Israel’s first student revolution

The ‘Yavne students’ ran activities for youth from difficult backgrounds in Jerusalem’s Old City in the 1940s and later encouraged them to settle on kibbutzim. A new exhibition in Jerusalem documents their journey.

By BATSHEVA POMERANTZ
Historical photo Yavne exhibition 521 (photo credit: Courtesy of Shulamit Aharoni)
Historical photo Yavne exhibition 521
(photo credit: Courtesy of Shulamit Aharoni)
The hardships suffered by students in Jerusalem in the late 1930s and ’40s might sound familiar to today’s younger generation.
Many students of the Hebrew University, the only university in Israel at the time, faced a sharp rise in tuition and lack of support from their parents back in war-torn Europe. In a letter to the university’s executive, student union chairman Gideon Hausner wrote: “The situation of hundreds of students is awful: they have no meals, they go from house to house with their belongings when they have no way of paying rent.”
For members of the Yavne Religious Students’ Association, a novel solution was found.
The exhibition “From Yavne to Jerusalem” at the Isaac Kaplan Old Yishuv Court Museum highlights their model of living within the community – students living and volunteering with youth in the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City.
Within this framework, three of these students – Mordechai Hayut, David Hayisraeli, and Dov Rappel – went on to Kvutzat Yavne (near Ashdod) and were among the founders of this thriving kibbutz. Nechemia Rappel, Dov’s son, today heads the Religious Kibbutz Movement.
The exhibition presents photographs of the students and youth on trips, gardening, and participating in activities such as theater and crafts in the Old City clubs operated by the students. Most of the photographs were taken by Yehoshua Markowitz, a student with golden hands who became a counselor and coordinator of the boys’ club. Also on display are board games, card games, booklets and toys popular throughout Israel in the 1940s.
The museum has a play area, designed by Eran Zimran, where children can play games from that time.
“Many families with children visited this summer, enjoying games of the past,” says exhibition curator Ora Pikel-Zabari.
In 1939, Dr. Judah Magnes, president of the Hebrew University, initiated the enterprise to assist the students while strengthening the Yishuv in the Jewish Quarter. A notice posted in his name encouraged students to settle in the Old City, where they would be given an apartment, and assist the neighborhood’s mainly Sephardi youth. Magnes supported the enterprise in the initial years, with students learning to budget their personal expenses and funding for the clubs.
Dov Rappel, who later became a professor of the philosophy of education, said that Magnes “was one of the most prominent people that I’ve seen in my life... He was our patron, he took care of the money for us, he financed the project and treated us nicely with the utmost respect.”
About 2,000 residents lived in the Jewish Quarter in the 1940s. With a high dropout rate, Jewish youth often roamed the streets, sometimes turning to crime. The difficult economic situation forced children to join the work force, with young girls being employed doing housework.
Yisrael Gigi, whose father had died, was a resident of the Jewish Quarter from 1938 to 1943. He recalls: “On the festivals when masses of Jews would go to the Old City to pray and give charity at the Western Wall, my older brother and I would mingle among the crowd ... trying to be guides ... or just asking for ‘bakshish money’ from guests going continually to the Western Wall.”
The working youth came from religious or traditional backgrounds, accepting help from whoever provided it. Secular youth movements like Hashomer Hatza’ir and Hanoar Ha’oved often drove religion from the poor neighborhoods. Thus the Yavne students were motivated to educate Jewish youth from difficult backgrounds, and encourage the Yishuv in the Old City.
Arriving in March 1940, the determined students did not lose hope when facing the opposition of the Old Yishuv’s Sephardi and Ashkenazi rabbis who feared the students would sway the youth away from Torah.
Parents also initially objected to the students’ activities. The students organized evening classes and operated summer camps, sweeping more youth to join.
“The camp committee set a budget for the club, which included only one meal, lunch, for all Old City children. This is how one club started for about 50 boys within the Old City, in the Talmud Torah [religious day school] of the Sephardim, and a camp club for girls in Yemin Moshe, which to some extent was considered a suburb of the Old City,” recalls Hayut.
In their reports, the students wrote that between 100 and 200 children participated in the clubs’ activities. Over a span of eight years, the figures changed due to the circumstances.
The students finally gained the confidence of the parents. Besides the clubs, evening classes started to include working girls (from the summer of 1940), and activities for adults.
The students ran a small-loan fund that helped many parents run their small businesses. By the end of 1941, the Yavne group grew to eight members, with two female students to lead the girls. Volunteer counselors from the new city joined, and the number of children visiting the clubs increased.
The Yavne students shared with the youth their ideology of Torah V’Avoda (religious Zionism based on labor and settlement).
“Although the group did not define itself as committed to this direction, as the educational work progressed, it became clear that serious-minded youth should be presented also with an ideological direction, and [that] you cannot educate intensively without this,” says Hayut. “It was clear that you cannot educate for purposes like reading newspapers, playing chess or even doing crafts.”
Through diverse activities (arts and crafts and enrichment) the students transmitted their beliefs: love of the people and the land, training for a life of sharing and labor, and expanding horizons. The youth created maps of Israel, visited places like Motza, the Rockefeller Museum, Rehavia and Talpiot.
They engaged in sports and performed in theater.
Realizing that sooner or later they’d be leaving, the students were concerned with the future of the youth. They debated taking them out of the Old City to the kibbutz.
In 1943, the Yavne counselors took their young charges to Rodges (today Kfar Avraham, Petah Tikva) where they worked in the garden for half a day and studied the rest of the time.
After spending over a year in Rodges, the children went to Kvutzat Yavne. Rappel, Hayisraeli and Markowitz were the devoted counselors who went with them from the Old City to Rodges, and continued on with them to Kvutzat Yavne, where they remained for two years. Some of the youth went to Kibbutz Sde Eliahu and Kibbutz Tirat Zvi.
With the outbreak of the War of Independence, the youth of the Old City clubs were recruited to fight in the youth battalions and as radio communicators in the defense of the Jewish Quarter. Some were killed or wounded, while others were taken prisoner by the Jordanian Legion. When the Jewish Quarter fell in 1948, the many youth clubs were brought to their end.
The values they received over the years from their counselors of the Yavne Religious Students Association stood them in good stead when they were called to duty.
The exhibition is at the Isaac Kaplan Old Yishuv Court Museum until March 2012.