With the reunification of Jerusalem, Jews could once again dwell in the Old City. But Jordanian occupation had destroyed the Jewish Quarter, and rebuilding required funding and organization on a national scale. A group of young soldiers – backed by an enthusiastic Israeli public – rose to the challenge

When the smoke cleared after the Six-Day War, Israel’s government had to make major strategic decisions about the areas conquered. As the gunfire ceased in the Old City in those euphoric days of its liberation, the first voices were heard calling its exiled Jewish population home.

Yet Jerusalem mayor Teddy Kollek and Finance Minister Pinhas Sapir dreamed of a total break with the past. They planned an artists’ colony and museums in the rebuilt quarter. Indeed, the first Jews to settle there were not the original, mostly ultra-Orthodox population, but artists. Painter Nahum Arbel and curator Elida Merioz each bought dilapidated Arab homes as soon as the fighting died down. Both Arbel and Elida left within the first year, however, and the idea of an artistic center was dropped.

Interior Minister Moshe Haim Shapira of the National Religious Party had a different vision. He saw the return of Jews to the Jewish Quarter as a settlement imperative to be carried out as fast as possible. Into that vision stepped the Ganat groups.

 

Urban Pioneering

Two of the greatest challenges facing the young State of Israel involved making the army part of the social fabric and filling the country’s empty spaces with housing and employment for the millions of immigrants flooding in. In 1948, pioneer youth movements approached the prime minister and acting minister of defense, David Ben-Gurion, with a promising proposal to attack both fronts at once: movement members would serve together in the army, providing the stable, fairly homogeneous groups needed to create settlements. Ben-Gurion promptly set up Nahal – a Hebrew acronym of “Fighting Pioneer Youth.” The National Service Law passed at the end of 1949 included the option of living in a Nahal cooperative, combining agricultural training and employment with military service.

The state’s second decade saw a substantial increase in the proportion of young people studying in vocational high schools, and growing numbers of army recruits were therefore already equipped with a profession when they enlisted. The national religious sector had its own such school, Boys’ Town Jerusalem, where students learned carpentry, mechanics, printing, and electrical engineering alongside traditional Jewish subjects.

Rabbi Yaakov Lishansky, the headmaster, noticed that at the end of his graduates’  army service, many weren’t going back to the professions they’d trained in. So he asked the Defense Ministry to make it possible for recruits to continue developing their professional skills alongside their military training. In 1964 an experimental Fighting Pioneer Youth for Industry (Hebrew acronym: Ganat) program was established. The first group – composed of Boys’ Town graduates – was named “Bezalel” (after the artisan of the biblical Tabernacle), but subsequent ones were known as Ganat A, Ganat B, and so on.

Like their Nahal counterparts, the Ganat groups were kibbutz-like cooperatives. They settled in border areas chosen by the Defense Ministry, putting their vocational training to use in local industries. As the original request had come from a religious high school, the National Religious Party selected the groups’ precise location and provided direction, support, and training – just as the kibbutz and moshav movements did for the Nahal corps.

Ganat Bezalel was the guinea pig. If this first group demonstrated the viability of replacing agriculture with industry as the cooperative’s objective, similar programs would be created for secular vocational-training graduates.