Hanoar Haoved Vehalomed
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Histadrut haNoar haOved vehaLomed (Hebrew: הנוער העובד והלומד) for The Federation of Young Students and Workers) is an Israeli youth movement. A sister movement of Habonim Dror, the Labor Zionist movement. It is the largest of the youth movements in Israel, as well as the most varied.
The movement was founded in 1924 by youth working to defend their rights.
The movement's mission is to develop models of cooperative life (in addition to the kibbutz), to assist the weaker social sectors, to absorb tens of thousands of immigrant youth, and to continue the struggle for the image of Israeli society as a more just society, egalitarian, democratic, tolerant, Zionist, and peace loving-all this under crisis conditions that are threatening the very wholeness of Israeli society.
An educational mainstay of the movement is the service year: twelfth grade graduates who postpone their military service and live communally as a kvutsah (literally group) in development towns and cities. Members of these groups volunteer in informal educational activities in the movement's centers, community centers, youth clubs, immigrant absorption centers, and work closely with schools, etc. During this year, members of the group function, not only as educators, but are also being educated: the process they went through in the movement continues in this voluntary process, too, to strengthen the relationship of the members to quality learning and to social and economic participation.
Today the movement has dozens of branches, centers and clubhouses throughout Israel, from Kiryat Shemona and the Golan Heights in the north to Eilat in the south. Tens of thousands of Jewish, Arab, and Druze young people are members; young people who work and study in the cities, development towns, kibbutzim and moshavim; affected young people and young immigrants. All are guided and accompanied in ways that are appropriate to them, working to strengthen the intra-movement relationship.
In the 1990s, along with the decline of the kibbutz movement, HaNoar HaOved VeHalomed began re-examining the ideal life path of its members, which had always began settling kibbutzim in garinim (groups, literally "seeds") after finishing their mandatory period of army service. Instead, a model started to be put forward in which bogrim ("graduates") of the movement formed small urban communes working in society, particularly in education. Today, there are about 1,000 members of HaNoar HaOved VeHalomed's Tnuat Bogrim ("Movement of Graduates") living in small communes in cities or kibbutzim and working in Israeli Society - mostly in education and the youth movement.
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[edit] Goals of membership
The movement aims that each member aspires to the following goals:
- To be an adolescent who sees the human being and his happiness as the central foundation of his creation and lives by this belief.
- To be an adolescent who stands for democratic and socialist principles.
- To be an adolescent who sees in the Jewish tradition a source of inspiration and influence, not a source of authority.
- To be an adolescent whose own responsibility and criticism are the foundations of his life conception and life-style's consolidation.
- To be an adolescent who bases his material and cultural existence on his own creation.
- To be an adolescent who is involved and active in social changing processes led by his beliefs and concepts.
- To be an adolescent whose ambition is to live in the state of Israel and takes part in its defense and building.
- To be an adolescent whose ambition is to live in a Kibbutz or in any other socialist and cooperative way of living.
