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FIFTY YEARS OF JEWISH YOUTH SELF-MANAGEMENT
Launch of
Hashomer Hatzair: Fifty Years of Movement Life Melbourne 1953-2003
3pm, Sunday September 12 – Grant Street Theatre,
Victorian College of the Arts, 234 St Kilda Road.
The latest publication of the St Kilda Historical Society, Hashomer Hatzair: Fifty Years of Movement Life Melbourne 1953-2003 by Becky Aizen, is an account of Melbourne’s most left-wing Jewish youth movement.
It will be launched at 3pm, Sunday September 12 at Grant Street Theatre by Karen Milgrom, herself a member of ‘Hashy’, as it is affectionately known, from 1964-73. Other alumni include broadcaster and arts administrator, Louise Adler, senior Victorian public servant Yehuda Blacher, ABC presenter Jon Faine, writer Renata Singer, president of the St Kilda Historical Society, Meyer Eidelson and Gideon Obarzanek, founder and artistic director of Chunky Move.
Hashomer Hatzair or the Young Guard began in Poland in 1913 as a youth movement that embraced nationalism, secular Jewish culture, socialist thought, self-reliance and love of song, dance and nature. The movement’s motto – ‘chazak ve’ematz’ (‘truth and courage’) – was put to the test during the Holocaust when members led resistance to the Nazis. Beth Aniekewicz, Hashomer’s meeting hall on the corner of Inkerman and Raglan Street, St Kilda takes its name from Mordechai Anielewicz, a Hashomer member who led the Warsaw ghetto uprising in 1943.
Some members fled anti-Semitism to Israel where they helped to pioneer kibbutzim (collective settlements). Others carried the movement worldwide through emigration. In Melbourne, Hashomer Hatzair was established in 1953. According to author Becky Aizen, Hashomer has occupied an unusual position – maginalised by the Zionists for being too extremist and leftist, and by socialists for being too Zionist.
Many of the early members, Aizen says, felt disenfranchised from school and the broader Australian community – for “their ‘ethnic’ sandwiches in the schoolyard, their mostly older parents’ heavy European accents, their inability to be freckled snub-nosed Weetbix kids.”
Meyer Eidelson says he received great benefits from belonging to Hashomer and still retains many friendships – and values- from that time.
“We had the good luck to belong to an organisation devoted to youth and managed almost entirely by youth, still a model for self-organisation in 2004. The movement trusted us to look after others and we returned that confidence with passion and commitment. We experienced secular Jewish culture expressed in folk dance, singing and story-telling. We learned the joys of intellectual debate or sicha. We camped in the bush, girls and boys sharing the same tents. We experienced idealism based on dreams of internationalism,” he said.
Renata Singer joined Hashomer in the mid-fifties when she was eight or nine. Prior to that, she’d been a member of another Jewish youth organisation called Skif but she didn’t like it.
“In Skif, you were told what to do all the time. It was fuddy-duddy and boring. But I took to Hashomer like a duck to water. The leaders were in the last couple of years at school. At eighteen, you either went to Israel to join a Hashomer kibbutz – what was called making aliya – or you left. It was such great fun with the camps, the singing, the discussions, all the events.
“We went to Shepparton to learn how pick oranges so we’d be prepared when we went to Israel – though I never went to Israel as I never became a Zionist. I never heard one anti-Arab word in Hashy. It was one of the great experiences of my childhood. Over thirty years later, my youngest daughter asked if she could go and she loved it too. It was one of the few places where socialism was still talked about,” she said.
The battles of the sixties over the Vietnam War, conscription, feminism and libertarianism; helped make Hashomer a less insular organisation. It has demonstrated continued support for Israel at several rallies since the seventies (such as one outside the National Theatre in St Kilda during the Gulf War in 1991) though it also calls for the establishment of an independent Palestinian state and better relations between Jews and Palestinians in Melbourne, “incendiary gestures for a largely pro-Israel-regardless-of-anything community,” according to Aizen.
In the eighties, Hashomer joined anti-Nazi rallies in Brunswick. Now it campaigns for reconciliation, refugees and environmental issues. For Aizen, Hashomer remains:
“… a unique space, one where young people – relatively powerless in the public sphere … – are autonomous; it is they who plan meetings, make critical financial/ideological/ administrative/cultural decisions; it is they who type up the minutes, print out the flyers, argue about politics, and walk about as if the weight of the world were on their collective shoulders. It is a space where males and females grow up together and thus accept the changes that take place to each other’s minds and bodies as natural. It is a space where debate is encouraged and critical thought revered. It is a space where no one is ever told, ‘You are too young’.”
Hashomer Hatzair runs to 50 pages and sells for $15 a copy. The St Kilda Historical Society is supported by an annual service agreement from the City of Port Phillip’s cultural development fund. Also on sale at the launch will be a ‘Fifty Years’ commemorative CD. For more information, go to: www.hashy.org.au
For further information, ring Sivan Barak on 9504 1792 or Ofer Doron at Beth Weizman on 9272 5555
Enquiries:
Carmel Shute
Media Officer
Tel: 9209 6163 Fax: 9525 4640
Mobile: 0412 569 356
Council webpage: www.portphillip.vic.gov.au
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