KADDISHEL
A Life Reborn
The Beginnings of a Normal Life The Dror group was steadily preparing to establish a new settle- ment, and as soon as the war ended and the Palmach disbanded, they returned to Kibbutz Yagur and stepped up their preparations. They were now called Yagur Hachshara. Usually, different groups merged to create a kibbutz, and the Dror group was no exception. “The main things that occupied us were unification of the group itself and unification with another group that would fit us,” Aharon wrote in the July 18, 1948 Yagur Journal article. “The kibbutz secretary advised us to unite with Hevrat HaNo’ar of Kibbutz Beit Oren. A delegation went to Beit Oren to get to know the people and to study the situation. When they came back and gave a report, an argument erupted between those who were in favor of the unification and those who were against it.” Overcoming the cultural gaps between those from Yagur and those from Kibbutz Beit Oren was not easy. While the Yagur members were Holocaust survivors from Eastern Europe, their Beit Oren neighbors had fled Syria. “We were standing in front of our first crucial challenge,” Aharon wrote, “but finally, what was in common overcame what separated us. We had one ideal, one goal, and one wish, and it overcame the differences of habits and character.” In November 1949, the Yagur and Beit Oren groups, joined by another group of young people from Kibbutz Ginnosar on the shore of Lake Kinneret, founded Mash’abei Sadeh. It was a barren place, deep in the Negev desert, with no houses or out-buildings and no reliable water supply. The week before they moved to the Negev, Aharon’s roommate, Shimshon Klakstein, died. Ezra Sherman said, “I went back to Yagur for a couple of months. By the end of 1949 or beginning of 1950, almost everyone in our group got together with another group and went to create Mash’abei Sadeh. We got there in winter, and we had nothing. At first, we lived in tents, then we put up a couple of shacks and built
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