Blackwell Reference Online

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Manya Shochat was a Russian Jewish activist, known as “mother of the kibbutz movement” in acknowledgment of her role in the early period of Jewish communal experimentation in Palestine. Born in Belarus in 1879 to middle-class Russian Jewish parents, Shochat (née Wilbushevitz) became involved in revolutionary circles at a young age. When police crackdowns and a period of imprisonment in 1899 led her to abandon her early confidence in non-violent union activity and proletarian education, she became a gun smuggler and in 1903 was involved in a plot to assassinate the Russian minister of the interior. In despair following the Kishinev pogroms and the collapse of the Jewish Independent Labor Party in 1903, Shochat visited Palestine and thereafter her attention turned from revolution in Russia to Jewish immigration and collective agricultural settlement in the Land of Israel. In 1907 she helped establish the cooperative farm at Sejera, a precursor of the kibbutz, and there she spearheaded the struggle for gender equality that ultimately laid the groundwork for modern Israeli feminism. Alongside future husband Yisrael Shochat she was involved in founding the Jewish self-defense organization HaShomer (The Guard) in 1908, and after a period of exile in Turkey during World War I she became active in the Gedud HaAvoda (Labor Brigade), an anarchosyndicalist communal labor force that subsequently ... log in or subscribe to read full text