Givat Haviva Voice

Photographs & text: Lydia Aisenberg Haviva Reik (second from left) and her British Army Palmach commrades training in Egypt; the compass lost over 70 years ago and right:  Yaniv Sagee, Executive Director of Givat Haviva with compass at MORESHET presentation ceremony. A small pocket compass dropped in Slovakia by pre-State heroine Haviva Reik, the inside cover engraved with both the initials of her Hebrew name as well as that of her British Army nom de guerre Ada Robinson, was recently presented - 72 years after her execution in Slovakia by the Nazis – to the Givat Haviva Center for Shared Society, an educational campus in Israel named after her. Haviva Reik, a member of the Hashomer Hatzair youth movement in her teenage days in the Slovakian town of Banska Bystrica prior to Aliya in 1939, became a member of Kibbutz Ma’anit (situated next door to a former British Army base that later became Givat Haviva), was one of the first women to be recruited to the ranks of the Pa

From the Ha’aretz Oct 2016 supplement “Israel at the Cutting Edge” Leaders//Innovation Talk SOCIAL ACTION / Yaniv Sagee Innovation can mean – and must mean – casting aside paradigms that are no longer relevant. For us, at Givat Haviva, it has meant changing the way we view shared life between Jews and Arabs in Israel. Founded in 1949 by the kibbutz federation, Givat Haviva was and remains the pioneering organization tasked with promoting what we used to call “coexistence” in Israel. If coexistence was the goal, dialogue was the means of bringing about change. The theory was simple: In a state in which Jews and Arabs live in separate communities and attend separate schools, we must bring them together for joint encounters in which they can get to know one another and develop a basis for good relations. In October 2000, with the outbreak of the second intifada, that premise of coexistence crumbled – as Israeli Arabs identified with their people, the Palestinians.

My father, Ya’acov Sagee, was a Jew born in Europe. The Second World War, which was the Holocaust for my people, led to the death of a third of our population. My father became a refugee and an orphan. A child without a home. In July 1948, upon the establishment of the State of Israel, he came to the kibbutz where I live to this day and where I raise my own children. Kibbutz Ein Hashofet. Only there did he find his home and his freedom. Three months before he arrived at the kibbutz, which was founded in 1937, my kibbutz’ Palestinian neighbors from the village Kafrayn lost their homes and their freedom in the war known by my country as “The War of Independence" and by the Palestinians as "The Nakba," the catastrophe. When I was a boy, my father, a Holocaust survivor, took me to the ruins of Kafrayn and taught me the most important lesson I have ever received: “An injustice is not corrected by creating a new injustice,” he told me. “Until there is justice and peac

A week ago, for a moment, it seemed like a ray of light pierced the darkness. The prime minister and the leader of the opposition spoke together about a historic opportunity for peace that would justify a partnership between them. By the next day it was clear that the light was from the engine of the train of war and hate … and we got a right-wing nationalist government. In the choice between peace and war, between democracy and ethnocracy, in the choice between a politics of fear and a politics of hope, again and again my beloved country chooses the slippery slope that leads to ruin. But we have not gathered here today for the sake of anger and wailing. We have gathered here to strengthen the construction, the partnership, the hope, the true light and not the false. We have gathered together because we are connected partners in the society which is marching toward that slippery slope, but we are also working to prevent the crash and to create an alternative. 2500 years ago, t

Sixty years after the conclusion of WWII, the UN decided to make January 27 th , the date of the Red Army’s entrance into Auschwitz, the official date of the International Holocaust Memorial Day commemorating the victims of the Holocaust. The UN issued a decision encouraging member states to develop curricula to teach the younger generations the lessons of the Holocaust in order to prevent such crimes in the future, to preclude any attempt to deny the Holocaust, and to denounce all instances of religious intolerance, racism and violence against ethnic or religious groups. Here in Israel, we focus on anti-Semitism, so Naftali Bennett, who is both Minister of Education and Minister of the Diaspora, presented The Anti-Semitism Report in this week's cabinet meeting. According to the daily paper “Yisrael Hayom," this Report indicates that more than 40% of EU citizens hold anti-Semitic views and agree with the statement that Israel behaves as did the Nazis or that Israel is con

Givat Haviva condemns the heinous murders committed against innocent civilians in Tel Aviv last Friday. We share in the mourning of families who lost their loved ones, praying for a quick recovery of the wounded, and hope that those responsible for the crime will be caught soon. In the face of rumors and suspicions poisoning the public atmosphere and the venomous incitement against all Arab citizens of Israel, incitement in which unfortunately the Israeli prime minister decided to play a major and destructive role, we stand behind the public announcement of the Council of Ara-Arara strongly condemning the murder and declaring in unambiguous terms "that this is a case of one man who is not representative of the villagers" and stressing "that the incident is alien to our culture and the culture of both villages." As an organization acting in partnership with the Local Council of Ara-Arara on behalf of shared living, we know that their statement faithfully reflects