Kibbutz Ramat Rachel marked its 100th anniversary in August as members reflected on a century that took the southern Jerusalem outpost from a battle-scarred frontier position to a real estate and tourism operation. The place that once sat on Jerusalem’s edge now deals in housing rights, hotel sites and leisure revenue. The old collective has become a business model, and the members are arguing over whether the model still holds.
From Frontier Outpost to Property Deal
David Drumlevich, a veteran member who acts as one of the kibbutz’s unofficial historians, said the founders “didn’t know about agriculture,” “didn’t know how to raise cows,” “didn’t know how to bake bread” and “didn’t know how to grow vegetables.” They “had to learn everything from scratch when they came to the desert as pioneers, committed to building a new type of equal and fair society in Israel,” he said. The language is old kibbutz mythology, but the numbers and land deals tell a different story. In 1926, through the Keren Kayemeth LeIsrael-Jewish National Fund, the group acquired a stony hill from the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate. The kibbutz was destroyed during the 1929 riots, when Arab looters attacked the community, and members later returned to rebuild homes, a bakery and agricultural fields.
During the 1948 War of Independence, Ramat Rachel’s position overlooking Hebron Road made it a key defensive point on Jerusalem’s southern edge. Drumlevich said, “Arab forces coming northward went through Hebron to occupy Jerusalem. After Gush Etzion fell, Ramat Rachel was the last point defending Jerusalem.” Kibbutz members and other Israeli fighting groups held back Egyptian and Jordanian forces in some of the war’s fiercest battles. When the armistice agreements were signed in 1949, Ramat Rachel remained within Israeli territory, bounded on three sides by Jordan. Many survivors left to help establish Kibbutz Carmel near Haifa, while other Israelis arrived over the years to replace them.
In 1954, Polish sculptor David Polus gave the kibbutz a statue of the biblical Rachel weeping, inscribed with the prophecy from Jeremiah, “And the children shall return to their own border.” During the 1967 Six Day War, Ramat Rachel again came under heavy Jordanian shelling, and the IDF used the kibbutz as a defensive post and staging area for a counterattack. Following Israel’s victory and conquest of the West Bank, the kibbutz no longer faced hostile neighbors and soon encountered new challenges. Those challenges were less about shells and more about zoning, debt and who gets to cash in on the land.
The State, the Municipality and the Market
After the Six Day War, Jerusalem expanded rapidly, and the municipality and the state began to see Ramat Rachel’s hills as land for housing. Hundreds of dunams of agricultural fields were carved away from the rural Mateh Yehuda Regional Council and annexed directly into the Jerusalem municipality. In the early 1990s, amid massive immigration from the former Soviet Union, Israel encouraged urban kibbutzim to rezone agricultural leases for housing. Ramat Rachel gave up its northern fruit orchards, used for developments in the Young Arnona neighborhood, in exchange for a clearance of its historical debts, ownership of apartments in the new towers and commercial rights that laid the groundwork for its pivot into hotel and leisure industries.
In the 2010s, the kibbutz allotted land from its eastern slopes for the Mordot Arnona project, consisting of roughly 1,800 to 2,000 housing units. For that project, the kibbutz secured building rights for 300 residential units and two hotel sites, which it later sold to private real estate developers for about NIS 500 million, then about $140 million. That windfall helped fund hotel expansion and diversify commercial investments. Around that time, the kibbutz bought several buildings in Ashkelon and sold them at a NIS 45 million profit in June this year. Another development project, the Lower Aqueduct plan, will develop Ramat Rachel’s southern flank into a neighborhood with up to 1,800 residential units, though the kibbutz will receive only negligible benefits. The project will connect Ramat Rachel with Giv’at HaMatos and Har Homa and block a potential contiguous expansion between East Jerusalem and Bethlehem.
The kibbutz maintains an archaeological park on the site of a 2,700-year-old royal palace and citadel from the Kingdom of Judah, where archaeologists uncovered royal gardens and water installations. The site later served as an administrative center under Persian rule and, over the following centuries, was home to Second Temple-era ritual baths, a Roman Tenth Legion estate and a Byzantine monastery dating to the fifth century. Ancient layers, modern leases, and a steady stream of property rights. The old frontier has become a ledger.
Who Gets the Money, Who Gets the Tension
David Drumlevich said the municipality unfairly coerced Ramat Rachel into giving up its orchards, but Ofer Cohen, the kibbutz economic coordinator, said the kibbutz believed it received a good deal for what was available at the time. Cohen said, “These deals improved our economic situation significantly, and we were able to pay back very large debts and send money to other kibbutzim. Once the money started coming in, people were able to start moving to bigger houses, and we were able to invest more in tourism.” He said the perception that the kibbutz got wealthy from real estate is overblown and said, “Relative to others, we are about average.” He added, “Some kibbutzim are much wealthier than we are, while others are struggling.”
Drumlevich’s freestanding home, built in 2000, is larger than the 64-square-meter home he raised his kids in, but he said, “these are normal, simple homes, not palaces.” Arza Ginga-Navama, who joined Ramat Rachel in the 1980s, said, “I know people outside think we are bourgeois. Maybe our pool complex is bourgeois, but I’m not getting any more money now.” The pool complex, where she works and teaches, was built by kibbutz members in 1977 and relaunched in 2018 as a health complex with indoor and outdoor pools, spas and a fitness club. Cohen said the kibbutz decided to invest heavily to make it “the best pool in Jerusalem.” Ginga-Navama said membership nearly doubled from 4,000 before the revamp to 7,000 today, and that the pool now feels “very cold and impersonal.”
Cohen said most of the kibbutz’s real estate income has already come in and will be almost completely dried up by the end of 2027. Real estate makes up about 30% of overall income, tourism about 40% through the hotel and sports complex, and agriculture another 30%, led by sales of cherries, other fruits and organic crops grown on 50 acres of orchards. Additional revenue comes from harvesting and selling solar energy. The event hall, once a popular venue for weddings, will reopen after the municipality approves a new concession to operate it.
Among roughly 600 residents, Ramat Rachel has 220 official members, including about 150 to 160 who currently work and about 70 pensioners. Children and young adults, along with most spouses, are not considered members. About half of the working members are employed on the kibbutz, while the rest work outside and pay their salaries into the communal account. Members receive monthly stipends and communal benefits, but many younger people are leaving, the kibbutz is short on housing, and members are divided over whether the cooperative model can survive. Most members want Ramat Rachel to move from the current cooperative model to a privatized model in which members retain personal ownership and pay monthly dues for communal services. Since the kibbutz movement’s debt crisis in the 1980s, about 80% of kibbutzim have gone private. At Ramat Rachel, about 64% of members have voted in favor of leaving the cooperative model, short of the 75% needed. Cohen said, “This issue is causing a lot of social tension among our members.” Drumlevich said, “None of the first pioneers here ever dreamed that the kibbutz would develop the way it has. We have bigger homes today, and greater resources, and this is all due to their hard work and sacrifices. Things here have changed, and we’ll have to see how things evolve here in the future.”