Shavuot on a Kibbutz

Photo Credit: Noam Moskowitz/FLASH90

Children from kibbutz Tzuba near Jerusalem celebrated Shavuot, May 27, 2012.

For the past century, the Israeli labor movement has embraced the agricultural aspects of the holiday, which marks the wheat harvest.

“The suitability of Shavuot as a holiday appropriate to kibbutz life was evident from the very beginning, when shortly after World War I, agricultural schools instituted the ceremony of Bikkurim.” (Kibbutz Judaism: A New Tradition in the Making, by Shalom Lilker).