Secular High Holidays

NECHEMIA MEYERS

While many Israelis are praying in synagogue on Rosh Hashana, members of Jezre'el Valley Kibbutz Beit Hashita will gather on a hillside facing historic Mount Gilboa and watch as "last year's sun" sinks below the horizon and the New Year begins. They will recite some traditional prayers along with contemporary Israeli prose and poetry.

On Yom Kippur they will delve into the heritage of the Jewish people and seek to draw up a spiritual balance sheet that encompasses their deeds, collective and individual, over the previous 12 months.

Beit Hashita is the home of the Kibbutz Institute for Festivals and Holidays, the most important center for writing and distributing educational material about Jewish holidays and lifecycle events to meet the needs of those who want to be Jewish but cannot find their place in the synagogue. It was founded by the late Aryeh Ben-Gurion, nephew of Israel's first prime minister, and originally operated almost entirely within the framework of the kibbutz movement.

For decades, kibbutzim were primarily responsible for the development of the country's secular Jewish culture, composing their own Passover Hagaddot as well as giving renewed expression to agricultural festivals like Sukkot and Shavuot that over the centuries had lost their original content and become largely prayer services.

For example, the celebration of Passover on kibbutzim begins not with a prayer about the gathering of grain but with actually harvesting grain, accompanied by songs and dances. The kibbutzim have also developed programs for Independence Day, Yom Yerushalim and Holocaust Memorial Day.

While the institute still serves the needs of the kibbutzim, it now primarily reaches out to others, with special emphasis on the Israeli Army, which sends a constant stream of soldiers to Beit Hashita for one-day seminars, while the institute deploys teachers to army units to talk about holiday celebrations.

Among those involved in this aspect of institute work is Mordy Stein, a former New Yorker who, unlike his colleagues, is strictly observant. He not only teaches commandos about the Jewish holidays; he also invites them for Shabbat at his religious kibbutz.

"That allows them to meet with religious Jews who ... won't make a fuss if a girl shows up wearing slacks and are part and parcel of the modern world," he says.

The Israeli Ministry of Education looks to Beit Hashita to prepare courses for teachers' seminaries and classroom lessons.

Binyamin Yogev, institute director, is deeply involved in teaching new immigrants about their Jewish heritage and helping them organize celebrations of the Sabbath and holidays. "What we do," says Yogev, "is limited only by the funds we have available. There is an enormous demand among secular Israelis who - while alienated from the synagogue - seek greater Jewish content in their lives."

The institute's Web site is at www.chagim.org.il/chagimenglish.html.

Nechemia Meyers is a free-lance writer in Rehovot, Israel.

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