Jabotinsky's Children by Heller Daniel Kupfert;

Author:Heller, Daniel Kupfert;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 4982432
Publisher: Princeton University Press

Mobilizing the Shtetl

To tame Betar’s members in provincial towns across Poland and convince them to conceive of themselves in national terms, the youth movement’s leaders launched an ambitious program. One of their first tasks was to create an organizational structure that would help convince Betar members that they belonged to more than just a local youth club, but a broader national community whose leaders wielded the power to transform their lives. This was no small feat for the youth movement’s “world leadership,” which was made up of no more than a handful of impoverished eastern European Jewish men in their early twenties, who crowded around Jabotinsky in Paris. Branding themselves the military “officers” of the “Betar Authority” (Shilton Betar), they asked the youth movement’s members to imagine themselves as citizens of a militarized state. In the summer of 1932, twenty-two-year-old Moshe Yoelson, a founding member of the first Betar branch in Riga, traveled through Poland to ensure that the youth movement’s branches adopted the “Authority’s” organizational model.15 Hebrew terms describing state and military power were to permeate the ranks of the movement. The headquarters of Betar in each country were to take on the title of netsivut, or “the command.” Poland’s netsivut was expected to supervise several regional commands (mifkadot galiliyot), where activists from a province’s urban center would supervise the activities of towns within their orbit. Each leader of a local Betar nest (ken) was a commander (mefaked), whose task was to oversee the various subsections within their branch, divided by age and gender. A cluster of several subsections within a local nest were to be known as battalions (gdudim). Members of Betar branches were asked to conceive of themselves not only as soldiers, but as members of a national family as well. Avoiding the term “comrade,” which was popular among socialist Zionist movements, Betar’s leaders instructed their followers to address one another as brother (ach) and sister (achot).16

Soon after Yoelson’s visit to Poland, the officers of the Betar Authority in Paris announced that they would begin to produce identity cards for the youth movement’s members that would “testify to the citizenship of the young man or woman in Betar.”17 Described by Benjamin Lubocki, one of the Authority’s members, as the “Betar passport,” he explained to the youth movement’s members in Poland that the documents proved that “Betar [is] one camp, one will—it truly is its own country among all the countries of the world!”18 The identity card campaign sought to instill in Jewish youth a sense of belonging to a unified, disciplined national community. By using the language of citizenship, Betar’s architects encouraged their followers to fantasize that their leaders were already running a Jewish state. The identity cards also served as a pretext to “tax” Betar’s members with an annual “passport fee,” which would go directly to the Authority in Paris. Lubocki reminded Betar youth in Poland that “the citizens of our very own Betar country are conscientious enough to understand that the government of our country cannot exist if its citizens do not pay its taxes.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.