The Founders

The Ghetto Fighters' House was established in April 1949 on a hill overlooking the Acre valley using old buildings of the British Army. Among the founders, all of whom were Holocaust survivors, were the last remaining survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto Revolt, partisans, prisoners of concentration camps, those who went into hiding using a false identity and those who escaped to the USSR.
Upon immigrating to Israel, the pioneers established a kibbutz in order to commemorate their families that perished during the Holocaust. The ground breaking ceremony was set for April 1949, on the sixth anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Revolt. On that same day, the foundations for the first museum in the world to document the Holocaust of European Jewry were established.

In August 1949, the first baby was born on the Ghetto Fighters’ Kibbutz. The first couples began to marry. For the first time, after the long years of suffering and wandering, the kibbutz members began to feel as if they have a permanent home and that their suffering had come to an end. In September 1949 there were 159 members and 21 children in this growing settlement. 60 years have passed since then and today, the kibbutz numbers 250 members, most second and third generation of the founders, their spouses, and groups from the Israeli youth movement who came to settle on kibbutz and families from the city and from abroad who also wanted to settle on the kibbutz. The kibbutz has 200 children, adolescents, and young adults who have completed their army service.

In 1984 the founders of the Ghetto Fighters’ Kibbutz published Pages of Testimony (Dapai Edut, interviewer and editor: Tzvika Dror). In this four volume literary work, there are testimonies of 96 kibbutz members. In these testimonies, the founders talk about their childhood before World War II, the war years, their struggle for life, making Aliya (the Hebrew term for immigration) and the establishment of the kibbutz. Pages of Testimony is in essence the story of the Jewish nation of our generation.