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Following is an excerpt from an article written in the Australian Jewish Historical Society
Journal (Nov 2006) entitled Hachshara: An Australian ‘Kibbutz’ by Bill Metcalf

Hachshara at Springvale

The first record found of a group of young Jewish Australians wanting to establish ‘collective
living, if possible on the land’ in Australia is in a letter dated 16 June 1944. To this youthful, and
perhaps naïve, Australian enthusiasm, the Habonim Office in Palestine responded with guidelines
pointing out that ‘Hachshara’, as it was already
known throughout Europe and North America,
should promote four ends:

1) Collective living;
2) Independence and responsibility;
3) Manual labour; and
4) Agriculture and Nature.

Before the end of November 1944, these would-be
Australian kibbutzniks, mainly centred in
Melbourne, had ‘taken the concrete step of pooling all money, including bank money’. They located
a 3.5 hectare (8.5 acre) chicken farm on the north side of Heatherton Road, just west of
Springvale Road, on the eastern edge of Melbourne, and inspected this land on 29 April 1945. It
had a farmhouse and chicken sheds but was run-down and unproductive. The youth group tried
but failed to gain financial support from the Jewish Agency in Jerusalem, so instead raised
finance from two local supporters, Joseph Yoffe and Yehuda Berkon, and, with a sizeable loan
from Union Bank, purchased the land for £2600, with an additional £400 for livestock and
equipment. The property was registered in the names of Yehuda Berkon, Joseph Yoffe and David
Tabor. The first three communards, Henry Urbach, Arthur Weisinger and Max Leffelholz, moved
in on 21 May 1945, and were soon joined by Michael Porter. Hermann Stern was hired to direct
the farm and its training activities.

…Members used the farm house as a communal cooking and
meeting place, and initially the boys slept in the house and
the girls slept in what had been the chicken-incubator
shed. Eva Urbach (nee Nothmann) recalls the first year of
Hachshara; ‘the baby chicks were gone but they left
behind their fleas! Lots and lots of fleas … and when I
went home occasionally for a bath, the water surface was
completely covered with fleas’. Needing the incubator-
shed for other purposes, they eventually erected an unlined fibro hut, about six metres square,
as a dormitory. Only four to five people could comfortably live there at a time although many
young Jews came out from Melbourne for working-bees, parties and meetings.

By the end of 1945, five young men and four young women were crammed into this inadequate
space with scarcely enough work to do. Eva Urbach remembers that ideological discussions were
intense. After she and Henry married in March 1946, they went for a week’s honeymoon, only to
receive an urgent message from their fellow communards.

They had held a meeting at which it was decided that honeymoons were “un-chalutzic” [too
bourgeois] and that we should return immediately. And we did! Such a childish
interpretation of kibbutz ideals seems funny now but it was dead serious to us at the
time.’