(Moshe Shapira, originally from Migdal, who took his own life at the age of 18, wrote: “We treated one another with brutality. Forgive me for the trouble I am causing you. May you succeed in your endeavors. Be more like psychologists. Tell the family that I died of malaria, it will be easier for them.”).
In the cemeteries of the Jordan Valley, among the graves of the builders of the country, lie hidden the graves of dozens of pioneers who decided to put an end to their lives. Dejection in the face of the country’s harshness, hunger, solitude, romantic disappointments, and the hardheartedness of their companions broke their morale. “Sooner or later, everyone ends up betraying themselves; I was deceived,” wrote Nathan Aher, aged 19, when he shot himself. “I no longer see either hope or reason to live in such a world.”
In the summer of 1936, the Jewish journalist B. Waldak was sent by his newspaper Forverts on a mission of the first importance: to travel across Israel and make a report. The Forverts is a Yiddish newspaper of the Jewish community of New York that followed from afar everything concerning Zionist action in Israel.
B. Waldak wrote a long article on Jaffa, on Tel Aviv which was developing alongside it, and on the moshavot of the Sharon; having arrived in the Jordan Valley, he went to Degania and then to Kinneret. He spoke with comrades, then went to the cemetery and came to a standstill before the gravestones, in a state of shock. “He had translated for him what was written on the gravestones,” recounts the historian Gur Alroey, “and he felt that he had to report to his readers the great number of suicides among the pioneers who had come to Eretz Israel1 in order to make the land fertile and who, at the end of their tether, ended up taking their own lives. He cited the epitaphs on the gravestones, explained the difficulties that the pioneers faced and still face, and described the pain of so hard a life in distant regions.” The article was found by Alroey, a professor in the department of Israel studies at the University of Haifa, a few weeks ago in the archives of the Yiddish Institute of Manhattan, where he was spending a sabbatical year.
The people who emigrated with the second (1904) and the third Aliyah2 (1914) were solitary and impassioned, despairing and full of severity. They found themselves in contradiction with the Zionist ideology that animated them, an ideology that uprooted them from their homes and their families, that thrust them onto the harsh land of Israel in the mosquito-infested marshes, under a terrible heat, with thirst, dehydration, hunger, solitude, and a harsh social reality.
One can find their remains in the cemeteries of Kinneret and Degania, which have become places of pilgrimage. After visiting the gathering courtyard of the kibbutzniks and the museum of Degania, he went to the cemetery from which one can see the lake in all its splendor. A. D. Gordon, Dr. Arthur Ruppin at Degania, Rahel the poetess, Naomi Shemer and Berl Katznelson at Kinneret.
A page of Israel’s history
But yet, among the graves of the famous lie the graves of anonymous pioneers, belonging for the most part to the generation of the builders, the generation of those who drained the marshes and broke stones, those who could not face reality and resolved to put an end to it all. Some shot themselves, others swallowed gasoline, there were some who drowned in the Jordan and in the Sea of Galilee; thus they took their own lives. Not one, nor even two, but indeed dozens among the pillars of these “aliyot.”
Now, in the cemetery of Kinneret, we meet the dead, the mad souls of the dreamers, of the visionaries, of those who came to Eretz Israel when everything began with great dreams and who fell like flies; they stumbled against a broken dream, malaria, solitude, and a great disillusionment. In the Zionist epic, this phenomenon was marginalized, even though they were numerous, all too numerous. Compared to the pioneers who entered the pantheon of commemoration, they were not a negligible quantity, but a significant group of pioneers full of motivation and energy who “cracked” and put an end to their lives. Such was their story.
One more headstone
September 2010. More than a hundred years have passed since the second aliyah. The lake offers itself to the eye, an intense blue. Green grass, palm trees, a pleasant breeze soothe the heat. The desolation of the gravestones tells the story of this great drama, of these tragedies.
Muki Tsur, the biographer of the kibbutz movement, has just written a book that recounts the hundred years of the kibbutz, The Suicidal Pioneers. He was the first to investigate and to look into the subject. The facts he recounts are incredible. About ten percent of the pioneers of the second and third aliyah put an end to their lives.
The statistics teach us that the percentage of pioneers among the totality of the new immigrants amounted to sixteen percent. “From the point of view of what they brought, it is they who truly formed the Jewish yishuv in Eretz Israel and traced the way for the country in the making,” writes Boaz Neumann in his book Land and Desire in Early Zionism. “In many ways, the pioneer era constitutes the founding moment of Zionism in Eretz Israel.”
Gur Alroey investigated the phenomenon of suicides and wrote a study on the subject which he titled The Wayward Pioneers: The Question of Suicide in the Period of the Second and Third Aliyot. He delved deeply into the subject and conducted research in the archives of the kibbutzim and the youth movements as well as in the registers of the workers of Hapoel Hatzair and Hashomer. He discovered that 59 pioneers had taken their own lives in those years. It is likely that many others escaped the lists and that the real number is much higher.
Far from the Sea of Galilee, in the Beit Ariela library in Tel Aviv, we leaf through newspapers of the era, full of stories about those who took their own lives. In the workers’ newspaper Kuntras of the year 1920, the writer A. Z. Rabinovitch, better known by the acronym A. Z. R., elaborates an almost subversive thesis: “There were those who took their own lives because of their disturbed sexuality. When the sexual instinct becomes the center of existence, it brings about great suffering, going as far as suicide. Even today, it is a sensitive subject: we are at the last stage of the liberation of woman, and relations between the two sexes have become freer than they were for previous generations; and yet no balance has yet been found.”
However, very few took their own lives because of their sexual frustration. These young people who came up to Eretz Israel alone lived in a group, but in great solitude: languor and despair at not finding love. It was a society jealous of itself, intolerant toward the weak and the different, somewhat chauvinistic, very collective, uncompromising.
In the archives of the kibbutzim of Kinneret, Degania, Ginegar, and of the Lavon Institute, we found dozens of letters from pioneers. Written very small, in a regular hand, legible despite the hundred years gone by. The distress, the lack of hope, the physical and moral pain scream through the letters.
At kibbutz Kinneret, we learned of the love story of Reuven Kribitski and his sweetheart Shoshana Esenstrat. They loved one another in secret and died of exhaustion. Kribitski was 23 years old in August 1920 when he shot himself in the head, disappointed by the direction of the movement, worn out by hard labor. Kribitski came up to Eretz Israel alone, and shortly afterward landed at Degania; there he joined a group of young people.
In the small archives of the kibbutz, directed by the comrade Ziva Leich, are kept the files of the founders. In the cemetery registers, which form a thick book, it is written about Kribitski: “At kibbutz Kinneret, Reuven took part in the lively controversy that bore on the kibbutz’s orientation for the future: enlargement or shrinking and the new form of settlement that was on the agenda: the moshav. Reuven maintained that the experience acquired within the group over all those years must on no account be given up, and that therefore everything must be done to maintain this line. For weeks and months, his friends worried about his tormented appearance. He isolated himself, shut himself away, stayed in bed, hid under the blanket, and would not get up. Together with the controversies, the terrible news of Reuven’s suicide on the lakeshore spread. He was a man of attractive appearance, agreeable company, and pure spirit. One of the most faithful workers of the group. He was 23 years old.
An old piece of paper yellowed by time was also found in the file, an announcement from the newspaper Hapoel Hatzair: “Reuven Kribitski — A new grave in the cemetery adjoining the Sea of Galilee. Yet another faithful and devoted worker lost to the community of Israel’s workers. Took his own life by gunshot. In 1920.”
Four months later, Shoshana went down to the lakeshore and swallowed kerosene. She died a few days later after terrible suffering. She was alone, sick, deeply depressed, crushed by the death of her beloved. In her file in the archives, it is written: “Worked for some time in the plantations of Yehuda as well as at Kfar Saba where she shelled almonds. Shoshana answered the call to come to Kinneret. She appeared to be a conscientious and devoted worker. After the war she devoted herself to working on the improvement of the garden that had been left abandoned. She planted flowers in a row all along the metal fence, built to keep out the mud and the dust. She watered the flowers with love. It was an attempt to create a familiar corner for the community. She also worked for a time at Degania.”
“After the tragic death of her companion Reuven Kribitski, she worked for a time at the kindergarten in Jerusalem. Over the years she very often contracted yellow fever as well as other illnesses. Back at Kinneret, not much time passed before Shoshana died after great suffering. She was 24 years old.”
She was buried just above the lakeshore, beside Kribitski. Everyone knew of their love, even though they had done everything not to show it to their comrades. All the elders of Kinneret, who were born years afterward, can today recount their love story, which could not be fulfilled. Why did their love remain secret? Perhaps they feared that those responsible for the collective would look unkindly on their union, which could have harmed (in their view) their mission at work.
Here is a letter that we found in the archives of Kinneret. Shoshana writes to Reuven on an unknown date. In it she alludes to the difficulties, to the depressing atmosphere within the group, and also to the fact that they must do everything to keep their relationship secret. “On Shabbat, I received your note like fresh air within me. My mood improved. The atmosphere at home is very bad, everyone is sad. It is difficult for me. I decided to leave two days ago; since then I cannot sleep, and since then I have had no respite. In the name of what can I act in such a way? All the same, we all have a responsibility toward this place. For me it is hard, but I see that it is the same for the others. According to what I have been able to hear and verify these last days, Hanna is suffering enormously, Yehudit is suffering, and I am convinced that for many others it is the same. Each must strive to push forward to the very end. From you, I received only a single note; one must in any case be careful with letters, for they are opened along the way.”
In the newspaper Hapoel Hatzair, we find a passage from the book by Yehudit Bratz, the wife of Yosef, one of the leaders of the second aliyah: “On the shore of the Sea of Galilee, in one of the most peaceful corners, are scattered the graves of the workers. A few, present from the beginning, are the only ones to know the story of this place. One has grown so accustomed to it. Just a small jolt and one carries on.”
Myriam needs nothing more
Muki Tsur has read thousands of documents and letters. He establishes a distinction between the second and the third aliyah as regards the state of mind of the pioneers: “The people of the second aliyah came to terms with draconian difficulties. They were the first to go up onto the lands of Galilee and into the Jordan Valley, and above all they were very alone. A great despair reigned among them. The people of the third aliyah came to Israel because of the pogroms. It was an aliyah caused by a terrible catastrophe. Their expectations were too high, and as a result disappointment and even suicides were not rare.” Prof. Tsur added: during the years of the First World War the situation in the land of Israel was threatening and terrible: famine, illness, and lack of work.
Four years before the suicide of Kribitski and Esenstrat, Yehuda the shepherd found the body of Myriam Greenfeld near the lone palm tree on the shore of Lake Kinneret, the very palm tree with the felled crown from the poem by Rahel the poetess. She had swallowed a bottle of vinegar. It was certain death. Greenfeld was sick, starving, alone, wounded by society’s attitude toward her. When she understood that she found herself on a road with no way out, she drank a bottle of vinegar. She was 22 years old.
We turn to Oded Israeli, a sort of explorer of gravestones, to go on the trail of her story. Israeli, 77 years old, a native of Rehovot, retired, a former security guard, has devoted himself in recent years, with his friend Yossef Greenbaum of kibbutz Lehavim, to investigating the new immigrants who died in unnatural ways. Years of physically grueling investigations, discussions with the relatives of the deceased… He establishes a retrospective of this somber past, connecting each detail to the others. A man of infinite subtlety and patience. In his computer, a buried treasure. Hundreds of life stories of all these dead. He has put a part of them online on his website: The Graves Speak.
What drew him toward the dead? “When I was in the army, I was assigned to the Nahal; I crossed the cemetery of Kinneret, and on the graves I saw a whole epic,” he recounts. “About ten years later I find myself at the home of a friend who was writing a book on door locks, and there I remembered the graves at Kinneret. I said to myself that if door locks deserved investigations and books, then the stories of the immigrants of the second and third aliyot were well worth a book too, and I set about it.”
According to his account, the results show that most of the immigrants of the second aliyah were not idealists. Most of them came to Palestine because they did not have the money to go to America. “Some of them cracked, because the dream had been shattered. Another part fell, in the manner of those swept away by the wave of suicides that was raging in Europe at that time. They were schoolboys, literary types who read Nietzsche and Dostoevsky, and were greatly influenced by them. Myriam Greenfeld, for example. She took her own life because she could not bear the affront of having been rejected by the collective. She was a combative woman of honor, until she had no hope left and took her own life.”
Greenfeld came to the land of Israel before the outbreak of the First World War. The situation in the yishuv was bad: a great economic crisis was raging. The pioneers were starving and work was almost nonexistent. She worked as a laborer at Petah Tikva and sewed for the wives of the farmers of her moshav. Then she settled in Galilee. These were difficult days. People moved from one group to another and begged for work. The work consisted essentially of paving roads for the Turkish army, exhausting physical labor for the men.
Greenfeld went up to Kinneret with other workers and asked to be admitted into the group, but there they had affiliated themselves with the party of Berl Katznelson. At Hatzer Kinneret they decided to help the workers who had been rejected by allotting them a parcel of 20 dunams to grow vegetables. The comrade Hanna Meisel had promised to train them in the planting of vegetables.
Greenfeld was transferred to the workers’ kitchen, where she did not get along with the supervisor Sarah Schmulker, the companion of Katznelson. A few months later, torrential rains had fallen. The fields were flooded and the vegetables rotted. Greenfeld fell ill with a lung infection and was sent to Setgera to breathe pure air there. When she recovered, she returned to Kinneret. She waited four days and still did not appear on the work schedule. She began to wash the windows on her own initiative, but after two days she was told that she had been dismissed.
Haya Rotberg, who worked in the kitchen, relates in her notes the chronicle of these dramatic events: “When on the same day Hanna entered the young women’s room to see her, she found her sitting there, pale and tormented, with a sum of money before her on the table. ‘The young women have driven me out of the group.’ She said this with a smiling face, proud and sad. ‘They gave me 50 francs for my wages until I find work. I will give the money back, I do not want charity.’”
Greenfeld set off to look for work elsewhere, then returned to Kinneret a month and a half later. “Hanna was so shocked at the sight of her face that she almost recoiled.” Rotberg goes on to recount: “It was not Myriam, but her skeleton that stood before her, as if her face had emptied to its last drop of blood. Her voice was weak, but she had not lost her kind smile. Since the winter she had grown so thin that her shoes were now too big for her and her legs had the look of two dry sticks. Hanna accompanied her to the dining hall and served her milk in a plate, for there was no glass during the war.
“The next day, when Rivka came into the kitchen to fetch milk and Hanna wished for an extra ration for Myriam, Rivka said: ‘Myriam needs nothing more.’ Down below, four people carried on their shoulders the body of Myriam to the hill of Kerech on the lakeshore and then laid her down on the ground. At the foot of the hill, her thin body was buried. Without ceremony, without eulogy, without her comrades at the bearing of the body, without even erecting a gravestone to her memory.”
They died of malaria and of despair
Professor Alroey says that beyond the physical difficulties, the young people had to face solitude and the pain of being separated from home. One had to bear all these difficulties alone. The pioneer feared that his homesickness for the family home would be interpreted as a weakness, and so he did not share his anguish with his companions. “Leaving the land of Israel was considered a betrayal by the group, a dishonor. Consequently some of them preferred to take their own lives, because suicide was not considered a shame. Just as one died of malaria, of pogroms, of the Arabs, some died of despair. In the society of the pioneers, it was commonly held that it was better to end one’s life than to leave this country.”
In Alroey’s research, we found the story of Moshe Shapira, a young man of 18 from the Migdal group who shot himself in April 1913. In a letter that he wrote, one can read: “We conducted ourselves with brutality toward one another. We did not try to understand the minds of our companions. We did not have the sensitivity necessary not to wound our fellow. Your moral lessons about anything and everything, your incessant remarks make me suffer greatly. These reproaches were made to me deliberately. Forgive me for the trouble I am causing you. May you succeed in your endeavors. Be more like psychologists. Write home that I died of malaria, it will be easier for them all the same. Your friend Moshe.”
Zvi Rosnik, buried at Degania, came to the land of Israel from Kishinev and went up to Galilee with a group of workers. Very little information about him is available. It is known only that he worked well. One night he disappeared and his comrades set off to look for him. When they reached the cemetery they found him lying stretched out on the grave of Moshe Braski, one of the important figures of Degania who had been killed by the Arabs three years earlier. He was 20 years old when he shot himself.
In the moshava of Kinneret, the shepherd Alexander Brakner shot himself in the head in October 1911. In his letter, which we found in the archives, it seems that the fever that afflicted him, the difficulties he experienced in earning his living, and the feeling that his fellow pioneers were straying from the ideological line, caused him great despair. He thirsted for human warmth, for a good book, for a little culture… but he got fever instead.
“Hello to you, my dear,” he wrote to a female friend in Haifa, “I would truly have liked to answer you sooner, but I was sick. Now I am better, after months of great suffering. I am weakened. What sadness takes hold of me now. I no longer hum my little tune, the days of gaiety and joy are far from me, the joy of living as well as the enthusiasm of the early years have left me. Here I am far from books and newspapers like a savage on a distant island.”
In the cemetery of Degania we also saw the gravestone of Zeev Vakskretzk, a charismatic ideologue who led the group, who built Degania C, which later became kibbutz Ginegar. In the group a split occurred. Vakskretzk wrote letters that expressed his despair and his depression. In 1922, when he was thirty years old, he shot himself.
Back at the cemetery of Kinneret, we went to Pardes Hanna, to the home of the retired veterinarian Dr. Uri Spector, son of the legendary Meir Spector, a mythical security agent, a man of Hashomer, a courageous man of many exploits. Spector the father took as his wife Fasiah Abramzon, and they lived at Kfar Giladi. She gave him two boys, raised them alone while he was away on security missions. The group looked unkindly on her, because Fasiah, instead of devoting herself to the well-being of the group, took care of her children.
Until her marriage, she was regarded as someone strong, a djadait, even a feminist. She worked at kibbutz Merhavia and fought for the equality of women at work. The moment Fasiah gave birth to her first child, her comrades boycotted her. They did not visit her even once after the birth, and did not answer her letters. The work of motherhood was in their eyes like an act of betrayal. In a letter she wrote to her husband Meir, she describes her resentment: “Apparently I cannot live like the others. The fact that I think child, that I think work… how I would have liked the two to be compatible. But I did not think I would meet with such difficulties.”
In 1922, when she was sick and felt alone and depressed, she shot herself in the head with her husband’s weapon. She was 28 years old. Beside her body in the tent at Kfar Giladi, a little note was found: “I no longer have any taste for living, I am not afraid to die.”
Uri Spector is the son that Meir Spector had with his second wife. Uri bears the first name of the son that Meir had with his first wife, Fasiah — a child who died six months after his mother’s suicide.
“It was not accepted at the time to be a stay-at-home mother. A woman had to work,” he said.
“Not easy to bear the weight of life”
The rows of the graves of those who took their own lives grew longer. The leaders of the yishuv were worried by the ease with which the pioneers accepted this phenomenon. In the workers’ newspaper (Kuntras) of the year 1923, we read an unsigned article that denounces this phenomenon and society’s attitude toward it: “The cases of suicide that have taken place among us of late have been like a plague. What sense is there in announcing a death publicly, that ‘they have left life,’ as if they had passed blithely from one room to another? And also, who publishes the announcement of the burial, why do they come? What is the meaning of a burial full of people after the death of two young people who could have lived together and who chose death? What is the good of it? It is not easy to bear the weight of life. It is the duty of each and every one to help others bear the weight of life and to help them not to let themselves die.”
Ernst Polack, who came up to Israel from the city of Salzburg (Austria) in 1919, changed his name to Nathan Aher. He rests near the graves of Kribitski and Esenstrat at Kinneret. His family owned Mozart’s house. His father Ludwig, of the second generation of assimilated Jews in the Austro-Hungarian empire, was a high official in the service of the municipality and a friend of the writer Stefan Zweig. The father destined his son for the career of a doctor. Ernst did not bend to his will. He discovered in himself an attraction to the intellectual world, spent most of his time reading Schopenhauer, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and others. He preached modesty with enthusiasm, the purity of body and soul as well as abstinence before marriage.
So it was until his encounter with Dora Schwartz, an Austrian Jewish woman, married and mother of two boys, a convinced Zionist. She organized a small group of young people of which Polack was part and steeped them in Zionism. Thus a radical change came about in him, and a month before the final examinations of the baccalaureate, he stopped his studies and decided to go up to the land of Israel. He was 19 years old.
On 24 February 1920, he arrived in Jaffa, and wrote: “Here everything is in bloom and the air is fragrant and intoxicating!!! The people are wonderful.”
After a few days he was transferred, at his request, by the labor office to the experimental farm of Bitania Tahtit, above Kinneret, and he lived there with three other workers in one room. The work was exhausting and the pay was low. A wave of cold swept over the country, the Bedouins were attacking Jewish settlement areas, but Polack — now Aher — was still determined and full of ardor. “We at Bitania are safer than in any country of Europe, since here there is nothing to take and the bandits know it.”
On the hill of the upper part of Bitania, the group Hashomer Hatzair was settled in a few tents, whose aspiration was to create a new man in a new society, cleaner, more idealistic, in a new country. This group was led by Meir Yaari, the oldest of the group, who was about to turn 24. Aher left the upper part of Bitania for the lower part. The atmosphere was electric and the tension terrible. Private life was subjected to unbearable intrusions and to a harassment that bordered on voyeurism. Aher’s state of mind kept worsening. The letters he sent home had become letters of distress and requests for financial help. “He was preoccupied because he was not capable of working in difficult conditions, but he was nonetheless not ready to give up and return home,” wrote Oded Israeli about him.
At the end of the summer, malaria struck him — that is what he wrote to his parents — and he was hospitalized at the hospital in Safed. Depressed, alone, he wrote a farewell letter and shot himself. “Sooner or later, everyone ends up betraying themselves. They deceived me,” he wrote. “I no longer see either hope or reason to be in such a world.” He was 19 years old.
His grave is a work of art by the artist Arie Ellouil that resembles an expressionist cry: broken wings, lightning bolts, a night-light, and a sacrificial rooster mingled with a hollow and tortured face, with haggard eyes, bearing the horns of the devil. Very different from those of the people who died in the same era.
Numerous are the conjectures about the death of Aher. Some thought he was part of a sect. Others said that the extreme pressures of the group and the “brainwashing” ended up making him lose his reason. Oded Israeli searched among the documents that Aher left behind him and found a letter written to his parents in which he asked them to send him a sum of money quickly because he “needed to be treated with the medication Salbarazon 606, of which social security reimbursed only a small part.”
Israeli checked the medication with a specialist doctor who indicated that it was used to treat syphilis, fairly widespread at the time. At Tiberias there were quite a few prostitutes, and the pioneers frequented them from time to time to unwind. “To learn that one had syphilis was like receiving very bad news,” says Israeli. “It is an illness that brought about serious disorders in the sick, including madness.”
Thus, the pioneers did not all take their own lives out of despair and the malevolence of their comrades. Some were stricken with syphilis and went mad.
Guideon Meron and Oded Chalom, “Etsev al yam Kinneret,” Yedioth Ahronoth (Shabbat supplement), 24/09/2010
Translated from the Hebrew by Marc, Julien, and David Maslowski.