Many studies have been written about the kibbutz, but only a few serious studies have been published to date on the religious kibbutz, whose members maintain an orthodox religious lifestyle in addition to living and working collectively.
This book examines the ideology and pioneering efforts of the Religious Kibbutz Movement in the pre-state years, and especially its emphasis on clustered settlements, leading to the birth of ten religious kibbutzim, nine of them in three distinct clusters, between 1936 and 1948. Religious pioneers settled in the Beit She’an Valley, in the hills south of Jerusalem (Gush Etzion) and the northern Negev – all of them frontier regions that posed a formidable geographical and political challenge. The Religious Kibbutz Movement in the Land of Israel looks at how these kibbutzim fitted into their surroundings and interacted with their non-religious neighbors, and explores the religious settlement enterprise in the context of all Zionist settlement in Palestine at the time.
Translated from the Hebrew Torah Ve-Avoda Be-Binyan Ha-Aretz (The Religious Kibbutz during the Mandate Period).
