If You're Secular, Do You Have to Be Non-Accomodating?

'Pioneers' legacy being sullied'

By Eli Ashkenazi

An ultra-Orthodox couple entered the Beit Gordon museum in Kibbutz Degania A yesterday to see an exhibit of the "People of the Second Aliya." When Amalia Ilan, director of the museum and member of the kibbutz, offered to play some of the songs that are part of the exhibit, the Haredi couple asked her not to.

"They were concerned that the voice of a singing woman would be heard," Ilan says. "Of course, I respected their wish, but it emphasized for me the tension between secular and religious culture."

This cultural tension emerged yesterday afternoon in another part of Degania A: "the Pioneer's courtyard." After 96 years of existence, a synagogue was inaugurated in the kibbutz yesterday, a fact which, on its own, leaves no one particularly excited. But its location, in "the Pioneer's courtyard," a symbol of the entire Kibbutz enterprise and its most secular representation, is rubbing quite a few people wrong way.

Ruti Shadmon, a member at the nearby Ashdot Ya'akov kibbutz, and the director of the museum there, describes this development as "a distortion of history." This view is shared by residents of some of the other kibbutzim along Lake Kinneret. At the secretariat of Degania A they say that "there was no debate over the question of establishing a synagogue."

Shai Shoshani, kibbutz secretary, trying to assuage those concerned says that "this is not going to be a Shas-style synagogue."

Ilan is not convinced. "A synagogue here counters the entire outlook of the Degania pioneers and the essence of the Second Aliyah. After all, those people all came from religious homes but chose not to build a synagogue here. This is a blatant blow to everything they believed in," she says.

"The equality between the sexes, the songs and the dances were part of the life experience of the pioneers," Ilan says. "It is more appropriate to set up a music room or a library on this site, not a synagogue."

"To me this is absurd," Shadmon says. "The pioneers that established this kibbutz turned their backs on religion and prayer and turned to the religion of labor. There will be a distortion of history at the site ? the visitors will think that the pioneers set up a synagogue at the site."

"Muki Tzur said that it's like putting a plow in a synagogue," Shadmon says referring to another kibbutz member, "but I think it's like putting a combine in a synagogue. This is a misrepresentation of history."

"The pioneers held high the flag of secularism, and they still had a very emotional link to the [Jewish] traditions, the Bible and the holidays of Israel, but not to prayer in synagogue," Shadmon says.

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