This is a poem written by Anda Pinkerfeld Amir in 1923 describing the beginning of Shabbat on the kibbutz. At this time, kibbutz members worked very hard, mostly in farming, for six days a week. Amir describes their hard labour as a weight on their shoulders with hands scarred from the hard work. But then, suddenly, Shabbat arrives, work is over, they stand up straight, shrugging off their burdens, and start singing and dancing.
Anda Pinkerfeld Amir belonged to a kibbutz from the secular Hashomer Hatzair movement. These kibbutzim did not observe religious laws, but the leaders of the kibbutz movement saw the essential social value of Shabbat; they demanded that no one work on this day and that Shabbat be celebrated in a way that reflected the socialist values of the kibbutzim. This poem indeed reflects the happy and meaningful way in which Shabbat was celebrated.
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Anda Pinkerfeld Amir - Anda Pinkerfeld Amir was born in Poland in 1902 and joined the Hashomer Hatzair movement after a pogrom took place in Lvov in 1918. In 1920 she immigrated to Palestine with a group from Hashomer HaTzair. Anda and her husband lived on several kibbutzim and eventually settled in Kibbutz Kiryat Anavim, close to Jerusalem.
In her youth Amir wrote and published poetry in Polish, but when she moved to Israel she began writing in Hebrew. After World War II, she was sent to work in the (DP) displacement peoples camps in Germany assisting the Holocaust survivors. Following her experiences in Europe, she was one of the first writers to write about the Holocaust. Amir wrote many children’s poems and stories, and her early poems were published in the children’s newspaper Davar. She wrote many nursery rhymes about animals, Jewish festivals, and events happening in Israel that have become Israeli children’s classics. In 1936 Anda Pinkerfeld Amir received the Bialik Prize for her children’s poetry and in 1978 she received the Israel Prize for children’s literature.
