Word: kibbutz
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...founder of Israel's first kibbutz, or communal settlement, Shmuel Dayan* was often in an exultant mood. His enthusiasm reflected the spirit of other Utopian experiments-virtually all of which failed. Now, in Israel's 25th year, the conditions that sustained the kibbutz in its early days have changed, and some Israelis are questioning whether their experiment can last...
MARK SLAVIN, 18, a promising wrestler, had emigrated from Russia only last May. Slavin had demonstrated in front of the KGB (secret police) headquarters in Minsk for the Jews' right to leave the Soviet Union. In Israel, he began studying Hebrew at a kibbutz near Tel Aviv...
Labor relations on the kibbutz sound like a factory manager's version of The Impossible Dream. The factories pay no wages to kibbutz members, though they deposit their profits in the treasury that maintains the collective farm. The workers nevertheless labor hard-kibbutz factories raised their productivity an imposing 11% last year -and none has ever gone on strike. The kibbutz plants consequently keep prices extremely low: high school and college lab equipment is sold in the U.S. at 20% below the price charged by American companies, and plastic flushing systems for toilets are sold in Africa...
...successful industrial operations is Sefen, a joint venture owned equally by seven kibbutzim and Ampal, the foreign-investment arm of the Israel Federation of Labor. Sefen's first factory, built in 1952 on the torrid Jordan Valley floor south of the Sea of Galilee, converted waste from a kibbutz plywood factory into insulator board. When Israel's building boom began in 1953, Sefen switched to making construction board. Now Sefen is a four-factory operation that last year earned a profit of $725,000 on revenues of over $11 million. It produces adhesives, scientific radiation equipment and laminates...
Dream Team. Most other kibbutz industrial ventures are considerably smaller. Kfar Ruppin, for example, has 20 workers-v. 450 at Sefen-and makes only one family of products, laboratory equipment for teaching physics. In addition, most factories are not fully mechanized: they require teams of laborers to spend long hours doing simple tasks by hand. To reduce the monotony, workers in a plastics plant at Kibbutz Ma'Agan Michael rotate jobs every two hours...