KFAR BLUM TODAY

One might think of Kfar Blum, in the northern tongue of Upper Galilee, miles from entertainment, purchasing, or marketing centers, far from any large city, as a farming community, raising a second and even a third generation of unsophisticated farmers. But this is hardly so: we ourselves are a center, a center for most varied activities. Our "main highway," seemingly so far from any artery of traffic—not even the first turn-off from the Rosh Pina-Kiryat Shmona Road, but an off-shoot of an off-shoot of the main road—is host: to innumerable conveyances, each representing a center of interest for one or several of the inhabitants of the community. Standing near the central office building on any weekday during the spring, summer, or autumn, one may count dozens of vehicles of all types entering and leaving the premises.

There is a constant coming and going of tractors hitched to wagons carrying alfalfa to the drying machine, the alfalfa grown by Kfar Blum and other communities in the vicinity; trucks come in bringing bread, foodstuffs, building materials, empty crates for packing agricultural produce, machinery and equipment, seeds from surrounding farms to be cleaned and dried, fuel, mattresses, and other smaller articles. Trucks leave loaded with sacks of dried alfalfa, with boxes of wooden clothes pegs, with apples, eggs, crates of chickens, with grapes and milk for distant markets. During the 'day three Egged buses come to take our travelers away and, particularly during the summer months, buses coming in loaded with tourists are not unusual. Passenger cars pass one another on the narrow road; cars at the disposal of members working on outside jobs, for the Huleh Reclamation Project, for the local Transport Cooperative, for the kibbutz federation's national office; the car belonging to the itinerant veterinary, who comes periodically to the barn; a van coming once a week to the hatchery to carry our chicks to market; the jeep belonging to our doctor, who also serves Kupat Cholim in Kiryat Shmona and two other villages; the motor-bike on which our venturesome dentist makes his rounds to communities not far from us; the Vespa at the disposal of the member who works for the Regional Council; the jeep which takes the woman raising gladiola on a large commercial scale; the motorcycle of the electrician who comes daily from Kiryat Shmona—add to this constant traffic our five-ton truck, two tenders for run-about duty, dozens and dozens of bicycles, and sixteen tractors—all these wheels turning, bringing up people, produce, and equipment into and out of Kfar Blum all day long; and each person and each item represents a greater or lesser portion of the whole. Each vehicle with its baggage or persons is like a small stone dropped into a pool; it causes ever-widening concentric circles or ripples as, more intensely or more remotely, it affects the lives of each of us.

In the course of sixteen years as a collective community, both our economic and social organization have grown and changed. Branches once highly remunerative have, in recent years, been scrapped for others more appropriate to our land, labor conditions, and marketing situation. New branches have been added to round out our agricultural self-sufficiency: to the original grain and green-fodder crops, chickens, barn, vineyards, apple orchards, and fish breeding, have been added beekeeping, cotton growing, alfalfa, raising of chicks, pear culture, and seeded pasture land. Whereas at one time, when Near Eastern markets were open to us and we had a production monopoly in this country, clothes-peg production was highly remunerative, it no longer is; and we are selling our factory. At one time vegetable gardening was profitable, but we have scrapped that for want of manpower and because of the abundance of vegetables whose producers are nearer to the market and can undersell us. Fish breeding and orchards remain our major income-producing branches, but their appearance today is very different from that of just a few years ago. More land is being put into orchards each year; the fish ponds have been rebuilt with modernized equipment for loading fish into the tanks which carry them to market. The combined income of our agricultural branches reaches over a million and a half pounds annually.

A link between these income producing branches and those branches which take care of the personal needs of our variegated population are the services and "public utilities." The garage, the metal workshop, the carpentry shop, the water-pumping station, the electricians--they all serve both the internal producers' and consumers' needs. The electrician may spend his day repairing lines for lighting the chicken houses at night, or he may devote hours to repairing the mangle in the clothing department or the electric mixer in the kitchen. The carpenters may be building a wagon for carrying cotton from the fields or repairing window frames and doors in the buildings of the high school. The metal workshop may interrupt the building of an elevator for loading fish into tanks to construct the supporting frame for an outdoor cinema screen.

The personal service branches in which some forty percent of the membership works include four distinct kitchens—the large communal one; a kosher kitchen, for parents of members who choose to cat there; the infants' kitchen, where the formulae and first foods for infants are cooked; and a kitchen which distributes the food to the elementary school children. The clothing stores for members and for children are separate units, each staffed with a large number of women. The mechanized laundry does all the washing for children, members, kitchen, guest house, and hospital. Small personal supplies as well as tools and equipment needed for work are stocked in a "general store." We have reached a degree of diversity and size which requires two gardeners; a man in charge of sanitation; maintenance men for the children's houses; a medical staff consisting of a doctor, nurse, dentist, his assistant, a girl in charge of the hospital; and an office and bookkeeping staff of several people.

Our children range from day-olds (at this writing) to those who have become members and have children of their own. Our infants' house is never empty; the toddlers and kindergartners fill the banks of the Jordan on summer mornings; the elementary school children, over one hundred of them, take advantage of their recess for the same kind of relaxing wild play that children all over the world indulge in; and the high-school students, also over one hundred, make a between-class beeline for their rooms, from which they emerge munching an apple or a piece of bread and butter. Our present nineteen-year-olds are now in the army or giving a year's service to the youth movement; an older group has already completed army training, and its chaverim are taking their places in the adult community. 

Our varied population of seven hundred—members from the age of eighteen to those who are approaching fifty, plus temporary residents, candidates, children, and parents of members, all coming from over twenty different countries; people with family status ranging from single to families of four, five, and six children; members who have been in Kfar Blum from birth (our "sabras"), those who started with the first garin over twenty years ago, and those who just joined a year or two ago—assures a dynamic base to the community.

SHIRLEY LASHNER, Kfar Blum, 1959