Hulda, Israel

Hulda is situated in central Israel along the historic Jaffa–Jerusalem road, in the Shephelah region at the foothills of the Judean lowlands.[8][1] The kibbutz is administered under the Gezer Regional Council.[2] Its position at a crossroads between the coastal plain and Jerusalem made it a natural waypoint, a role that proved decisive during the 1948 War of Independence.[1][9]

The modern history of Hulda begins with a land transaction in the early twentieth century. In 1905, the company Geula ("Redemption") purchased approximately 500 acres from Arab residents of Hulda village, intending to subdivide the land for sale to Jewish newcomers; the land was described as barren after extensive grazing, and its distance from the nearest town made attracting buyers difficult.[10] The National Library of Israel records that the Zionist Federation formally decided to purchase the land of Hulda in 1905.[11]

Sources give conflicting dates for the forest's beginnings. The Central Zionist Archives dates its planting to 1904, after Theodor Herzl's death, as part of a Jewish National Fund effort supported by donations from Jews around the world.[3] Ynet dates the beginning of planting to 1907, while The Times of Israel places the JNF decision to plant a memorial forest at Hulda in 1908.[1][10] These accounts present an unresolved chronology and may refer to different stages of acquisition, planning, and physical planting.

German agronomist Louis Barish, also recorded as Louis Brisch, took charge of the farm in 1909. Of roughly 12,000 olive seedlings, only about 3,000 took root in the unfamiliar soil.[12] Planting subsequently expanded to almonds, pines, cypresses, and carobs, with pines becoming prominent because they grew successfully in the local conditions.[3][1]

In 1909, the site also became an agricultural training farm, or hachshara, for new immigrants. It was built as a closed courtyard modeled on the farm at Kinneret, with the farm director's residence at the center.[11] The walled courtyard housed stables, chicken coops, a cowshed, storerooms, a laundry, a guardhouse, workers' quarters, and a water reservoir. The manager lived on the upper floor of the stone residence, while inexperienced immigrant workers were housed in a crowded basement.[10][12] Agronomist Yitzhak Wilkansky, later known as Yitzhak Elazari-Volcani, developed the site into a teaching farm with orchards, woodland, field crops, livestock, and small-scale agricultural industry.[1][12]

After the olive plantings failed, greater emphasis was placed on pines and other species suited to the soil.[3][1] A grove was added in 1920 in memory of the defenders of Tel Hai.[13] An early account by Henrietta Szold noted that tourists could travel to Lydda and drive to Hulda to see what she called the "Herzl Forest of olive-trees" and the National Fund's nurseries. She estimated that between 18,000 and 20,000 tourists visited Palestine in the spring of 1914.[8] Herzl's name was commemorated in forests at both Ben Shemen and Hulda, and the Hulda forest became known as the Herzl Forest.[11][14]

In a May 1931 letter, pioneer Michael Mesing described the Herzl Forest as 600 dunams, threaded by avenues of pine, cypress, and palm trees. He named one route "Love Avenue," running from Herzl House through the forest toward the Ayalon Valley, and another "Desperation Avenue," which passed beside an olive plantation toward the grave of Efraim Zitsik.[15]

The First World War severely disrupted Hulda's farm and its workers, and the Central Zionist Archives records that the conflict left the enterprise badly damaged.[3] A locust invasion devastated the plantations, and most workers left or were expelled; the farm was subsequently abandoned.[1][12] After the armistice, pioneering groups returned to restore the forest and resume training. Their slogan captured the ambition of the era: "We will afforest the mountain, bring it to life, and settle it."[12] Rotating groups of pioneers used the farm for professional training in agriculture and forestry during the 1920s.[3] Szold's earlier account had characterized Hulda as one of the Jewish National Fund's estates leased to cooperative workingmen's associations, placing it alongside Ben Shemen on the Jaffa–Jerusalem road.[8]

The August 1929 disturbances brought violence directly to Hulda's isolated farm. Arab attackers from the surrounding area encircled the compound and set its threshing floor alight, forcing the defenders to retreat toward Herzl House.[12] Ephraim Chizik, also rendered Chisik or Chichick, had traveled from the Galilee to help defend Hulda and was killed while moving with the defenders toward the house.[12] His sister Sarah had previously fallen defending Tel Hai, and the siblings were later commemorated together at Hulda.[3]

British forces subsequently compelled the defenders to evacuate. The farm was abandoned for approximately two years before settlement resumed.[12] The National Library of Israel additionally records that Haganah reinforcements fought alongside the settlers before British police evacuated the Jewish defenders after several hours.[11]

The North American Zionist student movement Avukah also took note of Hulda's plight. After the devastation, Avukah decided to launch a campaign to rehabilitate the kibbutz, a decision made amid the organization's internal debates about cultural engagement and practical work connected to Palestine.[16]

Reconstruction came through the Gordonia youth movement. At the end of 1929, young men and women from Poland, Galicia, and Latvia arrived in Palestine and initially settled in Hadera.[11] Michael Mesing was among the first members of this Gordonia company to arrive in 1929. After a year in Hadera, the Jewish Agency offered the group the task of moving to Hulda to rebuild its ruins, and Mesing was among the first volunteers.[15] A group of twelve young men and women came to Hulda first and worked the land for more than a year.[11]

In 1931, the Zionist Congress encouraged Hulda's permanent re-establishment, and a Gordonia group settled in the farm buildings and began restoring the site.[13] The group in Hadera, which the National Library of Israel says had grown to approximately forty members, came to found Gordonia Alef.[11] A later memorial account described Hulda as the first Gordonia kibbutz in Israel.[15]

A letter Mesing wrote in May 1931 records that the group had received the farm, forest, and olive grove on a five-year lease. He described the settlement as surrounded by Arab villages and wrote of a duty to maintain friendly relations with its neighbors.[15] Early hardship was severe: the settlers tried to dig a well, but the drill struck rock, while water and basic necessities remained scarce.[15]

The Gordonia pioneers restored Herzl House, rebuilt the courtyard, and replanted trees.[12] By 1934, the settlement had recorded its first child.[11]

A typhus outbreak struck Hulda in 1935, during the Hebrew month of Sivan 5695. More than forty of the community's approximately eighty members were hospitalized. An expert committee attributed the illness to contaminated water from a nearby well, while another account also identified malnutrition as a contributing factor.[15] The National Library of Israel records four member deaths from the outbreak.[11] The JewishGen memorial account repeatedly refers to three deaths—Meir Rosner, Michael Mesing, and Yitzchak Lerer—but later names Hadassa Bletman and a visitor named Litvak as additional people who died in connection with the outbreak, leaving its own accounting unclear.[15]

Security worsened with the outbreak of Arab hostilities in 1936. Hulda was attacked during the 1936–1939 disturbances.[13] After an attack, young children were evacuated to Kibbutz Naan; the settlement's position within the forest and amid Arab villages made it particularly exposed.[11] Four kibbutz members were killed by local Arabs while traveling to or from Hulda before the establishment of Israel.[11]

Hulda was formally recognized as a Jewish settlement in 1937, and the cornerstone of a new site was laid on June 22, 1937, one kilometer west of the forest.[11] Architect Richard Kauffmann conceived the kibbutz plan that year, separating industrial and residential areas and placing public buildings at the community's center.[5] The new settlement was built with family homes, public buildings, agricultural structures, and a water line connected to a water tower. Members began moving there in 1938, and the full transition took three years.[11]

In October 1943, hundreds of British soldiers and police surrounded the kibbutz and searched for weapons. Weapons were found, and seven members were arrested, tried in Jerusalem, and sentenced to terms of two to six years; they were released only after the end of the Second World War.[11] Another account likewise records a major British search for Haganah weapons at Hulda in 1943.[13] The old farm also served as a Haganah training center during the 1940s.[1]

Hulda's role in the 1948 War of Independence was strategically important. The main route linking Jerusalem to the coast ran westward through Sha'ar ha-Gay, or Bab el-Wad, to Kibbutz Hulda and onward toward Tel Aviv and the coastal plain. When Arab forces blocked this road in March 1948, Jewish Jerusalem was cut off from supplies of food, equipment, medical stores, weapons, and ammunition.[9] Hulda became a principal departure and assembly point for military forces and convoys attempting to relieve the besieged city.[11][1]

On June 1, 1948, Haganah intelligence head Yitzhak Levi assembled the first convoy to use the Burma Road, an alternative route that bypassed the Arab forces, at Kibbutz Hulda.[4] The convoy comprised seventeen vehicles carrying thirty Czech machine guns, one hundred three-inch mortar shells, food, and other supplies.[4] The road was barely passable at first, with vehicles needing to be pushed through narrow and steep sections. It was officially completed on June 14, and the volume of supplies moved along it grew from twelve tons a night in early June to one hundred tons a night by the end of the month.[4] The siege was partially lifted in July.[9]

The Egyptian Air Force bombed the kibbutz for twelve days in May 1948.[11] Two members were killed, and the babies' nursery was destroyed. Women and children were evacuated to Tel Aviv for four months while buildings were repaired or rebuilt.[11] A memorial account states that kibbutz member Asher Halpern was killed after Egyptian shelling set an equipment shed on fire and he ran toward it to save the machinery.[17]

The years following Israel's establishment brought financial and social growth to Hulda. New agricultural ventures expanded the kibbutz's economy, which came to include orchards, grape-growing for wine production, olive cultivation for olive oil, and pomegranate cultivation.[11] Educational, social, and cultural activities flourished alongside the agricultural economy. Communal facilities built in this period included a swimming pool and fifty-six apartments for veteran members.[11]

The kibbutz's cultural center, also called Beit Herzl or Herzl House, was designed in 1945 in the International Style and inaugurated in 1955.[5] The dining hall was expanded in 1976 by architect Alex Kashtan, though the same architectural account noted that it had been unused since the 1990s.[5] A building designed in 1980 by architect Hanan HaBaron, originally intended as an archive for the Union of Groups and Kibbutzim, later housed the Gordonia–Maccabi Hatzair archive.[5]

Hulda's holiday practices developed a distinctive character. A 1953 Rosh Hashanah ceremony opened with a shofar blast that the stage instructions transformed into flute music, followed by a prayer accompanied by piano, a hymn set to music from Handel's Samson, and a children's choir.[18] The ceremony drew on Jewish texts, new Hebrew writing, and universal literature. Its harvest blessing invoked vineyards, fields, orchards, gardens, and the filling of silos and was performed by the kibbutzniks themselves, with God conspicuously absent.[18] The children's choir sang: "A good year to every worker / in the furrow and in the cement. A good and sweet year to every girl and boy!"[18]

The Herzl Forest and the stone farmhouse known as Herzl House are the most historically significant landmarks associated with Hulda. Herzl House was built as the farm manager's residence and later restored as a small museum on the history of settlement and afforestation in the area, with an exhibition and an eight-minute film.[12] After another period of neglect, the Jewish National Fund began accessibility work in 2020. The site subsequently reopened under the name "Herzl Farm – Seasonal Cultural Center."[1]

The Herzl Forest is managed by the Jewish National Fund, and the restored farm has served as a museum and visitor site.[3][1] Pioneering groups trained at Hulda in agriculture and forestry before dispersing to other settlements, making the farm a formative site in the broader history of Zionist settlement.[11][1]

A limestone memorial titled "Labor and Defense," also translated as "Work and Defense," stands in the forest. Sculptor Batya Lishansky designed a memorial at Ephraim Chizik's grave in 1929, while the Central Zionist Archives records that a sculpture commemorating Ephraim and his sister Sarah was placed in the forest in 1937.[5][3] Another account associates the monument's figures with Ephraim Chizik, Sarah Chizik, and Benjamin Munter and interprets its tools, wagon wheel, and wheat sheaves as symbols of labor and settlement.[10] Munter had trained at Hulda before going to help settle the Galilee, and a grove was planted at the site in 1920 in memory of the Tel Hai defenders.[10][13]

The remains of the Arab village of al-Khulda lie near the kibbutz entrance. An architectural survey notes that the village was mentioned in Crusader-period sources and described by European travelers in the nineteenth century as a large village. The same account states that its residents were expelled and its houses demolished in April 1948 during Operation Nachshon.[5]

Kibbutz Hulda attracted distinguished visitors and was associated with several prominent Israelis. In 1972, philosopher Herbert Marcuse visited Israel for the first time and was taken to Hulda, where author Amos Oz showed him around. Oz later quoted Marcuse's verdict: "Yours is the only socialist experiment that has not spilt blood and so far has not turned bourgeois."[7]

Tel Aviv mayor Ron Huldai has roots in the kibbutz. His parents, Ozer and Henke Huldai, moved to Palestine from Lodz and helped establish Kibbutz Hulda.[6] An architectural account reports that both Huldai and Amos Oz lived at Hulda during their childhoods.[5]