Page 41 - Kol Bogrei Habonim - Winter 20

friends got together and formed the ‘Glasgow The settlement/courtyard was to be known as
Agudas Olei Zion’. Hatzar Merhavia (meaning wide open space),
and was designed by the Jewish German
They began saving and collecting money to
help establish a collective agricultural architect, Alexander Baerwald, in the
settlement in Palestine. At the end of that German farmstead style with 400 dunams
year, they held a public meeting and, to their being set aside for the Glasgow contingent.
amazement, twelve families transformed the
idea into a reality by signing up and
committing to go to Palestine.
In 1910, Prof. Franz Oppenheimer, a German
socialist and economist, on hearing about the
group, went to Glasgow to meet them.

He was so impressed by their commitment
that he introduced them to his scheme for an In November 1911, a year after Merhavia was
agricultural communal settlement, known as first established, the group of four young
a Co-operazia, an idea he had proposed to pioneers and their families arrived there from
Herzl in 1904, in which he saw the Glasgow with all their worldly possessions.
embodiment of Herzl’s book, “Altneuland” They were a bedraggled group of nineteen,
(“The Old New Land”). comprising four young men, their wives and
children.
This was the first such initiative by a western
Jewish community, and it was greeted The Jezreel Valley was desolate – the land
enthusiastically by the Zionist Organisation was inhospitable and malaria-ridden. There
and Dr Arthur Rupin, their representative, was no accommodation for the pioneering
who was based in Jaffa. families, and they had to live beside the well,
in abandoned mud-brick huts with straw-mat
Each member of the group undertook to raise roofs, freezing in the winter and with very
£6, annually, to be sent to Rupin and invested high temperatures in the summer. Conditions
with the Jewish Colonial Trust, to buy land were harsh.
and agricultural equipment, and to build
homes.

The area/site chosen for the new agricultural
settlement was near the village of el-Fuhle, at
the foot of biblical Givat HaMoreh in the
Jezreel Valley, on land which had just been
acquired by Yehoshua Hankin, in 1910, from
the Sursuk family in Beirut.

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