Israel: On And Off The Tour
A worker pulls a tractor over and inspects a crop.
hand when almost any
expertise is needed. Gezer,
the Hebrew word for carrot,
farms some 1,200 acres of
land, sending 8,000 liters of
milk and 10,000 eggs to
market nearly each day.
The kibbutz also earns
money through its adhe-
sives factory and graphic
arts studio.
On this spring day in
April, the couple sits in
their comfortable Gezer
home sharing coffee with
guests. A breeze blows
through back-yard trees and
the feeling in the home is
sedate and comfortable. But
Mr. Leichman and Ms. Gold
remember Gezer in the
1970s when they arrived.
They remember building
through the mud when
there was nothing there.
They know that the kibbutz
homes received phone lines
just two years ago.
But they also have some-
thing on this kibbutz that
many American Jews will
never see or know. Indeed,
there's a certain tranquility
here. Little children run
New York Times. It's been
called a field of dreams
around in a day-care center
because of its beautiful set-
playground, complete with a
ting. Recently, Maccabiah
safe, dismantled old car to
tournament softball games
play in. Older children have
created intri-
cate cement
designs of the
holidays on
the Kibbutz's
buildings'
walls. There's
even a petting
zoo and a
swimming
pool. The visi-
tor
center,
with
its
orange gabled
roof, is intro-
duced to a tour
of American
Jewish senior
citizens, as the
"Howard Playing in the fields.
Johnson of the
Middle East."
were played there. Teams
Then there's the baseball
from all over Israel come to
field, with a center field that
the field throughout the
looks into Tel Gezer. It's
year for games. Israeli flags
been the subject of stories in
flap in the breezes on the
publications all over the
foul lines. Its only missing
world, most notably the
the ghosts of the great play-
ers walking out of the corn
fields. Mr. Leichman said
with a smile that he's not
dreaming about that hap-
pening; he's expecting it to
happen.
Living
in
was
Israel
something that
Ms. Gold also
expected from
the time she
visited in 1966
during her
junior year of
high school for
a seven-week
tour. She
remembers
cleaning mili-
tary trenches
that were used
by Israeli
Defense Forces
in the 1967 Six-
Day War.
"I came back in 1969, and
my Israeli friends would ask
me why I didn't live in
Israel," she said. "That's
when I started thinking
what would it be like to live
here. For me, the biggest
challenge was imagining
what it would be like not to
live with my family. I can
remember making the deci-
sion, though, that if I made
aliyah, I'd work out the
missing of my family."
Ms. Gold, the daughter of
Lillian and Ruben Gold,
came back to a Habonim
kibbutz called Tavor. There,
she said, "I learned that kib-
butz life made sense for
me."
She returned to Israel
again as part of the Detroit
Federation's Otzma Project,
and then in 1977 she came
to Gezer to stay.
Mr. Leichman talked
about how the kibbutz din-
ing-hall bulletin boards had
at one time announcements
almost totally in English. It
was considered almost
exclusively an American
kibbutz. Now, though there
are many Americans living
there, the language of choice
is Hebrew.
Perhaps the most dramat-
ic changes are the physical
ones where buildings and