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4 Manya Wilbushewitz-Shohat and the Winding Road to Sejera Shulamit Reinharz In 1907 on the Sejera training farm in the Lower Galilee, Manya Wilbushewitz implemented a socio-economic plan on which she had been working for several years.* Her goal was to organize a group of Jewish workers in a way that would enable them to support themselves in agricultural labor, without exploiting anyone and without being dependent on charity. Her hope was that if her project succeeded, it could become a model for other groups of J ews in Palestine and eventually a model for large-scale settlement and employment. Whether or not her group at Sejera actually achieved that goal is a matter of continuous debate (see Frankel, 1981; Near, 1983). The purpose of this chapter, however, is to focus on the origins ofher ideas and the winding road she took to put them into practice with the men and women at Sejera. Manya Wilbushewitz was born in 1880 on an estate in Western Russia, in an area called Lososna, close to the town of Grodno. Manya's father was wealthy, deeply religious, and unlike many of *For help in preparing this chapter, I would like to thank my husband, Jehuda Reinharz, as well as the members of my feminist research methodology group, Dina Abramovitz, Deborah Bernstein, Ruth Grushka, Michael Hermann, Thelma Nason, Henry Near, Moshe Mishkinsky, Joanne Seiden, and Zohar Wilbush. 1 would also like to thank Pergamon Press Ltd. for permission to reprint sections of my article, "Toward a Model of Female Political Action: The Case of Manya Shohat, Founder of the First Kibbutz", Women's Studies International Forum, 1984, Vol. 7, No. 4, pp. 275-287. The translation from Hebrew to English is my own. My next project on Manya Shohat is an edited collection of her correspondence and speeches. This will appear first in Hebrew (Yad Ben-Zvi) and is a joint endeavor with my husband. 95 96 Shulamit Reinharz his contemporaries, interested in technology. His land on the banks of the Neiman River included a grain mill that employed scores of peasants. Manya's mother was not interested in religion. She had received a secular education and fought her husband's plan to have their sons educated as rabbis. Manya was the eighth child of this conflictual marriage. None of her older brothers and sisters were to remain on the estate in roles intended by either parent. Instead, each pursued an ideological path ranging from joining the terrorist Social Revolutionaries, becoming a Tolstoyan peasant, emigrating as a farmer to Palestine with the Hibbat Zion, or obtaining a superior technical education and becoming an engineer in Palestine. Several eventually committed suicide when their feminist, romantic, or social ideals disappointed them. Manya's family mirrored the contradictions of Jewish life in late nineteenth century Russia. At the same time as restrictions on Jewish occupation, education and travel were lifted allowing for a certain amount of assimilation into both the educated and revolutionary Gentile groups, Jews also experienced a backlash of antisemitism which provoked religious retrenchment, emigration, Zionism and socialism. In her childhood, Manya first was profoundly religious and then equally committed to Russian peasants. At the age of fifteen she ran away to the city of Minsk to become an industrial laborer. There in her brother Gedaliahu's factory, she organized a strike of the five hundred workers against him, protesting the excessively long work day. This was to become the first of her numerous efforts to improve the working conditions of industrial and agricultural laborers. In Minsk many young Jews, similar to Manya, had converged. Their first-hand confrontation with class exploitation and political oppression led them to form divergent political groups. Among the most important was the Bund, founded in 1897, whose purpose was to pursue a revolutionary solution to the oppression of Jewish workers, in conjunction with the Russian socialist revolutionary movement- vis-a-vis both the Czar and the bourgeoisie. Competing with the Bund was the Poalei Zion, or socialist Zionists, who advocated gradual emigration to Palestine, while also trying to improve the economic condition of Jews still in Russia. A third set of groups was the terrorist Social Democrats and Socialist Revolutionaries who attempted to overthrow the Czar. Finally, the Hibbat Zion groups believed in immediate settlement in Palestine, but did not have a socialist orientation. Manya befriended people in all of these groups and absorbed The Winding Road to Sejera 97 aspects of each ideology. The action she...

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