It seems that everybody knows about a kibbutz. They also know that it is somehow vaguely similar to a Russian kolkhoz - whatever that is - but they have strange pictures of what happens in the kibbutz.
Well, if you have any ideas of what really goes on in a kibbutz, forget it. It's nothing like you imagined previously.
A kibbutz is a commercial enterprise today. Sometimes there is farming, since farming is one kind of commercial enterprise, but it could be just about any other field of interest and the people in the kibbutz have a goal of making money just the same as anybody else. The money is sometimes distributed unfairly today in the kibbutz and sometimes it is more fair. The children are usually raised at home today and not as before.
Thus, a kibbutz - and its sister environments, the moshav or the moshav shitufi are often much more similar to a city life than they were before.
People today might even go to a kibbutz in order to raise their standard of living and to be able to live more cheaply in a one family house with a reasonable plot of land around it. Those with allergies to greenery, on the other hand, might choose to make their life elsewhere.
Perhaps there was a need for a traditional kibbutz - the kind that you are thinking of when you think of a kibbutz - in the early days of the State, but those times are over now and now we have a modern way of life.
Thus, if you were thinking of making aliyah and coming to a kibbutz because you have this romantic idea of kibbutz life, well, there may still be a kibbutz here and there that is for you, but I cannot promise that it will remain the same as the traditional kibbutz that you have in mind forever.
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