Letter to Henrietta Szold

Born near Grodno, Russian Empire (today in Belarus), Manya Wilbushewitz (Vilbushevitsh) was brought up speaking Russian in a landowning family. Her family was observant but maintained closer ties with the local peasantry than with the Jewish community. At age fifteen, Wilbushewitz ran away to join the proletariat, working for a brief time in a factory. Soon thereafter, she joined her brother in Minsk, where she became involved with local working-class politics. Exposed to ideas of revolution and social change through her involvement with organizations such as The Bund, Wilbushewitz began studying models for collectivist living. Under the influence of Sergei Zubatov who briefly experimented with the idea of legalizing certain forms of socialism as a means to divide the movement, the Moscow chief of the tsarist secret police, she established the Jewish Independent Labor Party in 1901, which led successful strikes—due to the secret police’s support—but was abhorred by other Jewish socialist groups for its “reformist” stance that workers should seek labor and salary improvements as ends rather than aiming for a revolutionary overthrow of capitalism. After the Kishinev pogrom in 1903, the party collapsed. At the invitation of another of her brothers, she traveled to Palestine. In 1907, along with Israel Shoḥat, whom she married the following year, she formed a commune on a farm near Sejera (today Ilaniya, Israel). The commune served as a forerunner for later kibbutzim and as a training ground for Bar-Giora, an armed group that later became Hashomer. Following World War I, she was involved with the Histadrut and the broader Labor Zionist movement in Palestine. Shoḥat was active in the Gedud ha-‘Avodah (Work Battalion) socialist Zionist labor group and also the clandestine smuggling of arms and immigrants into Mandatory Palestine. She cofounded the League for Arab-Jewish friendship in 1930. She died in Tel Aviv.