Kibbutz marks 80 years of Shavuot song and dance with pioneering artworks

Israel’s kibbutz communities have long celebrated Shavuot with ceremonies welcoming the harvest holiday in dance and song, mimicking scythes cutting wheat or farmers bearing baskets full of new fruit.

Elements of those ceremonies are credited to two pioneering members of Kibbutz Ramat Yohanan in the north, choreographer Leah Bergstein and composer Mattityahu Shelem, who created a series of agricultural ceremonies some 80 years ago.

Bergstein and Shelem wanted to mark seminal moments in the agricultural seasons and the Jewish calendar, so they composed music and choreographed dances that reflected some of the emerging traditions of their farming community in those pre-state years.

This year, Kibbutz Ramat Yonanan, led by one of its own, artist Noam Edry, is marking the 80th anniversary of the first time the kibbutz hosted a Shavuot ceremony with these artists’ songs and dances, in 1945. Edry, who grew up on the kibbutz and returned to live there several years ago, invited contemporary artists to exhibit their works in the kibbutz.

The exhibit, “As the Sheaf Passes,” brings together veteran artists and local creatives with live installations to bring Bergstein’s choreography and Shelem’s songs to life again.

“The whole kibbutz has become a museum,” said Edry. “It’s a very new idea for us, it’s pioneering, like they were — pioneering in the field of art.”

Bergstein, often considered one of the mothers of Israeli folkdance, was born in what is now Ukraine and fled with her parents and six siblings to Vienna at the start of World War I. She studied modern dance there with a colleague of Isadora Duncan, choreographing works inspired by ancient Greek vase paintings and learning about folk festivals from the works of Austro-Hungarian choreographer Rudolf von Laban.

The aspiring choreographer left for pre-state Israel in 1925 and was living in Kibbutz Beit Alfa when the kibbutz shepherds asked Bergstein to create a festival focused on sheep-shearing, inspired by their Bedouin neighbors.

The Polish-born Mattityahu Shelem was one of the kibbutz shepherds. He composed what became popular Israeli shearing songs, such as “Se u’Gedi” (A Lamb and a Kid), “Sisu v’simchuna” (Be Joyful and Celebrate) and “Sheep and Goat, Goat and Sheep Went Out Together to the Field,” which Bergstein choreographed.

By the 1940s, Bergstein, Shelem and other kibbutz members had moved to Ramat Yohanan during an ideological split within Kibbutz Beit Alfa.

“Ramat Yohanan gave the individual a lot more freedom than Beit Alfa,” said Edry. “Beit Alfa leaned more staunchly toward Stalinism and when the kibbutz split, Ramat Yohanan tripled in size overnight.”

In their new kibbutz, Bergstein and Shelem designed several festival ceremonies inspired by the Jewish and agricultural calendars, such as the Omer Festival, which marked the beginning of the 49 days of counting from Passover, along with festivals for Shavuot and Sukkot.

Bergstein built a stage in the wheat fields, its dance floor covered in sheaves of wheat to offer the illusion that her dancers were performing on the heads of the grain. Her kibbutz troupe performed throughout the country, with other communities eventually adopting her rural festival choreography, said Edry.

Edry’s 80th anniversary exhibit is inspired by Shelem’s songs and Bergstein’s choreography.

“This pioneering duo of creators, Matti and Leah, wanted to refer to those ancient sacrificial ceremonies and mirror them in the new land, and they were so powerful in their ping-pong of creation that it spread like wildfire,” she said. “Every aspect had meaning; it wasn’t just for entertainment.”

The exhibiting artists were charged with trying to understand why the ceremonies became so elemental to Israeli life, taking Shelem’s lyrics and Bergstein’s choreographies, dissecting them, and putting them back together into their artworks, said Edry.

A sculpture by conceptual artist Efrat Natan, “Stepping and Harvesting,” is composed of 24 wheat-slicing sickles arranged in a spiral, attempting to capture the movement of wheat harvesting and echoing Bergstein’s dance movements.

Musician Noam Enbar, whose grandparents were among Ramat Yohanan’s founders and whose memories of the Omer Festival inspired him to create the quirky, original Great Gehenna Choir, installed video works in the historic kibbutz bunker.

Rona Yefman, a New York-based artist who grew up on Ramat Yohanan and studied with Bergstein, who died in 2017, choreographed a work with kibbutz dancers performed at sites around the kibbutz, while Atar Geva, a Bezalel-trained installation artist, created “Bubbling Bubbles,” an installation of spirulina algae and water in homage to Ramat Yohanan’s traditional Water Festival, usually celebrated during Sukkot.

“We try to show how Matti and Leah saw it as such a magical ceremonial tradition that inspired generations of artists in all kinds of fields,” said Edry. “We want to show the huge effect that their life’s work had on art in Israel, on culture in Israel.”

There are 52 artists in total whose work appears in the exhibit, which is open weekends through June. The works are placed in six locations around the kibbutz, in sites normally used for other purposes, such as a commemoration hall where yoga is usually practiced and the kibbutz pool.

It’s all a first for Ramat Yohanan, where the emphasis in the kibbutz is on keeping these traditional ceremonies alive, said Edry.

She spent part of her childhood and teenage years in London, but eventually returned to the kibbutz, after living with her husband and children in Tel Aviv.

She had long dreamed of inviting contemporary artists to the kibbutz and suddenly had the opportunity when the kibbutz asked her to handle the exhibit.

There were times during the last year and a half, following the Hamas terror attack of October 7, 2023, in which 1,200 people were killed and 251 taken hostage to Gaza, when Edry and her team of volunteers thought it didn’t make sense to be doing this now.

In some ways, however, the project took on new meaning.

“There’s an entire body of works inside the show that deal with October 7, created by artists to commemorate those killed in the massacre,” said Edry. “They show how the wheat, the fields, all these symbols invented by Shelem and Bergstein are still very relevant. They’re allegories for today, for the state of the kibbutz in Israel today and what it means to be a part of a community in the face of this war.”

One artist, Michal Shachnai, took Bergstein’s dance ceremony and created a video artwork in which sand dunes rise and fall — a metaphor for the southern kibbutzim that were so viciously attacked on October 7, asking if the kibbutz can rise from the ashes of that day.

“We couldn’t ignore any of it,” said Edry. “It all still resonates for us.”

“Dor l’Dor Yabia Omer” opens May 30 through June 30, Ramat Yohanan. Fridays, 10 a.m. to 1 p.m., with guided tours at 10 a.m. and 11 a.m. Saturdays, 11 a.m. to 2 p.m., guided tours at 11 a.m. and 12 p.m.