Page 18 - Issue 23

Day. Pharaoh was Hitler and there was great weeping
during the Seder. Later, with the institutionalization of
Holocaust Remembrance Day, and then the
establishment of Independence Day, those aspects were
removed from the Haggadah," Tzur said.

Tzur also explains that due to the Holocaust, many of
the kibbutz members became orphans, or were left with
small families. Refugees from the same shtetls that
kibbutz members came from would join the seders in
the kibbutzim, in order to be together in an event that
became a kind of memorial day.

"One or two people would come to a kibbutz where
there was someone who came from their old shtetl, and
that was their extended family," he said.

A similar phenomenon existed around the
establishment of the state – in the first years of the
state, Seder night functioned as a kind of independence
day.

The work of Yehuda Sharet

In the Hashomer Hatzair, there was one Haggadah for
all the kibbutzim of the movement. The other kibbutz
movements had a variety of versions, but the best
known of which was the Haggadah created by Yehuda
Sharet, first published in 1951.

Yehuda Sharet, brother of Moshe Sharet, the second
prime minister of Israel, was a violinist, composer and
musician, and member of kibbutz Ein Harod and Yagur.