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community working to improve quality of life and education in underserved neighborhoods.
It’s a different kind of pioneering.

“The unique idea of an urban kibbutz is to take the old idea of a kibbutz — a group of people

living together and sharing their resources to help each other accomplish a mission – and
apply it to a social environment rather than an agricultural environment,” explains Gardi.

Five secular and religious families started Kibbutz Beit Yisrael in 1993. They moved into a

former immigrant absorption center in a rundown part of Gilo and extended a hand to
residents of the surrounding public-housing projects.

“We’re working with amazing people who happen to have a lot of troubles. To understand

them we have to live among them, respect them and build trust. The connection has to
influence both sides,” Gardi says. “Of all the things I do, the most important is just to live there
and be a caring friend and neighbor.”

Members founded the Kvutzat Reut nonprofit as a vehicle to promote social action and
religious pluralism in Gilo Aleph.

Kvutzat Reut-Kibbutz Beit Yisrael offers informal education programs for all ages; revitalizes

public preschools and elementary schools with declining enrollment; and founded Mechinat
Beit Yisrael, a pre-army leadership, study and local volunteering program that attracts students
from Israel and abroad.

“Kibbutz Beit Yisrael was one of the first to invent this model and a lot of people have come
here to learn about it in the past 25 years,” says longtime member Omer Lefkowitz. “Israel is full
of people looking for vision, for a life of meaning. Mission-driven communities give them a way

to do that.”

A new social movement
Nomika Zion, founder of urban Kibbutz Migvan in the blue-collar
southern town of Sderot, estimates that more than 200 urban

kibbutzim or similar intentional communities exist across Israel.
More are springing up all the time.

“It’s a new social movement,” she says.

This movement includes Garin Torani communities of religious

young families; student volunteer villages of the
grassroots Ayalim Association in the Negev and Galilee; and non-
Jewish (including Druze) intentional communities.
Nomika Zion, founder of

“What they have in common is that they are extremely involved in urban Kibbutz Migvan in

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