MOSHAV BET CHERUT

The process of voluntary migration from one country to another is one that generally has a long story to it. People do not, as a rule, pick themselves up one bright day and hike themselves off to strange lands and foreign customs, leaving home and work and friends and the familiar beaten tracks for the unknown and the strange. To understand the history of Bet Cherut, we should see what the people who started it really felt and thought and believed, what homes they came from, and what immediate environment stimulated them in the street, in the local political field, on the economic front, and on the international horizon. But this would take us too far afield. I must be content with brevity.

As far back as 1932, the first organizational steps to form Bet Cherut were taken. It is instructive to survey the stages by which the schemes became a reality and to notice how many times in its history it might have fallen through for lack of faith or lack of horse sense, how long and how slow was the process of creation, and which were the steps that brought it forward. In this survey there are lessons for us to learn.

Agreement had been reached between the Jewish National Fund and the Histadrut firm known as Yachin Chakal, in terms of which land in the Emek Chefer region, recently purchased from the Arabs, was to be developed as orange groves. The groves were to be sold to would-be settlers in various countries, including Poland, Lithuania, and the United States, who would pay Yachin for the monthly upkeep of their groves for five years. The settler was then to come to Israel and work his land himself; it was expected by then to be income producing.

It was planned to establish three settlements' and three groups were organized, called Cherut Aleph, Cherut Bet, and Cherut Gimmel. Some fifty-nine families in Canada and the United States who signed contracts were all members of the Labor Zionist movement, and they constituted Cherut Bet, They originally planned that their settlement would be a moshav ovdim, wherein each family would have ten dunam of citrus (a dunam being approximately one fourth of an acre) plus fifteen dunam of other land, to be worked as separate family units.  In anticipation, a few families sent their children to study agriculture in Palestine as early as 1933. Cherut Aleph at Tzofiut near Kfar Saba was not a successful venture, primarily because the chaverim who joined the group did not come to settle in Israel. But there are still six American families in Tzofiut.

When the first contract with Yachin was due to expire, the groves did not yet yield enough to provide the minimum needs of a family. The question arose of how to continue. From the start, there had been a minority in favor of closer cooperation. At the first conference of members held at Chelsea, Michigan, a great number of chaverim submitted the idea of a moshav shitufi, a smallholders' cooperative in which the land is worked collectively, as in a kibbutz. This was not accepted, in deference to a small minority from the Eastern states, which persisted in its desire to be individual smallholders. It was, however, decided that Yachin should, from then on, deal directly with each individual member. The group set up two offices: one in New York, with Z. A. Arial as secretary, and the other in Minneapolis for the Midwest region, with Yaakov Berman as the secretary.

A year later, at the second conference in Cleveland, the idea of moshav shitufi was adopted by a great majority, with two basic variations from the standard moshav shitufi: ( I ) that every family could build its own house according to its means; (2) that each family have two dunam of land around the house which it could work individually. A further step that helped greatly in the success of the project was the assumption by the group of all responsibilities and financial obligations to Yachin, which some members were not able to fulfill because of the depressed financial situation in the United States at the time.

Therefore, in 1936, when the Yachin contract was due to expire, the ground, was ready for a further step in communal responsibility: Cherut Bet, as a cooperative, signed a new contract with Yachin for additional work on the groves, replacing the individual contracts that had existed between the members and Yachin.
By 1939, some of the youngsters, including Nachman Arial, who had been sent over earlier were now qualified. Together with a few older members, who had already arrived, they assumed the responsibility 
for preparing the ground for the others still in America. They registered the cooperative as a legal entity in Israel and, in its name, took over the lands of Cherut Bet from Yachin. Soon they were ready for the new aliya.

But the years of World War II intervened and then the British "closed-door" immigration policy was a barrier to be breached. A large number of members of tie group managed to break through in 1947. In spite of these difficulties, a sufficient number of settlers arrived in the post-war years t get the settlement firmly founded.

This is not the place to describe the later history of Bet Cherut. Its story follows the pattern of a settlement that made its way in Israel to become one of the "showplaces." It has grown to a community with one thousand dunam of orange groves, two hundred and fifty dunam of fishponds, one hundred of tropical fruits, four hundred dunam of field crops, vegetable, and grain, some thousands of turkeys and six thousand chickens, etc. with a large silk-screen printing plant and a woodworking factory.

Bet Cherut is unique in several respects. It is sometimes called a moshav shitufi, but it is not accepted as one of the groups of moshavim shitufiim in the moshav movement, with which it and they are affiliated. It has not received the usual Jewish Agency budget, which practically all settlements have needed to build themselves up, but has been created by the efforts and capital of it own members.

How is it different in its internal structure? The crucial decision in this respect, one which determined the unique form of Bet Cherut, was made in 1938, when it vas decided to work cooperatively the orange groves which had been purchased on an individual basis, and to continue the expansion and development of the community on a cooperative basis. This was about the time when the first moshavim shitufiim were founded in Israel, but some of them were founded outside the framework of the Moshav movement; whereas Bet Cherut was within it from the beginning. It was unique among moshavim in the degree and permanence of the cooperative section of its economy. A small domestic farm was permitted to members but this was limited to what a wife could manage in her own time and with her own work. (For example, the number of chickens allowed has been changed from time to time.) The work of tie men, on the other hand, is organized on the same central work-assignment basis; as in the Kibbutz. Consequently, like the kibbutz, the) can engage in industry as well as in agriculture. Through specialization of labor, manpower becomes available for industry to a degree that the moshav ovdim, with its individual family farm, can hardly begin to equal; and, for the same reason, it can more easily find members for community services such as shlichut, youth movement work, and so on.

Unlike any Kibbutz or moshav shitufi, however, its houses have been built with the capital of its members (borrowed, for the most part, from the -moshav or some outside source), and designed in various styles and sizes to suit each family's individual taste and pocket. In practically all settlements today, the initial houses that are built for settlers are of one basic pattern; and it is only in moshavei ovdim, after many years, that members begin to add or build or even replace their houses as they become inadequate or dilapidated. In the kibbutz and the moshav shitufi proper, housing is the concern of the settlement as such, and the individual family has no interest or concern with it. (Of course, as a group, they decide what they want within the limits of the money available, since this affects each individual intimately.) 

The greater emphasis on the community as the path to welfare, which Bet Cherut shares with the kibbutz and the moshav shitufi, has led it to develop programs more extensive than those of the moshav ovdim for mutual aid; for education from the age of three to army age; for health, vacations, old age, retirement, social security, and the integration of children into the life and culture of the community.

In short, the uniqueness of Bet Cherut lies in its function as a moshav whose social form places such great stress on the community's economic and social role and as a meshek kibbutzi (a term used for the kibbutz and the moshav shitufi) that goes further than any of the others in extending the financial role of the individual family.

There are, today, more than sixty families in Bet Cherut, some of the original members living there with their children and grandchildren. Approximately half of its members are graduates of Habonim. Much of what Bet Cherut is today is a result of Habonim associations and teachings. Its members are justly proud of what they have made of that teaching in the reality of Israel.

NIBBY PENN, Bet Cherut, 1960