When my parents, Lea and Aba, arrived in Ein Vered, they built a small wooden house with two rooms, a kitchen, and a porch. That's where we lived. The bathroom was outside.
My father worked in tile-making. My mother worked picking citrus fruit in the winter and stacking hay in the summer. And when she returned from work, she continued to work in our vegetable garden and the cowshed. When I was a little girl in kindergarten, there were no fences between the homes - or more accurately, the huts. Everyone lived in wooden huts, without electricity. There were no paved roads, only sand.
When I was about to start first grade at the shared school in Tel Mond, the “events” (Arab riots) began. Arabs rioted and murdered Jews throughout the country, so our parents decided we should study within the moshav. First and second graders learned at the Yavzarov house, while the older children - including my brother - studied at the Levani house. When the danger passed, we returned to study in Tel Mond along with the children from Herut and Kfar Hess. There was no transportation, so we walked - through the sand - in the rain and cold, and in the scorching heat. We didn’t know there was any other way. Sometimes children were allowed by their parents to ride a donkey to school. That turned into a celebration, with all the donkeys braying together outside in chorus.
When I was nine, we moved to a house with two rooms, a kitchen, and a large porch where we used to eat our meals and store watermelons and vegetables as a kind of refrigerator (which, of course, we didn’t have!). In the early years, when we raised chicks and had no training coop, we cleared out a room in the house to raise the chicks until they could be moved to the henhouse, and all of us lived together in the second room. Many other families did the same.
Back then, there was still no radio in the moshav, and television hadn’t been invented yet. The children played together in every shaded corner - marbles, hopscotch, five stones, hide and seek, and many other games we invented ourselves. Kids were very creative in those days.
All the children in the moshav took part in farm work from a very young age. My brother and I helped with everything, including tile-making. It was a very difficult period economically. Some children finished 10th grade but weren’t sent to continue their studies outside the moshav because their parents couldn’t afford it. They worked at whatever jobs they could find.
I remember Friday night and holiday dinners at home, sitting around the table and singing Israeli songs and Russian songs our father had taught us for hours. I also miss the days when all the members of the moshav would celebrate important events and reading nights together with their children. Most of all, I remember the communal Passover Seder, with matzah and wine, group reading from the Haggadah, singing, and humorous skits accompanied by caricatures on the walls. There was a real sense of community and togetherness.
During the War of Independence, a terrible tragedy struck us and changed our lives forever. My brother, Shmuel Nipomnichy, who had enlisted in the Palmach and fought in many battles in the Jerusalem hills, was killed in action. He was only eighteen and a half years old.
(From: “Stories of Ein Vered – Seventy Years of the Moshav, 1930–2000,” edited by Bilha Nachman, 2000, Ein Vered Moshav Publishing)