The Dining Room as Parable

To a visitor who has never eaten regularly at one, a kibbutz dining room might look like a glorified (or even unglorified) cafeteria: the stainless-steel smorgasbord of salads and meats and breads, the long table-clothed tables and conversation-filled open room, the noisy conveyor-belt dish-washing machine. Echoes of high school perhaps, with more gossip and fewer food fights.

But for a longtime kibbutznik (and even a nostalgia-drunk volunteer like myself), the dining room is so much more. It’s the heart and soul of the kibbutz. It’s the centre of activity. It’s the thrice a day (sometimes more) gathering place. It’s as much a symbol as a setting. It is, as the title of a recent exhibition at the Eretz Israel Museum in Tel Aviv suggests, a parable. So it’s little wonder that the dining room has proved the fascinated focus for many artists, like the photographers in the Eretz Israel show, or Avraham Eilat (who uploaded a time-lapse film sequence of the dining room at Kibbutz Shamir, with the members gathering around the TV for news of a terrorist attack by the Red Brigade), and others. 

Over the past two years, I also “read” the dining rooms at the different kibbutzim I visited as parables. I tried to discern the state of their social and community life from the state of their dining room. At Kibbutz Hanita, my host took me to the dining room explicitly to show me how life there had declined since privatization: there was a cash register, half the room was closed off, the remaining side was half-empty and occupied mostly with retirement-age kibbutzniks, and he admitted that since most of his friends had left the kibbtuz, he rarely ate there himself.

Kibbutz Lotan, by contrast, had a small but lively dining room, still communal, still free, and packed shoulder to shoulder, with challa and wine on the table, for Shabbat dinner. I watched two male friends hug warmly as they met near the kitchen. The heart of this dining room was still beating strongly. It felt the same at Kibbutz Samar, although the dress-code was more hippie-chic, and its kitchen is probably unique in the entire country for being open and unlocked at all hours of the day or the night: anyone can drop by for a snack at the anarchist dining room. 

Kibbutz Ketura was a bit more complex. It had a more spacious dining room, but the social geography of the space was carefully sub-divided, likely unconsciously, perhaps because of the many different groups who coalesce at the kibbutz: international volunteers sat at one table, students at the Arava Institute at another (and Mulsim students tended to cluster together amongst themselves), several tables were reserved for one of the many tour groups (in this case, young Swedes) who come through, and there was food station reserved for guests of the hotel—we got a slightly choice of food fixings, because we were paying for our meals.

Kibbutz Urim’s dining room was lightly attended for breakfast, but during our meal, our host ran into his university-aged son, who is living in a student apartment on the kibbutz, and they had coffee together—a nice moment. Urim is struggling to stay communal and considering different statuses for different members, to give some flexibility and freedom without fully embracing privatization: the dining room seemed to mirror that trend.

Kibbutz Revadim was the most depressing. Jerry and I were the only people eating in its huge dining room, because we were staying at the guest house. The dining room’s kitchen were privatized, and only used for catering functions and guest-house breakfasts. A panorama of photographs outside the entrance showed the kibbutz’s expansion, from an aerial view, over 60 years, with the dining room at its hub. But now that hub is empty of its original purpose.

Kibbutz Mishmar HaEmek has a huge L-shaped dining room, usually busy, with stacks of high-chairs and newspapers to be picked up outside. It remains the proud centre of this bastion of the kibbutz movement. Kibbutz 

Kibbutz Shamir’s dining hall was much like I remembered it, with its sun-filled vertical windows and huge tapestry, although the kitchen itself has been renovated and cash registers added to pay for the (heavily subsidized) meals. It was open for breakfast and lunch and two dinners per week. Workers from the factory, in their blue overalls, still used it, although because agriculture plays a smaller role, with far fewer workers, in the kibbutz economy, I didn’t see the lines of muddy field-hands in their sun-hats and work-shirts, a cigarette tucked behind their ears, trundle in for a meal like I used to do. We were only there four days, but it wasn’t long before we were chatting to and nodding at friends and acquaintances that we had met—the social glue of eating in the same place was starting to set.

Day 16: Kibbutz Ein Harod

Of course, one solution to the problems at Kibbutz Hanaton would be to follow the wisdom of Solomon and make the split literal by chopping the community in half. That’s what happened during the much more contentious schism—a political divide about which left-wing party to support—that racked the kibbutz movement in the 1952. Some members simply left their homes and moved to communities that supported their preferred political party.

In a couple cases, most famously at Kibbutz Ein Harod, the kibbutz itself was physically and socially split into two, and the separated communities became known by the suffix Meuhad or Ihud, depending on which federation its members aligned with. Kibbutz Ein Harod—Meuhad and Ihud—is famous for more than just this split… which seems, from the distance of history, like political hair-splitting by a pack of socialists but was of the utmost importance to the committed members in the early years of the State of Israel, when everything seemed possible, even a socialist Jewish nation on the shores of the Mediterranean.

Ein Harod is perhaps the most important kibbutz after Degania. It was founded in 1921 as a reaction to the small kvutzot, like Degania, and intended to be a “big kvutzot” or communal society instead—a thousand people, maybe more, something more sustainable than the 20 to 50 individuals that had founded the earlier communities. In this way, Ein Harod was the first kibbutz per se—as the word “kibbutz” became applied to these larger settlements and eventually replaced “kvutza” as the generic term. Ein Harod was also the home of Yitzhak Tabenkin, who turned the kibbutz into the centre of a nationwide movement (eventually called Meuhad) to promote this vision of large, economically robust socialist communities expanding across and hopefully transforming pre-state Israel. 

In the end, Ein Harod was changed by Israeli society, rather than vice versa. Political divisions between the weakening movements died down, and the Ihud and Meuhad federations joined to form the United Kibbutz Movement in 1981, although the two Ein Harods remain separate. Last September, Kibbutz Ein Harod Meuhad voted to privatize, an event as significant perhaps as the same decision that was made by Degania Aleph two years earlier. Tabenkin’s socialist utopia is now embracing the capitalist ethos—a change that his 79-year-old son says the founder of the “big kibbutz” movement would not have approved.

That was all just context to our visit to the Art Gallery at the kibbutz, where I spoke with Galia Bar-or, who is co-curating an exhibition about 100 years of kibbutz architecture for the Israeli pavilion at the upcoming Venice Biennale. Our discussion added to my understanding of the built-environment of the kibbutz—what makes it unique and how it has changed—from my earlier interview with the Chyutins in Tel Aviv. 

Dr. Bar-or emphasized that the thinking behind the design of the kibbutz is not simply of historical interest, even in the era of the capitalist kibbutz. “It’s still relevant,” she told us. “It’s not a long exhausted idea. It’s very fruitful to think about different kinds of solidarity. This is an alternative form to the generic city or suburbs.”

Kibbutz architects, she explained, were conscious of planning public spaces and building arrangements that encouraged social interaction, especially the all-important dining room, the centre of most kibbutzim, where so much of communal life took place—eating, voting, dancing, you name it. “It’s very nice that the heart of the community is linked to food,” she said. “Now with the changes, with privatization, in many cases the community is not able to maintain that big building because people eat at home.” Israeli filmmaker Amos Gitai is contributing to the Venice exhibition an experimental film focused on the dining room of Kibbutz Kfar Masaryk, especially its sounds.

Dr. Bar-or talked about the pressures being placed on the social spaces of the kibbutz. “We are in a crucial time when, in many cases, the privatization of land has violated the space of the kibbutz. There are also rules of the state that force you to make fences—” We had seen high wire fences that Kibbutz Urim had to erect around its daycare. “—and roads for ambulances to enter.” I had mentioned how I had always appreciated the way many kibbutzim are made for people walking not for cars driving. “There is a need for rethinking and to preserve that common space and to maintain that social space.”

And what about the future?

“I’m not certain that the kibbutz will survive even in the form of the new kibbutz,” Dr. Bar-Or admitted. “I think the idea, the courage to try, that thing that makes you human—that you are looking to make the future better—that’s the main thing. Even if it will disappear, it’s like a ghost. It will come back.”