Manya and Israel Shochat

Today almost forgotten, but once a legend, was Manya Shochat. The well known Zionist activist's life resembled an imaginative soap opera, except that it was real! You can say that the future State of Israel had its beginnings in the Ottoman Turkey.
Mavi Boncuk |

Manya Shochat (Born near Grodno in 1880*; Died 1961) was the "mother" of the Kibbutz movement and collective settlement. She was born in Belorussia to middle-class Russian Jewish parents. As a young adult, she went to work in her brother's factory in Minsk to learn about working class conditions. She was imprisoned because of her contacts with revolutionaries in 1899. There she was indoctrinated by Zubatov, the head of the Tsarist Secret Police in Moscow. She founded the Jewish Independent Labor Party. Following the collapse of her ideas, she accepted an invitation from her brother Nachum, who was the founder of the Shemen soap factory, to visit the land of Israel in 1904. She concluded that only collective agricultural settlement could produce Jewish workers and farmers who would be the basis for building a Jewish homeland. She returned in 1907 to help establish the country’s first ideologically based cooperative at Sejera, which later became the basis of the first Kibbutz. In 1908, with Israel Shochat, she helped found the Hashomer guard organization, which evolved into the basis of Jewish self-defense [1]and later married Israel Shochat, a dashing and idealistic man who shared the same philosophy as Manya (he was 9 years younger then her) and had two children, Anna and Gady. At one point Israel, together with David Ben Gurion and Yitzhak Ben Zvi (a future President of the State of Israel) studied Turkish Law in Turkey[2] . Since Turkey was the administrative government in Israel, knowledge of Turkish law was fundamental.

In World War I, the Turks deported the Shochats and others who were not Turkish citizens to Bursa, in Turkey. [3] Their daughter Anna was born there during their exile. In 1930, Manya Shochat was among the founders of the League for Arab-Jewish Friendship. Manya worked to help in smuggling Jews in from the Diaspora. She helped found Tel Chai in the upper Galilee, which became a center for importing smuggled weapons from Lebanon.

Source

Israel Shochat (on the right), together with David Ben Gurion and Yitzhak Ben Zvi in Constantinople.

[1] Israel Shochat had an audience with Enver Pasha in 1912 during balkan Wars and proposed the establishment of a Jewish unit in the ottoman Army fro the defense of Palestine. His request was not granted.

[2] With the restoration of the Ottoman Empire's constitution after the Young Turk revolution in 1908, Ben-Zvi and one of his closest friends and party comrades, David Ben-Gurion (future prime minister), traveled to Constantinople (now Istanbul) to study law as an avenue of entry into Ottoman politics from 1912 to 1914. With the outbreak of World War I in Europe, he and BenGurion returned to Palestine but were unable to remain. Exiled by Ottoman authorities as potential troublemakers, Ben-Zvi and Ben-Gurion lived and lectured, on behalf of the Poʿalei Zion movement, in the United States.They returned to Palestine in August 1914, but were expelled by the Ottoman authorities in 1915. The two of them moved to New York City, where they engaged in Zionist activities and founded the HeHalutz (Pioneer) movement there. Together, they also wrote the Yiddish book The Land of Israel Past and Present to promote the Zionist cause among American Jewry.

[3] They were originally scheduled for Sivas in central Anatolia. However the American Ambassador Henry Morgenthau intervened and changed their destination to Bursa/Brusa where they stayed for 3 years and were helped by many friends including Dr. Binyamini who was serving with the Ottoman Army and a jewish nurse (also called Manya) who worked at the military hospital in Brusa. The British Delegation also helped them to go to Sweden as delegates for the Poalei Zion Convention in August of 1918 and in early 1919 they returned to Palestine.