Sha'ar HaAmakim

Sha'ar HaAmakim lies on a ridge between the Jezreel and Zebulun valleys, about two kilometres west of Kiryat Tiv'on, and is affiliated with Kibbutz Artzi ha-Shomer ha-Tza'ir.[2] Israel’s Ministry of Defense memorial page likewise places it west of Kiryat Tiv'on and explains that the name reflects its position between the valleys.[1]

A 2015 Calcalist report describes the kibbutz as being in the Western Galilee, while a Ynet article places a nearby site in the Jezreel Valley; the sources do not explain the difference in geographic descriptions.[5][6]

The kibbutz was founded in 1935 by immigrants and pioneers from Romania and Yugoslavia.[1][2] Its founding group included two Hashomer Hatzair training groups from Romania and a youth group from Yugoslavia. Before settling permanently, members spent time in work camps in Hadera and Ness Ziona between 1929 and 1932; the three groups had joined together at Magdiel by 1933.[3]

In June 1935, the groups moved to Givat Hartiya, near the Kishon Bridge and facing Mount Carmel, where the kibbutz remains. A photograph records tree planting at Hartiya on 30 April 1935.[3] The National Library of Israel’s photographic collection traces the pioneers from Europe through youth-movement and agricultural training, immigration to Eretz Israel, and temporary camps in Magdiel and Hadera.[7]

The kibbutz faced frequent attacks during the 1936–39 period, which the Jewish Virtual Library calls the “Arab riots.” Its account says the attacks sought to dislodge the settlement from its strategic position.[2]

The Jewish Virtual Library records 580 inhabitants in 1970 and describes the population as remaining stable into the 21st century, but gives no later figure.[2] Other reports offer snapshots from different years: Calcalist described about 350 members in 2010 and about 320 in 2015,[4][5] while the Ministry of Defense memorial page reports a population of approximately 550.[1] These figures refer to differing dates and descriptions, rather than a single current count.

In the 1960s, the community had roughly 360 members and organized daily life around collective provision. Members lived in identical homes, received no individual salaries, and were provided food, shelter, education, and health care by the kibbutz.[8] Children lived apart from their parents in a children’s house until 1991.[8]

The era’s social culture included shared routines and rules. Skirts, playing cards, neckties, and ballroom dancing were considered taboo or bourgeois; members took English and choir classes, danced to Israeli folk songs once or twice a week, and held a weekly culture night on Tuesdays.[8] Hillel Livni, one of the founders, was recalled as part of a community in which children addressed their parents by their first names rather than “Dad” and “Mom.”[9]

Agriculture was an early economic foundation. The kibbutz practiced intensive, fully irrigated farming that included field crops, plantations, fishing, and dairy cattle.[2] In the period when Bernie Sanders was reported to have volunteered there, members grew apples, peaches, and pears; the kibbutz also had a flour mill and was opening a solar-water-heater factory.[8]

The kibbutz movement concluded in the late 1950s that agriculture alone could not sustain kibbutzim and encouraged them to develop other sources of livelihood. Sha'ar HaAmakim sent representatives to England to learn chromium coating, then opened a factory in 1962 to coat metal objects. The name Chromagen derived from the process; after problems with chromium-coated water heaters, the factory adopted enamel coating but retained the name.[4]

By 2010, Chromagen was a substantial industrial enterprise. Calcalist reported annual sales of about NIS 200 million and production of roughly 100,000 solar water-heating systems a year at two factories. About half of production was exported to 35 countries; the water-heater factory was at the kibbutz and the solar-collector factory at the Tziporit industrial zone.[10] An agreement signed in April 2010 made Chromagen the exclusive supplier of solar water heaters to A.O. Smith in the United States and Canada for five years, with a possible later phase of joint product development and a potential need to double or triple production capacity.[10]

The kibbutz introduced differential wages in 2003 and was assigning private homes to members by 2010, a shift that members described as difficult.[4] In the early 2000s it privatized parts of its economic arrangements, while members continued to own factories jointly and maintained a fund for members in need.[8] Chromagen remained an important source of support. In 2010, about 240 people worked there, around 50 of them kibbutz members; salaried employees had replaced most members on production lines, and outside professionals held most management roles. The kibbutz and the Tene Fund were partners, with Tene holding one-third from 2007.[4]

That year, about 95 percent of kibbutz members voted, following a heated discussion, to transfer additional community funds to Chromagen to help finance a proposed factory in Australia, identified as the company’s strongest export destination. The decision was tied to whether the kibbutz would retain control if Tene invested without it.[4] In 2015, Sha'ar HaAmakim was reported to own 68 percent of Chromagen, with Tene holding 32 percent; the company employed 220 people, exported to 40 countries, and had estimated annual sales of NIS 200 million. Negotiations to sell it to France’s Groupe Atlantic were reported at an estimated NIS 150–160 million, after an unsuccessful effort to take the company public.[5]

The kibbutz bought Tene’s roughly one-third stake in Chromagen in 2021 and sold the company to Italy’s Ariston for NIS 115 million. At the time, Chromagen employed 340 people, mostly at its Israeli sites at Sha'ar HaAmakim and Tziporit, and had estimated revenues of $50 million. The report said the company sold to 40 countries and that production in Israel would continue after the acquisition.[11]

In the 1960s, Sha'ar HaAmakim was associated with Mapam. A report on the kibbutz describes the movement as a communist, Soviet-affiliated faction in the 1950s and says members admired Joseph Stalin until his death and marked May Day with red flags.[8] Members expressed their collective economic ideal as control over the means of production and distribution according to ability and need.[8]

The kibbutz’s volunteer program generally paired a month of work with a weeklong hike and included lectures on Zionism, Israeli history, and kibbutz life. Albert Ely, who managed the program in the early 1960s, estimated that fewer than 100 volunteers arrived annually; longer-term volunteers might work in the cowshed or fishery.[8]

Bernie Sanders’s reported stay is not fully established in the accounts provided. One report says Sanders identified Sha'ar HaAmakim as the kibbutz in a 1990 interview and said he visited Israel in 1963 as a guest of Hashomer Hatzair, but notes uncertainty about the precise circumstances and timing.[12] Ely recalled a volunteer named Bernard but said he did not remember Sanders, and no surviving kibbutz records bearing Sanders’s name were found.[8]

The National Library of Israel holds a collection of 227 photographs documenting the kibbutz from 1923 to 1983. The images and descriptions trace members’ journeys from Romania and Yugoslavia through youth movements, pioneering preparation, immigration, and early settlement.[7] The library notes that the descriptions were supplied by the Bitmuna laboratory and entered into its database automatically without proofreading.[7]

Hillel Livni, identified as one of the founders, documented the kibbutz as a filmmaker. Footage later shown in an exhibition at Pyramid, a cultural center in Haifa, included the construction of the first building, early births, harvests, children in the vineyard, the dining-room bell, and trucks bringing Holocaust refugees. His daughter recalled that he generally filmed what he saw through the viewfinder rather than staging or posing people.[9] Groups of young people who had survived the Holocaust arrived at the kibbutz in 1941; one photograph identifies Youth Aliyah trainees from Yugoslavia and shows David Elazar, later chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces, in the background.[3]

A memorial to kibbutz members who fell in Israel’s wars stands on a hill near the sports hall in the eastern part of the kibbutz. It includes a black iron sculpture, inscribed walls bearing the fallen’s names, and lines from a poem by E. Hillel.[1]

Accounts of the kibbutz’s political history describe its Mapam affiliation and members’ admiration for Stalin; these details are presented in the cited reporting on life at Sha'ar HaAmakim during the 1960s.[8] The available reporting also leaves uncertainty about the exact timing and circumstances of Bernie Sanders’s reported volunteer stay, including the absence of surviving records under his name.[8][12]

A 2024 article about a documentary play reports that founder Aaron Cohen, described as a Mapam central-committee member and educator, was convicted and imprisoned in the 1960s on an accusation of passing information to a foreign agent, and later received a presidential pardon. The account connects the subject to a play based on an interrogation transcript; the allegation and its interpretation should therefore be understood as reported historical claims.[13]