forty-five years Zionism pretended to be the atid factory and olive groves, and the Ben Shemen youth village lived in peace with Lydda. Then, on three days in the catastrophic summer of 1948, Lydda was no longer there. "

Mula Cohen, commandant of the Palmach's Yiftach Brigade during Operation Danny , July 1948

In 1968 Ari Shavit set out to talk to the Israeli people involved in the Lydda massacre. He interviewed former Ben Shemen students who were serving as soldiers in Lydda in 1948, and he met the commander of the battalion directly responsible for the massacre.

“Mula Cohen, the brigade commander, was born in Kovno in 1923, where his father and Dr. Lehmann worked. He grew up in a socialist household in Tel Aviv but was sent to the Ben Shemen youth village in junior high school, where he became a darling of his father's old friend. On Shabbat morning he was invited to the Lehmann House to listen to recordings by Haydn, Mozart and Bach on the gramophone. On public holidays he accompanied Lehmann on courtesy visits to the surrounding villages. Occasionally he went with him to friends and schools in Lydda. He liked Lydda, its market, its olive presses, its old town. In Ben Shemen he worked in the stable, in the vineyard, in the orange grove, played handball and developed a sense of art. Most of all, he loved music: classical music, popular music, folk music. One of his favorite memories of Ben Shemen is that hundreds of students sit in the large courtyard in silence, listening to an orchestra and choir performing Bach's 'Peasant Cantata'. "

But there was also another Mula Cohen, the one who completed military training with friends in the forest behind the youth village at night and who joined the Palmach immediately after graduating from school , who climbed Masada in the winter of 1942 and rose step by step in the military hierarchy, until he became the commander of an elite Jewish unit in 1947. When Shavit asked Cohen 20 years later whether he had ever dealt with the contradiction of having become an officer on the one hand and having been a Lehmann student on the other, the now sixty-nine year old gave “no real answers”.

“'Officers are people too,' said Cohen. ›And as a person you are suddenly faced with a chasm. On the one hand there is the noble legacy of the youth movement, the youth village Dr. Lehmann. On the other hand is the brutal reality of Lydda. 'He had trained for the day for years. He had been told that the war was coming and that the Arabs would have to go. ›And yet you are in shock. In Lydda the war was as cruel as possible. The killing, the looting, the feelings of anger and vengeance. Then the column marched. And even though you are strong and well trained and resilient, you experience some kind of mental breakdown. You feel the humanistic upbringing you received collapse. And you see the Jewish soldiers, and you see the marching Arabs, and you feel heavy and deeply sad. You feel that you are standing in front of something big that you cannot deal with, that you cannot even grasp.

For Shavit, the conquest of Lydda and the expulsion of the people of Lydda was no accident, even if it was apparently not planned. These events "laid the foundation for the Jewish state". Lydda is an integral and integral part of the story. And when I try to be honest I see that the choice is tough: either reject Zionism because of Lydda or accept Zionism with Lydda. One has to endure this dichotomy when considering the history of the children's and youth village Ben Shemen, whose founder and director promoted understanding with the Arab neighbors, but on the other hand hid weapons to combat them and was therefore arrested by the British.

Ben Shemen today

If you want to find out more about the children's and youth village after the establishment of the State of Israel, you probably have to look in the archive, which has been maintained there since 2012. Other sources are rare. Von Wolzieh only briefly refers to waves of immigration from the post-war period, which brought children from Asia and North Africa to Ben Shemen, or to the later immigration from the Soviet Union. The prevailing weighting of community, work and school in Lehmann's time has changed, school comes first, then community and work follow.

Marlene Dietrich in Ben-Shemen during a concert tour through Israel in 1960

Wolzog mentions the founding of the Albert and Elsa-Einstein-Gymnasium in 1957 , and Elisabeth Bückmann mentions that after Lehmann's death (June 13, 1958) a Dr. Daugilajcky took over the management of the village. In 1964 he was followed by Aryeh Simon.

The homepage of today's BEN SHEMEN YOUTH VILLAGE is not very productive in terms of its own history. The development up to 1927 is only briefly outlined, and for the time after that it simply says: “Since then, children and young people in grades 1 to 12 have received their education here under boarding conditions, where they both worked and studied. Many of the founders of the trade union movement (“Hahityashvut Haovedet”) and the state leaders were trained in the village. ”Elsewhere it says, not much more tellingly:“ Currently, Ben Shemen is the home of more than 400 children and young people aged 6 and over -21 years. As a home for his children and young people, Ben Shemen takes care of all their needs - a bed, meals, individual support, social and educational enrichment and more. But the village is more than just an educational institution. Who are currently working in the IDF from the smallest child in our children's home, to our graduates. " IDF stands for Israel Defense Forces , the Israel Defense Forces so. Despite the compulsory military service in Israel, it is surprising that, as the quote suggests, there is now only an educational one-way street towards military service in the institution founded by Siegfried Lehmann, “a moral rigorist when it comes to the idea of peace” should. Already on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the children's and youth village, the former pupil Regine Mayer pondered: “I have a different memory of Ben Shemen at the time. The houses and gardens were more manicured. Somehow it saddened me. Perhaps there was an idealism back then that is now a thing of the past. ”What has become of this idealism today remains open. The BEN SHEMEN YOUTH VILLAGE still advertises on its homepage with its (now more than) ninety-year history; a critical look at this is still pending.

Employee

Käte Baer, former Volksheimerin

Mosche Calvary (1876–1944), head of the Blue-White Jewish Youth Association . Lehmann met him on his first visit to Palestine in 1914 and remained closely connected to him from then on. Moshe Calvary later worked as a teacher in the children's and youth village.

Helene Chatzkels (1882–1973), was also friends with Siegfried Lehmann and advised the educational institutions he headed in Kovno and Ben Shemen. In 1929 she visited Ben Shemen.

Hilde and Hanna Freund, Friedrich Julius Freund's sisters , traveled to Palestine in the winter of 1936 and lived temporarily in the children's and youth village.

Wilfrid Israel , former Volksheimer

Ruth Lewy, former Volksheimerin

Eva Michaelis-Stern , who had already worked as a gymnastics teacher in the Jewish people's home, came to the children's and youth village in 1928 to teach gymnastics here too. After a short stay there, she fell ill and had to return to Germany. Eva Michaelis Stern was co-founder and director of the Working Group for Child and Youth Aliyah in the 1930s and director of the Youth Aliyah office in London during World War II. Eva Michaelis-Stern is the daughter of William Stern ; her siblings are Hilde Marchwitza and Günther Anders .

Gerda Philipsborn was already an employee in the Volksheim and later supported the work in Ben Shemen.

Jehuda Polani (also: Jehuda Ron-Polani, * 1891 - † 1984). When he joined in 1928, “a 'modern community school ' developed overnight, as it were . According to Bertold Otto 's 'complex method' , older and younger people always worked and learned together. ”
Polani, who was born in Ukraine, emigrated to Palestine in 1906 and initially worked in agriculture. Later he attended a teacher training college and became an educator and teacher in various schools and children's villages. "Jehuda Polani vom Hever Hakvutzot (later: Ichud Hakvutzot ve Hakibbutzim) was first (in the mid-20s) involved in the educational experiment in Mount Gilboa (Beit Alfa)." After Ludwig Liegle and Franz-Michael Konrad, Polani was one of those "pioneers [ en] of the New Education in Palestine ”, which“ gave important impulses to the reception of European and American reform pedagogy through publications and the establishment of educational institutions ”. Polani stayed in Ben Shemen from 1928/1929 to 1936 and then moved to Kibbutz Ramat Yohanan (after Yuval Dror only in 1940), where he helped to found “the regional Beit Hinuch (house of education). From then on he was active in various expert committees and provided written and oral advice on educational issues. “He also worked briefly as a teacher in Bulgaria and Egypt.

After moving to Palestine in 1939, Hugo Rosenthal lived with his family for a few months in the children's and youth village Ben Shemen. Rosenthal refreshed his knowledge of the Hebrew language here and also took on his Hebrew name during this time. From then on he called himself Josef Jashuvi .

Erich Roth, former Volksheimer

Ernst Salzberger (* 1913 in Breslau - † 1954 in Ben Shemen) was a handicrafts teacher and came from the Jewish school home in Herrlingen .

David Werner Senator, former Volksheimer

The Israeli delegation during the talks on the armistice agreement of January 1949. From left to right: The commanders Jehoshafat Harkabi , Aryeh Simon , Jigael Jadin and Yitzhak Rabin .

Ysrael Shiloni “was born in Berlin in 1901 under the name Hans Herbert Hammerstein and worked as a teacher in Germany in the 1930s. In 1934, under the rule of the National Socialists, he had built a Jewish elementary school in Bonn that worked according to reform pedagogical principles. During the Second World War he emigrated to Palestine. ”In 1926 Hammerstein traveled to Kovno with his girlfriend, Sophie Wolpe, and worked at the children's home. "About England and Australia, he came to Palestine in 1942, was an educator in Ben Shemen, then moved to Nahariya." Shiloni is the founder of the original in Nahariya based museum of German-speaking Jewry in Tefen.
Aryeh Simon (* 1913 in Mainz). “Simon was born in Mainz and studied classical languages and philosophy in Heidelberg. He emigrated to Israel in 1935, studied education and began teaching in the Ben Shemen youth village in 1937. He served in the British Army's Jewish Brigade during World War II and as an officer in the Israel Defense Forces in the War of Independence. After the war he devoted himself to education and was appointed director of Ben Shemen in 1964. In 1975 he received the Israeli Prize for Education. ”His wife Greta lived with him as a housemother in Ben Shemen.
Ludwig Strauss , former Volksheimer
Akiva Yishai (Akiba Vanchotzker) organized the Hebrew lessons in Kovno and ran a youth community in Ben Shemen.
S. Yizhar (Yizhar Smilansky). His narrative Gila , which is not available in German, is “one of the most reflective memories of Yizhar's career as a young teacher in the Ben Shemen Youth Village between the late 1930s and the early 1940s. It is also one of the few stories that deals with the work of the teachers of that time with the children who immigrated to Israel as part of the youth aliyah, children who were forced to leave their homes and families in Europe, and become Israelis overnight in an accelerated process of "Sabraization". The educators and also the director of the boarding school, the legendary Dr. Lehmann, the tools to treat the psychological problems of these young people were missing. [..] The educators, some out of clumsiness, others out of delicacy, decided to keep the painful subject in silence, and the children of Ben Shemen, who had absorbed this message, “overcame” it or secretly shouted, until fragments of memories reappeared, melodies like in the story “Gila” that brought the home back to life and made the eyes shine again. It is a tender and moving story that tells their stories, and most of all the painful feeling of helplessness of their teachers. "

Pupils

Paul Abraham Jacob (born July 10, 1893 in Berlin; † 1965 in Israel) took over the school management of PriWaKi in July 1938. He set up a Palestine group at the school. This Palestine group originally consisted of 20 to 30 students. At the end of 1938 / beginning of 1939 Siegfried Lehmann visited the PriWaKi and selected the people from this group who were to come to Ben Shemen:

James Crypt (born August 5, 1925)
Hans Georg Hirsch (later Chanan Choresh, born June 10, 1926). He completed an agricultural education in Ben Shemen and founded the Kibbutz Amiad in 1946 with a group whose core had come together in Ben Shemen .
Walter Lewy (Levy) (born July 14, 1926)
Ernst Stern (later Dan Stern, born March 4, 1927) and his brother
Gerhard Stern (later Gad Stern, born November 4, 1925)
Gertrud Wohl (no further dates known)
Max Wolf (also Max Julius Wolff, * July 28, 1927)

The group left Berlin on March 27, 1939 and arrived in Tel Aviv port on April 3, 1939, where they were received by the teacher Ernst Salzberger (see above).

Paul Jacob, the initiator of the Palestine group, and his wife Franziska were also able to emigrate to Palestine in September 1939. Paul Jacob first learned Hebrew intensively and then took over the school management in the children's and youth village Meir Shefayah (also Meir Shfeya) between Haifa and Hadera to the south.

Shimon Peres and his wife Sonia, who was also buried in Ben Shemen in 2011.
Dahn Ben-Amotz
Mula Cohen came from Kovno, was a student in Ben Shemen and in 1948 the commander in charge of the massacre of the Palestinian population of Lydda.
Günther Engel traveled at the age of sixteen in October 1936 via Trieste to Palestine and there to Ben Shemen.
Saul Friedländer
Yosef Harmelin , temporary head of Shin Bet , the Israeli domestic intelligence service
Chaya Horowitz (married Roth) came to Ben Shemen from Italy in the spring of 1945. At the end of 1946 / beginning of 1947 she returned to her mother in Antwerp. As a young adult, she moved to Chicago and received her PhD in psychology from the University of Chicago in 1960 . For thirty years she was Associate Professor of Clinical Psychiatry at the University of Chicago and Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Illinois . She is the author of the book The Fate of Holocaust Memories , in which she also describes in detail the 21-month stay in Ben Shemen that she and her sister,
Gitta Horowitz (married Fajerstein-Walchirk), spent there.
Channah Katz (married Weiner) came to Palestine with her mother when she was nine years old.
Barbara Koch (1920–1995), born in Frankfurt am Main, was the daughter of Richard Koch . She took the first name Naomi and came to Ben Shemen in November 1936. From 1939 she lived with Walter Laqueur in various kibbutzim before they later married.
Gábor Lengyel
Richard Lewinsohn had been a student in the Jewish children's and rural school home in Caputh before he was sixteen in 1938 when he was able to travel via Trieste to Palestine and finally to Ben Shemen. He also worked as a cameraman and photographer of the still photos (production stills) on the film ADAMAH (see film award ).
Regina Mayer visited the Philanthropin in Frankfurt am Main before she left her home country in 1938 at the age of thirteen for Palestine.
Arnold Paucker
Igal Mossinsohn (1917–1994), graduated from the agricultural school in Ben Shemen and was an Israeli writer and playwright.

Ben Shemen in the film

Siegfried Lehmann recognized the importance of film as a medium for advertising his ideas and for acquiring the necessary funds for their realization early on.

“Even before he went to Palestine, in October 1925, he had the idea of recording his children's home in Kovno (Kaunas) as the introduction to a longer film that was to deal with youth and education in Palestine. This actually resulted in the film YOUNG PALESTINE / HANOAR BE'EREZ YISRAEL in 1926, produced by Keren Hayesod in Jerusalem and shot by Yaacov Ben Dov, Palestine's most prolific film director of the twenties. Two further fundraiser films about the boarding school, THE JÜDISCHE WAISENDORF BEN-SCHEMEN (1927) and FROM THE LIFE IN THE CHILDREN AND YOUTH VILLAGE BENSCHEMEN (1930), were initiated by Lehmann and produced by the Jüdische Waisenhilfe eV in Berlin. In the early 1930s there were again plans for a major film about Ben Shemen. 'In terms of recording technology, the main thing is to work in the style of Russian film art. Above all, I have the film EARTH in mind, with its wonderful close-ups. ' An early role model gave the film ADAMAH its name, which was produced 15 years later. "

The film ADAMAH (ERDE), made by Helmar Lerski in 1948 based on a template by Siegfried Lehmann, tells the story of the arrival and settling in of the young Holocaust survivor Benjamin in the children's and youth village Ben Shemen.

swell

Ludwig Liegle / Franz-Michael Konrad (ed.): Reform pedagogy in Palestine. Documents and interpretations of attempts at a 'new' education in the Jewish community of Palestine (1918–1948) , dipa-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1989, ISBN 3-7638-0809-4 . In this:
- Siegfried Lehmann: The position of the West Jewish youth towards the people (1919/1920) , pp. 61–68. First published in Der Jude , 4, 1919/1920, pp. 207–215.
- Siegfried Lehmann: The Children's and Youth Village Ben Shemen (1929) , pp. 107–115. The article first appeared in the journal Das Werdende Zeitalter , 8th year, 1929, issue 2, pp. 90–98.
Siegfried Lehmann: From the street horde to the community (from the life of the “Jewish children's home” in Kovno) , in: Der Jude, Jg. 9 (1925–1927), no. 2 (1926): special issue on education, pp. 22–36 . The text is available online through the collections of the University Library of the University of Frankfurt am Main .
Jewish review
- Report from Ben Schemen , No. 70, September 6, 1929, p. 455 (letter to the editor without naming names).
- The rescue of Ben Schemen , No. 75, September 24, 1929, p. 499 (comment by the editor on the report from Ben Shemen, not marked by name).

From the Leo Baeck Institute :

Guide to the Youth Aliyah Records in the Hadassah Archives 1928–2009 : Here you can also find documents on the cooperation between the Children's and Youth Village and the Youth Aliyah (especially sub-series 5: Institutions, 1928–2008 ); unfortunately they are not yet digitized.
In the Richard Koch Family Collection 1890s-1993 (bulk 1935-1970) there is the folder Laqueur, Naomi - Palestine materials . Among other things, it contains a brochure on the occasion of the ten-year existence of the Agricultural School (in English) and a wealth of images. In addition, there are letters from student correspondence (in German) that allow insights into the cultural and personal self-image.

The Richard Levinson Archive , named after the former pupil and employee Richard Lewinsohn (see above: pupils ) , which was opened in Ben Shemen in 2012 to document and preserve the history of the children's and youth village, can only be used on site . The archive contains documents collected by Lewinsohn over the course of 40 years and documents that have already been kept in the village.

literature

Roni Hirsh-Ratzkovsky: From Berlin to Ben Shemen: The Lehmann Brothers between Expressionism and Zionism , AJS Review, Volume 41, Issue 1, April 2017, pp. 37-65.

Beate Lehmann: Siegfried Lehmann and the Jewish people's home in Berlin's Scheunenviertel , in: Sabine Hering, Harald Lordick, Gerd Stecklina (eds.): Jewish youth movement and social practice , Fachhochschulverlag, Frankfurt am Main, 2017, ISBN 978-3-943787-77 -1 , pp. 103-122.

Ari Shavit: Lydda, 1948. A city, a massacre, and the Middle East today , The New Yorker, October 21, 2013.

Sabine Haustein, Anja Waller: Jewish Settlements in Europe. Approaches to a transnational social, gender and ideological historical research , Medaon - www.medaon.de, Issue 4, 2009.

Chaya H. Roth: The Fate of Holocaust Memories. Transmission and Family Dialogues , Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2008, ISBN 978-0-230-60607-4 .

Sophie Buchholz: Hans Herbert Hammerstein / Yisrael Shiloni. An educational biography , master's thesis, Berlin, 2008.

Dieter Oelschlägel: Integration through education - Jewish Toynbee halls and people's homes in Austria and Germany in the first third of the twentieth century , in: Peter Herrmann, Peter Szynka (ed.): Breakthroughs in the social - a commemorative publication for Rudolph Bauer , Wiener Verlag für Sozialforschung , Bremen, 2014, ISBN 978-3-944690-22-3 . (Quoted from Google Books)

Dieter Oelschlägel: The Jewish Settlement Movement. A search for clues , in: Social work. Journal for Social and Socially Related Areas , Volume 61:

Part 1: Issue 1.2012, pp. 2–11
Part 2: Issue 2.2012, pp. 42–50

Dieter Oelschlägel: The idea of ›productive work‹. Siegried Lehmann (1892–1958) , in: Sabine Hering (ed.): Jüdische Wohlfahrt im Spiegel von Biographien , Fachhochschulverlag, Frankfurt am Main, 2006, ISBN 978-3-936065-80-0 , pp. 256-267.

Gershom Scholem: From Berlin to Jerusalem. Jugenderinnerungen , Jüdischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1994, ISBN 3-633-54086-5 .

Wolf von Wolzüge: "... This Ben Shemen spirit brought me very close to the Jewish culture". The children's and youth village Ben Shemen between Berlin and Lod - a sketch , in: Monika Lehmann / Hermann Schnorbach (ed.): Enlightenment as a learning process. Festschrift for Hildegard Feidel-Mertz , dipa-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1992, ISBN 3-7638-0186-3 , pp. 256-274.

Ludwig Liegle: Children's Republics. Documentation and interpretation of a “modern” form of education , in: Zeitschrift für Pädagogik, vol. 35 (1989), issue 3, pp. 399–416

Elisabeth Bückmann: Ben-Shemen. Integration of two cultures in an Israeli children's village , German Institute for International Educational Research, Frankfurt am Main, 1965.

Siddy Wronsky: Social pioneer work in Palestine , in Ludwig Liegle / Franz-Michael Konrad (ed.): Reform pedagogy in Palestine , pp. 152–155 (see sources).

Walter Laqueur: Born in Germany. The exodus of Jewish youth after 1933 , Propylaea, Berlin 2000, ISBN 3-549-07122-1 .

Web links

Commons : Ben Shemen Youth Village - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Commons : Images from 1948–1949 - collection of images, videos and audio files

BEN SHEMEN YOUTH VILLAGE: Homepage
Active Museum Berlin: Siegfried Lehmann and his life's work . Address by Beate Lehmann on the occasion of the unveiling of a 'Berlin memorial plaque' on September 21, 2018 in Max-Beer-Straße 5
Jewish Museum Berlin: The Jewish People's Home at Max-Beer-Strasse 5
Aliyat Hanoar: Ben Shemen Youth Village est. 1927

Individual evidence

↑ Dieter Oelschlägel: The idea of ›productive work‹ , p. 258
↑ Siegfried Lehmann, quoted from Wolf von Wolhaben: '... This spirit of Ben Shemen brought me very close to Jewish culture' , p. 258
^ Gershom Scholem: From Berlin to Jerusalem , p. 84
^ "Ernst Joel (1893–1929) was an important German pacifist. He was a medical doctor and was best known for his studies of the pharmacology of cocaine and morphine. In 1926 he founded the welfare office for alcoholics and other poison addicts in the Berlin district of Tiergarten, of which he also became director. He then moved to the Kreuzberg district and was the first manager of the health center on Urban until his untimely death. Ernst Joel was active in the academic youth movement and founded the magazine 'Der Aufbruch' in 1915 ”(Dieter Oelschlägel: Integration through education , p. 118). See also: Friedrich Bauermeister and Margarete Exler: From the youth movement to medical drug help. The life of Ernst Joe͏l (1893–1929) around Benjamin, Landauer and Buber , Trafo, Berlin, 2005, ISBN 978-3-89626-018-5
↑ Dieter Oelschlägel: The idea of ›productive work‹ , p. 259
↑ Dieter Oelschlägel: The idea of ›productive work‹ , p. 259
↑ Dieter Oelschlägel: The idea of ›productive work‹ , p. 262
↑ Beate Lehmann: Siegfried Lehmann and the Jewish People's Home in Berlin's Scheunenviertel , p. 116
↑ Beate Lehmann: Siegfried Lehmann and the Jewish People's Home in Berlin's Scheunenviertel , p. 117
↑ Beate Lehmann: Siegfried Lehmann and the Jewish People's Home in Berlin's Scheunenviertel , p. 119
↑ Sabine Haustein, Anja Waller: Jüdische Settlements in Europa , p. 12
↑ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e ^f ^g Beate Lehmann: Siegfried Lehmann and the Jewish people's home in Berlin's Scheunenviertel , p. 120
↑ Beate Lehmann: Siegfried Lehmann and the Jewish People's Home in Berlin's Scheunenviertel , p. 120
↑ Sabine Haustein, Anja Waller: Jüdische Settlements in Europa , p. 11
↑ Dieter Oelschlägel: The idea of ›productive work‹ , p. 263
↑ Wolf von Wolzüge: "... This Ben Shemen spirit brought me very close to Jewish culture" , p. 259
↑ Jewish Yearbook for Greater Berlin , 1931, pp. 113/114
↑ Hanni Ullmann, quoted from Dieter Oelschlägel: The idea of ›productive work‹ , p. 265
^ Siegfried Lehmann: From the street horde to the community , p. 36
↑ Sch. S. Pugatschow: Das Kinderdorf im Emek Jesreel , in: Der Jude, Jg. 9 (1925–1927), no. 2 (1926): special issue education, pp. 36–50. The text is available online through the collections of the University Library of the University of Frankfurt am Main
↑ Dieter Oelschlägel: The idea of ›productive work‹ , p. 265
↑ Wolf von Wolzüge: "... This spirit of Ben Shemen brought me very close to the Jewish culture" , p. 273 (note 14)
^ Claudia Prestel: Youth in Need. Welfare education in German-Jewish society (1901–1933) , Böhlau Verlag, Vienna Cologne Weimar, 2003, ISBN 3-205-77050-1 , p. 315
↑ Wolf von Wolzüge: "... This Ben Shemen spirit brought me very close to Jewish culture" , p. 259
^ Elisabeth Bückmann: Ben-Shemen. Integration of two cultures in an Israeli children's village , p. 24
^ Sophie Buchholz: Hans Herbert Hammerstein / Yisrael Shiloni , p. 28. The Hebrew name of the JNF is Keren Kayemeth Le'Israel , from which the abbreviation KKL or JNF-KKL is derived.
^ Yisrael Shiloni, quoted from Sophie Buchholz: Hans Herbert Hammerstein / Yisrael Shiloni , p. 28
↑ Ari Shavit: My Promised Land , p. 151
^ ^A ^b ^c Siegfried Lehmann: Das Kinder- und Jugenddorf Ben Shemen (1929) , p. 107
^ ^A ^b ^c Siegfried Lehmann: Das Kinder- und Jugenddorf Ben Shemen (1929) , p. 108
^ ^A ^b ^c Siegfried Lehmann: Das Kinder- und Jugenddorf Ben Shemen (1929) , p. 109
↑ Wolf von Wolzüge: "... This Ben Shemen spirit brought me very close to Jewish culture" , p. 263
↑ ^a ^b ^c Siegfried Lehmann: Das Kinder- und Jugenddorf Ben Shemen (1929) , p. 110
↑ Dieter Oelschlägel: The idea of ›productive work‹ , p. 267
^ Ari Shavit: Lydda, 1948 . 'Six months after Lehmann established the youth village, an earthquake demolished much of the old town of Lydda and killed scores of residents. Lehmann rushed to the city to attend to the survivors. His work had a profound impact, and over the years he made friends among Lydda's Palestinian gentry and among the dignitaries of the neighboring Arab villages of Haditha, Dahariya, Gimzu, Daniyal, Deir Tarif, and Bayt Nabala. He saw to it that the villagers walking to and from Lydda in the summer heat could have cool water and refreshing shade at a fountain that he built for them at the gate of the Zionist youth village. Lehmann instructed the local clinic to give medical assistance to Palestinians who needed it. '
↑ Roni Hirsh-Ratzkovsky: From Berlin to Ben Shemen , p. 60. “Great emphasis was placed on marking Shabbat and Jewish holidays and festivities, since Lehmann believed it important to preserve students' ties to Jewish tradition, and to develop a religious sensibility and respect for the transcendental; he also wanted to encourage them to fashion and shape their own rituals, and stressed the agricultural dimension of the Jewish holidays. "
↑ Wolf von Wolzüge: "... This Ben Shemen spirit brought me very close to Jewish culture" , p. 269
^ Siegfried Lehmann: Das Kinder- und Jugenddorf Ben Shemen (1929) , p. 111
^ ^A ^b Siegfried Lehmann: Das Kinder- und Jugenddorf Ben Shemen (1929) , p. 113
^ Siegfried Lehmann: Das Kinder- und Jugenddorf Ben Shemen (1929) , p. 112
↑ Roni Hirsh-Ratzkovsky: From Berlin to Ben Shemen , p 37
^ Siegfried Lehmann: Das Kinder- und Jugenddorf Ben Shemen (1929) , p. 114
↑ The following description of the August events in Ben Shemen follows the report from Ben Schemen in the Jüdische Rundschau (see sources).
↑ Jüdische Rundschau: Report from Ben Schemen
↑ ^a ^b ^c Jüdische Rundschau: The rescue of Ben Schemen
↑ Wolf von Wolzüge: "... This spirit of Ben Shemen brought me very close to the Jewish culture" , pp. 267–268
↑ Wolf von Wolhaben: "... This Ben Shemen spirit brought me very close to Jewish culture" , p. 267
↑ Wolf von Wolzüge: "... This spirit of Ben Shemen brought me very close to the Jewish culture" , pp. 257 & 260
^ Roland Kaufhold: Savior in need. 85 years ago, the Children and Youth Aliyah helped 12,000 girls and boys to escape to Palestine , Jewish General, October 30, 2017. The mentioned herein Kibbutz Ein Harod , it should be around the located in northern Israel kibbutz Ein Harod have acted ; the suffix “near Lod” is incorrect.
↑ Wolf von Wolzüge: "... This spirit of Ben Shemen brought me very close to the Jewish culture" , pp. 257 & 261
↑ Wolf von Wolzüge: "... This Ben Shemen spirit brought me very close to Jewish culture" , pp. 264–265
↑ Hildegard (married Shelton, born March 26, 1917 in Darmstadt - † December 4, 1999 in London) and Hanna (married Tabori , born May 4, 1919 in Darmstadt - † 1969 in the USA)
↑ Chanan Choresh on April 20, 1991 in Kibbutz Amiad, quoted from Werner Fölling: Between German and Jewish Identity , Springer Fachmedien, Wiesbaden 1995, ISBN 978-3-8100-1269-2 , p. 183
↑ See above all the chapter Another Mentality in: Walter Laqueur: Geboren in Deutschland , p. 203 ff.
^ ^A ^b Walter Laqueur: Born in Germany , pp. 213–214
^ Palestine Haven For Children , Jewish Daily Bulletin, Dec. 30, 1934, p. 10
^ Jewish History 1940
↑ Siddy Wronsky: Social Pioneer Work in Palestine , p. 154
^ Chaya H. Roth: The Fate of Holocaust Memories , p. 81
^ Chaya H. Roth: The Fate of Holocaust Memories , p. 81
^ Chaya H. Roth: The Fate of Holocaust Memories , p. 83
^ Chaya H. Roth: The Fate of Holocaust Memories , p. 87. We were standing in a large dusty courtyard; an old gnarled carob tree stood in the middle providing shade for the entire square-like space, but it didn't cover us. We, the newcomers, were standing in the sun together with the yellow, gold, orange, and red Mediterranean flowers that grew along all four ranch-like buildings. These were built with heavy, unevenly cut bricks that I would come to recognize as Jerusalem stone. Behind us were the showers and a two-storied brick building that housed the teachers who were living here and would become my teachers. On the other side of the yard, behind the carob tree were two more two-storied brick buildings. These would be our school. A large iron gate separated the two buildings. On the left side of the school buildings, looking toward the showers where I stood was a long row of one-storied rooms: these were the children's rooms. On the right side of the square were another row of low-slung buildings, but they were made of wood. These were the day workers' quarters. The white dust covering the ground came from the fine, white gravel that would offer us the opportunity to thoroughly wash the stone floors of our rooms with water plus gasoline, of course, at least twice a week. What else but gasoline to disinfect against all sorts of crawling critters that roamed around our quarters? That's why the flowers, of which there were so many, were not as outstanding as they could have been, because their vivid colors were covered during most seasons with the same white dust that spread uniformly all over the square.
↑ Chaya H. Roth: The Fate of Holocaust Memories , p. 88. 'They were pleasant rooms: whitewashed walls, light-colored stone tile floors that were cool in the summer and freezing cold on winter nights. A narrow bed stood against the wall, a little side table by the bed, and maybe a place to store our clothes, I don't remember if we had a closet to hang our clothes in. I say 'we ”because each girl had a roommate. My first roommate's parents lived in the city. To have parents nearby was a status symbol. Maybe this is where my troubles began to show. Belonging to no one, I felt poor. I was ashamed that I had no family to visit. "
↑ Chaya H. Roth: The Fate of Holocaust Memories , p. 89. “Our teacher was Dr. Lehman's wife; she was tall and dark-haired, older than our counselors; she was serious and imposing, but not scary, because she was a terrific teacher. Whatever she taught was so interesting that the object of the lesson never remained flat for long and my curiosity grew the more she taught. "
↑ Chaya H. Roth: The Fate of Holocaust Memories , p. 90. 'No one ever asked where one came from. Children and even the grownups just didn't make conversation like this. They didn't need to know about your past, they just wanted to be in the present, and they wanted to know what you were thinking, doing, studying, eating, and the like. And that suited me just fine. '
↑ Chaya H. Roth: The Fate of Holocaust Memories , p. 86. 'When we did come back and saw what was going on in Antwerp with the survivors and their children, we saw the difference between the life we had left behind and what we were expected to adapt to: namely to a conventional, petit bourgeois type of city-living that differed blatantly from the free environment we had left in Ben Shemen where exploration, study and friendships were encouraged; where we were surrounded by culture, readings, theater, music, dance performances, each associated with the specific topics we were learning in class. The Jewish Holidays were celebrated like so many live tableaux in which the main actors were the children themselves. I have not experienced anything like it in my entire adult life. '
↑ ^a ^b ^c Ronny Loewy : ADAMAH. Helmar Lerski's last film
^ Ari Shavit: Lydda, 1948 . "Lehmann conceived of the film as a fund-raising tool, portraying an almost impossibly idyllic commune: boys and girls who had barely escaped Europe living in a progressive, democratic educational establishment; a kind of convalescent home for the uprooted youth of an uprooted people in the land of the Bible. "
^ Encyclopedia Judaica: Ben Shemen .
^ Hadassah: Our Villages
^ Jewish Virtual Library: Kefar Vitkin
↑ Wolf von Wolhaben: "... This Ben Shemen spirit brought me very close to Jewish culture" , p. 271
↑ His account of the events is not without controversy. See: NAOMI FRIEDMAN: What primary sources tell us about Lydda 1948 , The Jerusalem Post, February 17, 2014
^ Ari Shavit: Lydda, 1948 . "Among the young combatants taking cover in a ditch nearby were Ben Shemen graduates, now in uniform. The brigade commander was a Ben Shemen graduate, too. He gave the order to open fire. Some of the soldiers threw hand grenades into Arab houses. One fired antitank shell into the small mosque. In thirty minutes, two hundred and fifty Palestinians were killed. Zionism had carried out a massacre in the city of Lydda. "
^ Ari Shavit: Lydda, 1948 . "Lydda is the black box of Zionism. The truth is that Zionism could not bear the Arab city of Lydda. From the very beginning, there was a substantial contradiction between Zionism and Lydda. If Zionism was to exist, Lydda could not exist. If Lydda was to exist, Zionism could not exist. "
^ Ari Shavit: Lydda, 1948 . 'When Siegfried Lehmann arrived in the Lydda Valley, in 1927, he should have seen that if a Jewish state was to exist in Palestine an Arab Lydda could not exist at its center. He should have known that Lydda was an obstacle blocking the road to a Jewish state, and that one day Zionism would have to remove it. But Dr. Lehmann did not see, and Zionism chose not to know. For decades, Jews succeeded in hiding from themselves the contradiction between their national movement and Lydda. For forty-five years, Zionism pretended to be the Atid factory and the olive groves and the Ben Shemen youth village living in peace with Lydda. Then, in three days in the cataclysmic summer of 1948, Lydda was no more. '
^ Ari Shavit: Lydda, 1948 . ‚Mula Cohen, the brigade commander, was born in 1923 in Kovna, where his father worked with Dr. Lehmann. He was reared in a socialist household in Tel Aviv, but in middle school he was sent to the Ben Shemen youth village, where he became a favorite of his father's old friend. On Shabbat mornings, he was invited to the Lehmanns' cottage to listen to recordings of Haydn, Mozart, and Bach on the gramophone. On holidays, he accompanied Lehmann as he made courtesy calls in the neighboring villages. Occasionally, he went with him to visit friends and schools in Lydda. He liked Lydda, its market, its olive presses, its old town. At Ben Shemen, he worked in the cowshed, the vineyard, the orange grove; he played handball and developed a taste for the arts. Most of all, he loved music: classical music, popular music, folk music. One of his favorite memories of Ben Shemen is of hundreds of students sitting in silence in the great courtyard listening to an orchestra and a choir perform Bach's' Peasant "Cantata."
^ Ari Shavit: Lydda, 1948 . “Officers are human beings, too,” Cohen said. “And as a human being you suddenly face a chasm. On the one hand is the noble legacy of the youth movement, the youth village, Dr. Lehmann. On the other hand is the brutal reality of Lydda. " For years, he had trained for that day. He had been told that war was coming and that the Arabs would have to go. “And yet you are in shock. In Lydda, the war is as cruel as it can be. The killing, the looting, the feelings of rage and revenge. Then the column marching. And although you are strong and well trained and resilient, you experience some sort of mental collapse. You feel the humanist education you received collapsing. And you see the Jewish soldiers, and you see the marching Arabs, and you feel heavy, and deeply sad. You feel you're facing something immense that you cannot deal with, that you cannot even grasp. "
^ Ari Shavit: Lydda, 1948 . “Those events were a crucial phase of the Zionist revolution, and they laid the foundation for the Jewish state. Lydda is an integral and essential part of the story. And, when I try to be honest about it, I see that the choice is stark: either reject Zionism because of Lydda or accept Zionism along with Lydda. "
↑ BEN SHEMEN YOUTH VILLAGE: Richard Levinson Archives
↑ Wolf von Wolzüge: "... This spirit of Ben Shemen brought me very close to the Jewish culture" , p. 272
↑ Wolf von Wolzüge: "... This Ben Shemen spirit brought me very close to Jewish culture" , p. 263
^ Elisabeth Bückmann: Ben-Shemen. Integration of two cultures in an Israeli children's village , p. 29. Whether this was Kolef Daugilajcky, who received his doctorate in Königsberg in 1922 with a thesis on the importance of the Jewish-Russian intermediary trade for the Königsberg trade , has not been clarified.
↑ Ben Shemen Youth Village est. 1927
↑ BEN SHEMEN YOUTH VILLAGE: Museatar . "Since then children and youth from the 1st to the 12th grade, have received their education under boarding school conditions, where they have both worked and studied. Many of the founders of the Labor Settlements Movements ("Hahityashvut Haovedet") and the state's leaders were educated at the village. "
↑ BEN SHEMEN YOUTH VILLAGE: About us . "Currently Ben Shemen is home to more than 400 children and youth ages 6-21. Ben Shemen as a home to its children and youth residents provides for all of their needs - a bed, meals, individual support, social and educational enrichment and more. However, the village is more than just an educational institution. From the youngest child in our children's home, to our graduates currently serving in the IDF. "
↑ Dieter Oelschlägel: The idea of ›productive work‹ , p. 267
↑ Regine Mayer, quoted from Wolf von Wolzüge: "... This Ben Shemen spirit brought me very close to Jewish culture" , p. 272
↑ Beate Lehmann: Siegfried Lehmann and the Jewish people's home in Berlin's Scheunenviertel , p. 108. You also: Avner Falk: Agnon's Story. A Psychanalytik Biography of SY Agnon , Brill-Rodopi, 2018, ISBN 9789004367784 , p. 162 (quoted from Google Books)
^ Born in Kovno: Helene Chatzkels
↑ See: Friedrich Julius Freund # Hilde and Hanna Freund
↑ Sabine Haustein, Anja Waller: Jüdische Settlements in Europa , pp. 4–5
^ Jewish Women's Archive: Eva Michaelis Stern 1904–1992
^ Gene Dannen: A Physicist's Lost Love: Leo Szilard and Gerda Philipsborn
↑ Wolf von Wolzüge: "... This Ben Shemen spirit brought me very close to Jewish culture" , p. 263
↑ ^a ^b Yuval Dror: The history of kibbutz education in the field of tension between family and children's home , in: Franz-Michael Konrad (ed.): Childhood and Family. Contributions from an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural perspective , Waxmann, Münster, 2001, ISBN 3-8309-1024-X , p. 330. On Beit Alfa see the article Beit Alfa in the English WIKIPEDIA .
↑ ^a ^b Ludwig Liegle / Franz-Michael Konrad (eds.): Reform pedagogy in Palestine , p. 228. Here, Polani's entry into the children's and youth village is dated to the year 1929, unlike von Wolzüge.
↑ You there: Jüdisches Landschulheim Herrlingen # Biographical notes on individual teachers
^ Sophie Buchholz: Hans Herbert Hammerstein / Yisrael Shiloni , p. 3
^ Sophie Buchholz: Hans Herbert Hammerstein / Yisrael Shiloni , p. 25
↑ Dieter Oelschlägel: The Jewish Settlement Movement , Part 2, p. 46
^ Encyclopaedia Judaica: Aryeh Simon
^ Chaya H. Roth: The Fate of Holocaust Memories , p. 89
↑ Wolf von Wolzüge: "... This spirit of Ben Shemen brought me very close to the Jewish culture" , p. 273 (note 15)
↑ Translated from the introduction by Nitsa Ben Ari to the online story Gila .
↑ Werner Fölling: Between German and Jewish Identity , Springer Fachmedien, Wiesbaden 1995, ISBN 978-3-8100-1269-2 , pp. 182-183. The dates of birth of the group also come from Werner Fölling: pupils of the private forest school Kaliski, Berlin 1932–1939 , in: Hertha Luise Busemann / Michael Daxner / Werner Fölling: Insel der Geborgenheit. The private forest school Kaliski. Berlin 1932 to 1939 , Metzler, Stuttgart 1992. ISBN 978-3-476-00845-9 , p. 297 ff.
^ Hadassah: Our Villages
↑ Peres: My love for Sonia will stay in my heart till I die , The Jerusalem Post, January 21, 2011
^ Ari Shavit: Lydda, 1948
↑ ^a ^b ^c Wolf von Wolzüge: "... This spirit of Ben Shemen brought me very close to the Jewish culture" , pp. 256-257
↑ Guide to the Richard Koch Family Collection 1890s-1993 (bulk 1935-1970) & Walter Laqueur: Wanderer against Will. Memories 1921-1951 , Edition Q, Berlin 1905, ISBN 3-86124-270-2 , p. 211 & Walter Laqueur: Born in Germany. The exodus of Jewish youth after 1933 , Propylaea, Berlin 2000, ISBN 3-549-07122-1 , p. 196 ff.
↑ Wolf von Wolzüge: "... This spirit of Ben Shemen brought me very close to the Jewish culture" , pp. 256 & 260
^ The Institute For The Translation Of Hebrew Literature: Igal Mossinsohn . See also: en: Yigal Mossinson

[1] Dieter Oelschlägel: The idea of ›productive work‹ , p. 258

[2] Siegfried Lehmann, quoted from Wolf von Wolhaben: '... This spirit of Ben Shemen brought me very close to Jewish culture' , p. 258

[3] Gershom Scholem: From Berlin to Jerusalem , p. 84

[4] "Ernst Joel (1893–1929) was an important German pacifist. He was a medical doctor and was best known for his studies of the pharmacology of cocaine and morphine. In 1926 he founded the welfare office for alcoholics and other poison addicts in the Berlin district of Tiergarten, of which he also became director. He then moved to the Kreuzberg district and was the first manager of the health center on Urban until his untimely death. Ernst Joel was active in the academic youth movement and founded the magazine 'Der Aufbruch' in 1915 ”(Dieter Oelschlägel: Integration through education , p. 118). See also: Friedrich Bauermeister and Margarete Exler: From the youth movement to medical drug help. The life of Ernst Joe͏l (1893–1929) around Benjamin, Landauer and Buber , Trafo, Berlin, 2005, ISBN 978-3-89626-018-5

[5] Dieter Oelschlägel: The idea of ›productive work‹ , p. 259

[6] Dieter Oelschlägel: The idea of ›productive work‹ , p. 259

[7] Dieter Oelschlägel: The idea of ›productive work‹ , p. 262

[8] Beate Lehmann: Siegfried Lehmann and the Jewish People's Home in Berlin's Scheunenviertel , p. 116

[9] Beate Lehmann: Siegfried Lehmann and the Jewish People's Home in Berlin's Scheunenviertel , p. 117

[10] Beate Lehmann: Siegfried Lehmann and the Jewish People's Home in Berlin's Scheunenviertel , p. 119

[11] Sabine Haustein, Anja Waller: Jüdische Settlements in Europa , p. 12

[Lehmann120-12] ↑ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e ^f ^g Beate Lehmann: Siegfried Lehmann and the Jewish people's home in Berlin's Scheunenviertel , p. 120

[13] Beate Lehmann: Siegfried Lehmann and the Jewish People's Home in Berlin's Scheunenviertel , p. 120

[14] Sabine Haustein, Anja Waller: Jüdische Settlements in Europa , p. 11

[15] Dieter Oelschlägel: The idea of ›productive work‹ , p. 263

[16] Wolf von Wolzüge: "... This Ben Shemen spirit brought me very close to Jewish culture" , p. 259

[17] Jewish Yearbook for Greater Berlin , 1931, pp. 113/114

[18] Hanni Ullmann, quoted from Dieter Oelschlägel: The idea of ›productive work‹ , p. 265

[19] Siegfried Lehmann: From the street horde to the community , p. 36

[20] Sch. S. Pugatschow: Das Kinderdorf im Emek Jesreel , in: Der Jude, Jg. 9 (1925–1927), no. 2 (1926): special issue education, pp. 36–50. The text is available online through the collections of the University Library of the University of Frankfurt am Main

[21] Dieter Oelschlägel: The idea of ›productive work‹ , p. 265

[22] Wolf von Wolzüge: "... This spirit of Ben Shemen brought me very close to the Jewish culture" , p. 273 (note 14)

[23] Claudia Prestel: Youth in Need. Welfare education in German-Jewish society (1901–1933) , Böhlau Verlag, Vienna Cologne Weimar, 2003, ISBN 3-205-77050-1 , p. 315

[24] Wolf von Wolzüge: "... This Ben Shemen spirit brought me very close to Jewish culture" , p. 259

[25] Elisabeth Bückmann: Ben-Shemen. Integration of two cultures in an Israeli children's village , p. 24

[26] Sophie Buchholz: Hans Herbert Hammerstein / Yisrael Shiloni , p. 28. The Hebrew name of the JNF is Keren Kayemeth Le'Israel , from which the abbreviation KKL or JNF-KKL is derived.

[27] Yisrael Shiloni, quoted from Sophie Buchholz: Hans Herbert Hammerstein / Yisrael Shiloni , p. 28

[28] Ari Shavit: My Promised Land , p. 151

[Lehmann_1929-107-29] A ^b ^c Siegfried Lehmann: Das Kinder- und Jugenddorf Ben Shemen (1929) , p. 107

[Lehmann_1929-108-30] A ^b ^c Siegfried Lehmann: Das Kinder- und Jugenddorf Ben Shemen (1929) , p. 108

[Lehmann_1929-109-31] A ^b ^c Siegfried Lehmann: Das Kinder- und Jugenddorf Ben Shemen (1929) , p. 109

[32] Wolf von Wolzüge: "... This Ben Shemen spirit brought me very close to Jewish culture" , p. 263

[Lehmann_1929-110-33] Siegfried Lehmann: Das Kinder- und Jugenddorf Ben Shemen (1929) , p. 110

[34] Dieter Oelschlägel: The idea of ›productive work‹ , p. 267

[35] Ari Shavit: Lydda, 1948 . 'Six months after Lehmann established the youth village, an earthquake demolished much of the old town of Lydda and killed scores of residents. Lehmann rushed to the city to attend to the survivors. His work had a profound impact, and over the years he made friends among Lydda's Palestinian gentry and among the dignitaries of the neighboring Arab villages of Haditha, Dahariya, Gimzu, Daniyal, Deir Tarif, and Bayt Nabala. He saw to it that the villagers walking to and from Lydda in the summer heat could have cool water and refreshing shade at a fountain that he built for them at the gate of the Zionist youth village. Lehmann instructed the local clinic to give medical assistance to Palestinians who needed it. '

[36] Roni Hirsh-Ratzkovsky: From Berlin to Ben Shemen , p. 60. “Great emphasis was placed on marking Shabbat and Jewish holidays and festivities, since Lehmann believed it important to preserve students' ties to Jewish tradition, and to develop a religious sensibility and respect for the transcendental; he also wanted to encourage them to fashion and shape their own rituals, and stressed the agricultural dimension of the Jewish holidays. "

[37] Wolf von Wolzüge: "... This Ben Shemen spirit brought me very close to Jewish culture" , p. 269

[Lehmann_1929-111-38] Siegfried Lehmann: Das Kinder- und Jugenddorf Ben Shemen (1929) , p. 111

[Lehmann_1929-113-39] A ^b Siegfried Lehmann: Das Kinder- und Jugenddorf Ben Shemen (1929) , p. 113

[Lehmann_1929-112-40] Siegfried Lehmann: Das Kinder- und Jugenddorf Ben Shemen (1929) , p. 112

[41] Roni Hirsh-Ratzkovsky: From Berlin to Ben Shemen , p 37

[42] Siegfried Lehmann: Das Kinder- und Jugenddorf Ben Shemen (1929) , p. 114

[43] The following description of the August events in Ben Shemen follows the report from Ben Schemen in the Jüdische Rundschau (see sources).

[44] Jüdische Rundschau: Report from Ben Schemen

[Rettung-45] Jüdische Rundschau: The rescue of Ben Schemen

[46] Wolf von Wolzüge: "... This spirit of Ben Shemen brought me very close to the Jewish culture" , pp. 267–268

[47] Wolf von Wolhaben: "... This Ben Shemen spirit brought me very close to Jewish culture" , p. 267

[48] Wolf von Wolzüge: "... This spirit of Ben Shemen brought me very close to the Jewish culture" , pp. 257 & 260

[49] Roland Kaufhold: Savior in need. 85 years ago, the Children and Youth Aliyah helped 12,000 girls and boys to escape to Palestine , Jewish General, October 30, 2017. The mentioned herein Kibbutz Ein Harod , it should be around the located in northern Israel kibbutz Ein Harod have acted ; the suffix “near Lod” is incorrect.

[50] Wolf von Wolzüge: "... This spirit of Ben Shemen brought me very close to the Jewish culture" , pp. 257 & 261

[51] Wolf von Wolzüge: "... This Ben Shemen spirit brought me very close to Jewish culture" , pp. 264–265

[52] Hildegard (married Shelton, born March 26, 1917 in Darmstadt - † December 4, 1999 in London) and Hanna (married Tabori , born May 4, 1919 in Darmstadt - † 1969 in the USA)

[53] Chanan Choresh on April 20, 1991 in Kibbutz Amiad, quoted from Werner Fölling: Between German and Jewish Identity , Springer Fachmedien, Wiesbaden 1995, ISBN 978-3-8100-1269-2 , p. 183

[54] See above all the chapter Another Mentality in: Walter Laqueur: Geboren in Deutschland , p. 203 ff.

[Naomi-213-214-55] A ^b Walter Laqueur: Born in Germany , pp. 213–214

[56] Palestine Haven For Children , Jewish Daily Bulletin, Dec. 30, 1934, p. 10

[57] Jewish History 1940

[58] Siddy Wronsky: Social Pioneer Work in Palestine , p. 154

[59] Chaya H. Roth: The Fate of Holocaust Memories , p. 81

[60] Chaya H. Roth: The Fate of Holocaust Memories , p. 81

[61] Chaya H. Roth: The Fate of Holocaust Memories , p. 83

[62] Chaya H. Roth: The Fate of Holocaust Memories , p. 87. We were standing in a large dusty courtyard; an old gnarled carob tree stood in the middle providing shade for the entire square-like space, but it didn't cover us. We, the newcomers, were standing in the sun together with the yellow, gold, orange, and red Mediterranean flowers that grew along all four ranch-like buildings. These were built with heavy, unevenly cut bricks that I would come to recognize as Jerusalem stone. Behind us were the showers and a two-storied brick building that housed the teachers who were living here and would become my teachers. On the other side of the yard, behind the carob tree were two more two-storied brick buildings. These would be our school. A large iron gate separated the two buildings. On the left side of the school buildings, looking toward the showers where I stood was a long row of one-storied rooms: these were the children's rooms. On the right side of the square were another row of low-slung buildings, but they were made of wood. These were the day workers' quarters. The white dust covering the ground came from the fine, white gravel that would offer us the opportunity to thoroughly wash the stone floors of our rooms with water plus gasoline, of course, at least twice a week. What else but gasoline to disinfect against all sorts of crawling critters that roamed around our quarters? That's why the flowers, of which there were so many, were not as outstanding as they could have been, because their vivid colors were covered during most seasons with the same white dust that spread uniformly all over the square.

[63] Chaya H. Roth: The Fate of Holocaust Memories , p. 88. 'They were pleasant rooms: whitewashed walls, light-colored stone tile floors that were cool in the summer and freezing cold on winter nights. A narrow bed stood against the wall, a little side table by the bed, and maybe a place to store our clothes, I don't remember if we had a closet to hang our clothes in. I say 'we ”because each girl had a roommate. My first roommate's parents lived in the city. To have parents nearby was a status symbol. Maybe this is where my troubles began to show. Belonging to no one, I felt poor. I was ashamed that I had no family to visit. "

[64] Chaya H. Roth: The Fate of Holocaust Memories , p. 89. “Our teacher was Dr. Lehman's wife; she was tall and dark-haired, older than our counselors; she was serious and imposing, but not scary, because she was a terrific teacher. Whatever she taught was so interesting that the object of the lesson never remained flat for long and my curiosity grew the more she taught. "

[65] Chaya H. Roth: The Fate of Holocaust Memories , p. 90. 'No one ever asked where one came from. Children and even the grownups just didn't make conversation like this. They didn't need to know about your past, they just wanted to be in the present, and they wanted to know what you were thinking, doing, studying, eating, and the like. And that suited me just fine. '

[66] Chaya H. Roth: The Fate of Holocaust Memories , p. 86. 'When we did come back and saw what was going on in Antwerp with the survivors and their children, we saw the difference between the life we had left behind and what we were expected to adapt to: namely to a conventional, petit bourgeois type of city-living that differed blatantly from the free environment we had left in Ben Shemen where exploration, study and friendships were encouraged; where we were surrounded by culture, readings, theater, music, dance performances, each associated with the specific topics we were learning in class. The Jewish Holidays were celebrated like so many live tableaux in which the main actors were the children themselves. I have not experienced anything like it in my entire adult life. '

[Ronny_Loewy-67] Ronny Loewy : ADAMAH. Helmar Lerski's last film

[68] Ari Shavit: Lydda, 1948 . "Lehmann conceived of the film as a fund-raising tool, portraying an almost impossibly idyllic commune: boys and girls who had barely escaped Europe living in a progressive, democratic educational establishment; a kind of convalescent home for the uprooted youth of an uprooted people in the land of the Bible. "

[69] Encyclopedia Judaica: Ben Shemen .

[70] Hadassah: Our Villages

[71] Jewish Virtual Library: Kefar Vitkin

[72] Wolf von Wolhaben: "... This Ben Shemen spirit brought me very close to Jewish culture" , p. 271

[73] His account of the events is not without controversy. See: NAOMI FRIEDMAN: What primary sources tell us about Lydda 1948 , The Jerusalem Post, February 17, 2014

[74] Ari Shavit: Lydda, 1948 . "Among the young combatants taking cover in a ditch nearby were Ben Shemen graduates, now in uniform. The brigade commander was a Ben Shemen graduate, too. He gave the order to open fire. Some of the soldiers threw hand grenades into Arab houses. One fired antitank shell into the small mosque. In thirty minutes, two hundred and fifty Palestinians were killed. Zionism had carried out a massacre in the city of Lydda. "

[75] Ari Shavit: Lydda, 1948 . "Lydda is the black box of Zionism. The truth is that Zionism could not bear the Arab city of Lydda. From the very beginning, there was a substantial contradiction between Zionism and Lydda. If Zionism was to exist, Lydda could not exist. If Lydda was to exist, Zionism could not exist. "

[76] Ari Shavit: Lydda, 1948 . 'When Siegfried Lehmann arrived in the Lydda Valley, in 1927, he should have seen that if a Jewish state was to exist in Palestine an Arab Lydda could not exist at its center. He should have known that Lydda was an obstacle blocking the road to a Jewish state, and that one day Zionism would have to remove it. But Dr. Lehmann did not see, and Zionism chose not to know. For decades, Jews succeeded in hiding from themselves the contradiction between their national movement and Lydda. For forty-five years, Zionism pretended to be the Atid factory and the olive groves and the Ben Shemen youth village living in peace with Lydda. Then, in three days in the cataclysmic summer of 1948, Lydda was no more. '

[77] Ari Shavit: Lydda, 1948 . ‚Mula Cohen, the brigade commander, was born in 1923 in Kovna, where his father worked with Dr. Lehmann. He was reared in a socialist household in Tel Aviv, but in middle school he was sent to the Ben Shemen youth village, where he became a favorite of his father's old friend. On Shabbat mornings, he was invited to the Lehmanns' cottage to listen to recordings of Haydn, Mozart, and Bach on the gramophone. On holidays, he accompanied Lehmann as he made courtesy calls in the neighboring villages. Occasionally, he went with him to visit friends and schools in Lydda. He liked Lydda, its market, its olive presses, its old town. At Ben Shemen, he worked in the cowshed, the vineyard, the orange grove; he played handball and developed a taste for the arts. Most of all, he loved music: classical music, popular music, folk music. One of his favorite memories of Ben Shemen is of hundreds of students sitting in silence in the great courtyard listening to an orchestra and a choir perform Bach's' Peasant "Cantata."

[78] Ari Shavit: Lydda, 1948 . “Officers are human beings, too,” Cohen said. “And as a human being you suddenly face a chasm. On the one hand is the noble legacy of the youth movement, the youth village, Dr. Lehmann. On the other hand is the brutal reality of Lydda. " For years, he had trained for that day. He had been told that war was coming and that the Arabs would have to go. “And yet you are in shock. In Lydda, the war is as cruel as it can be. The killing, the looting, the feelings of rage and revenge. Then the column marching. And although you are strong and well trained and resilient, you experience some sort of mental collapse. You feel the humanist education you received collapsing. And you see the Jewish soldiers, and you see the marching Arabs, and you feel heavy, and deeply sad. You feel you're facing something immense that you cannot deal with, that you cannot even grasp. "

[79] Ari Shavit: Lydda, 1948 . “Those events were a crucial phase of the Zionist revolution, and they laid the foundation for the Jewish state. Lydda is an integral and essential part of the story. And, when I try to be honest about it, I see that the choice is stark: either reject Zionism because of Lydda or accept Zionism along with Lydda. "

[80] BEN SHEMEN YOUTH VILLAGE: Richard Levinson Archives

[81] Wolf von Wolzüge: "... This spirit of Ben Shemen brought me very close to the Jewish culture" , p. 272

[82] Wolf von Wolzüge: "... This Ben Shemen spirit brought me very close to Jewish culture" , p. 263

[83] Elisabeth Bückmann: Ben-Shemen. Integration of two cultures in an Israeli children's village , p. 29. Whether this was Kolef Daugilajcky, who received his doctorate in Königsberg in 1922 with a thesis on the importance of the Jewish-Russian intermediary trade for the Königsberg trade , has not been clarified.

[84] Ben Shemen Youth Village est. 1927

[85] BEN SHEMEN YOUTH VILLAGE: Museatar . "Since then children and youth from the 1st to the 12th grade, have received their education under boarding school conditions, where they have both worked and studied. Many of the founders of the Labor Settlements Movements ("Hahityashvut Haovedet") and the state's leaders were educated at the village. "

[86] BEN SHEMEN YOUTH VILLAGE: About us . "Currently Ben Shemen is home to more than 400 children and youth ages 6-21. Ben Shemen as a home to its children and youth residents provides for all of their needs - a bed, meals, individual support, social and educational enrichment and more. However, the village is more than just an educational institution. From the youngest child in our children's home, to our graduates currently serving in the IDF. "

[87] Dieter Oelschlägel: The idea of ›productive work‹ , p. 267

[88] Regine Mayer, quoted from Wolf von Wolzüge: "... This Ben Shemen spirit brought me very close to Jewish culture" , p. 272

[89] Beate Lehmann: Siegfried Lehmann and the Jewish people's home in Berlin's Scheunenviertel , p. 108. You also: Avner Falk: Agnon's Story. A Psychanalytik Biography of SY Agnon , Brill-Rodopi, 2018, ISBN 9789004367784 , p. 162 (quoted from Google Books)

[90] Born in Kovno: Helene Chatzkels

[91] See: Friedrich Julius Freund # Hilde and Hanna Freund

[92] Sabine Haustein, Anja Waller: Jüdische Settlements in Europa , pp. 4–5

[93] Jewish Women's Archive: Eva Michaelis Stern 1904–1992

[94] Gene Dannen: A Physicist's Lost Love: Leo Szilard and Gerda Philipsborn

[95] Wolf von Wolzüge: "... This Ben Shemen spirit brought me very close to Jewish culture" , p. 263

[Konrad-Polani-96] Yuval Dror: The history of kibbutz education in the field of tension between family and children's home , in: Franz-Michael Konrad (ed.): Childhood and Family. Contributions from an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural perspective , Waxmann, Münster, 2001, ISBN 3-8309-1024-X , p. 330. On Beit Alfa see the article Beit Alfa in the English WIKIPEDIA .

[Liegle-228-97] Ludwig Liegle / Franz-Michael Konrad (eds.): Reform pedagogy in Palestine , p. 228. Here, Polani's entry into the children's and youth village is dated to the year 1929, unlike von Wolzüge.

[98] You there: Jüdisches Landschulheim Herrlingen # Biographical notes on individual teachers

[Buchholz-3-99] Sophie Buchholz: Hans Herbert Hammerstein / Yisrael Shiloni , p. 3

[100] Sophie Buchholz: Hans Herbert Hammerstein / Yisrael Shiloni , p. 25

[101] Dieter Oelschlägel: The Jewish Settlement Movement , Part 2, p. 46

[102] Encyclopaedia Judaica: Aryeh Simon

[103] Chaya H. Roth: The Fate of Holocaust Memories , p. 89

[104] Wolf von Wolzüge: "... This spirit of Ben Shemen brought me very close to the Jewish culture" , p. 273 (note 15)

[105] Translated from the introduction by Nitsa Ben Ari to the online story Gila .

[106] Werner Fölling: Between German and Jewish Identity , Springer Fachmedien, Wiesbaden 1995, ISBN 978-3-8100-1269-2 , pp. 182-183. The dates of birth of the group also come from Werner Fölling: pupils of the private forest school Kaliski, Berlin 1932–1939 , in: Hertha Luise Busemann / Michael Daxner / Werner Fölling: Insel der Geborgenheit. The private forest school Kaliski. Berlin 1932 to 1939 , Metzler, Stuttgart 1992. ISBN 978-3-476-00845-9 , p. 297 ff.

[107] Hadassah: Our Villages

[108] Peres: My love for Sonia will stay in my heart till I die , The Jerusalem Post, January 21, 2011

[109] Ari Shavit: Lydda, 1948

[Wolzogen256-257-110] Wolf von Wolzüge: "... This spirit of Ben Shemen brought me very close to the Jewish culture" , pp. 256-257

[111] Guide to the Richard Koch Family Collection 1890s-1993 (bulk 1935-1970) & Walter Laqueur: Wanderer against Will. Memories 1921-1951 , Edition Q, Berlin 1905, ISBN 3-86124-270-2 , p. 211 & Walter Laqueur: Born in Germany. The exodus of Jewish youth after 1933 , Propylaea, Berlin 2000, ISBN 3-549-07122-1 , p. 196 ff.

[112] Wolf von Wolzüge: "... This spirit of Ben Shemen brought me very close to the Jewish culture" , pp. 256 & 260

[113] The Institute For The Translation Of Hebrew Literature: Igal Mossinsohn . See also: en: Yigal Mossinson