Holocaust survivors established Kibbutz Lohamei Hagetaot in the Western Galilee in April 1949. The founders included survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto revolt, partisans, concentration camp prisoners, people who survived in hiding, and Jews who had escaped to the Soviet Union. Alongside the kibbutz, they laid the foundations for the Ghetto Fighters’ House, a museum documenting the Holocaust of European Jewry.
A community formed by survivors
The founders chose communal life as a way to build a permanent home in Israel and commemorate family members who had been murdered, according to the museum’s history. The Ghetto Fighters’ House records that the kibbutz’s founding ceremony took place on the sixth anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto revolt. The first child was born there in August 1949; by September, the community numbered 159 members and 21 children, according to the founders’ history.
The founders documented their own experiences as well as creating a home, described in the museum’s founders history. In 1984, the kibbutz’s founders published four volumes of testimony based on interviews with 96 members. The accounts cover their prewar childhoods, wartime survival, immigration to Israel, and the establishment of the kibbutz.
Memory and daily life together
Lohamei Hagetaot joined communal agriculture and family life with an institution devoted to historical documentation. The museum began as the first institution of its kind dedicated to documenting the Holocaust of European Jewry. The combination grew from the founders’ own biographies: many had fought against the Nazis or survived their persecution, and they wanted a lasting community that could preserve those histories.
Yad Mordechai is another kibbutz with a Holocaust remembrance institution, but its origins differ: its founding group arrived in 1936 and established the kibbutz in 1943, before the Holocaust. Its museum, “From Holocaust to Revival,” connects Jewish resistance with the kibbutz’s later battle in 1948. Distinguishing older communities from survivor-founded ones avoids confusing memorial projects with community founding.
See the broader account of survivors’ role in Israel and how testimony entered public remembrance.