The History

The story of Nes Ammim began as a challenge.

The year was 1963: No running water, no electricity, no outgoing telephone lines – instead,there was a lot of mud which made it nearly impossible to reach Nes Ammim during the rainy season.
The pioneers were the only ones existing there: a Swiss family that had a bus. Israelis from Nazareth had given them the bus as a present It was an obsolete model and it had defective brakes.

But they made it. The bus was converted into the first room in the village. It was positioned on a small hill. All around there was only untilled land.
Nes Ammim grew from this.

The road was long and difficult until the pioneers finally gained permission from the State of Israel to build Nes Ammim in 1963:
A delegation of Europeans had already come to Israel in November, 1960 and joined their Israeli compatriots only to find that their contact person in the Israeli government had been called up for military reserve service and was accordingly unable to help them. Neither David Ben-Gurion, the Prime Minister, nor any other government ministers, received them. The members of the delegation thought that the government was not interested in Nes Ammim.

The change in fortunes came at the end of November 1960: Dr. Johan Pilon and. Jacob Bernath, two of the founding fathers of Nes Ammim, were sitting in the Jerusalem office of the Ben Dor brothers, who were renowned architects and they spoke about Nes Ammim. Both of the Ben Dors were thrilled with the idea of Nes Ammim. One of them – a close friend of Minister of Finance Levi Eshkol (who later became Prime Minister) – picked up the phone and organized a meeting with him for Nes Ammim.
A day later, Pilon and Bernath met with Eshkol. Eshkol had already spoken with Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir (who would become the 5th Prime Minister of Israel) about Nes Ammim. They all adopted a positive approach with regard to the project. Three Israeli Prime Ministers were now on the side of Nes Ammim!

But only one hurdle had been cleared:
Fears that "The missionaries want to build one of their centres in this village" were aired by many. Missionizing Jews had never been an aim of Nes Ammim and yet Rabbis from all round the country visited the Israeli President Ben-Zvi and demanded the end of Nes Ammim. Missionizing was then, and it still is, a red rag to Israelis. It is forbidden by law and is a punishable offense.
Nes Ammim, exemplifying the idea of a Christian village in Israel, caused a wave of outrage. Thousands of people in Naharia, a town near Nes Ammim, took to the streets in protest against the village. Rabbi Aharon Keller, the Chief Rabbi of the Western Galilee, lead the protest. Rabbi Keller proclaimed that Nes Ammim was a concealed mission.
Then, in 1963, the Israeli Knesset (parliament) accepted the Memorandum, in which Nes Ammim once again set down in writing that missionizing would never be its aim. This was the green light for Nes Ammim. Now the challenge could begin!

Seven years after the founding of the village of Nes Ammim Rabbi Keller visited it for the first time. Since then he has been observing the village´s activities very closely.
A very moving moment occurred on an evening in July 1970. Rabbi Keller made a speech and then discussed with young volunteers. He became reconciled with Nes Ammim and turned into a friend of the village. From that time until his death he gave classes about Judaism for the Nes Ammim study program.
His daughter Zahava Neuberger-Keller followed in her father’s footsteps: She conducts dialogue classes with Israeli Jewish and Arab women in the village. She forms part of the dialogue work in Nes Ammim.

His daughter Zahava Neuberger-Keller (in the middle) doing her dialogue work in Nes Ammim.

But at the time when Rabbi Keller and Nes Ammim came to an understanding, Germans still were not allowed to live in Nes Ammim. In the early years of the State of Israel, Germans were prohibited from entering the country. There was still a lot to do until young Germans could perform their alternative service in Nes Ammim.
The kibbutz neighboring Nes Ammim is Lochamei HaGetaot – survivors of the Warsaw ghetto have settled there. Up to the present day Lochamei HaGetaot is held in high esteem as the "Ghetto Fighters' Kibbutz". Many of the victims of the National Socialists lived in the immediate vicinity of Nes Ammim – many held reservations about the non-Jewish Germans who wished to settle in Northern Israel, in Nes Ammim.

Tanja Ronen with three German volunteers
in the world´s first Holocaust museum at Lochamei HaGetaot.

On the invitation of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, the theologian Heinz Kremers was allowed entry into the country in 1968. Otto Busse, who was invited by the Israeli government, came to Israel in 1969. He had saved the lives of numerous Jews in the Bialystok ghetto by providing them with medicine, clothes and weapons. He also helped them to escape from the ghetto and warned them of German actions. Today there is a tree in Yad Vashem, the central Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, which was planted for Otto Busse. He was honoured as one of the "righteous among the nations". In long talks with the regional administration and with the survivors of the Warsaw ghetto, Otto Busse and Heinz Kremers argued for the young Germans' right to live in Nes Ammim. They maintained that it was exactly these young people who should come to Israel and who should hear from Holocaust survivors themselves what they had been through and how they could build together a new future now.

Volunteers from Nes Ammim visit Otto Busse’s tree in the Forest Of The Righteous at Yad VaShem in Jerusalem

Long and difficult internal discussions took place in the regional administration until it was decided in October, 1971 to authorize the entry into Israel of a restricted number of German volunteers. Since then, the German authorities have accepted service in Nes Ammim as a substitute for military service in Germany.

Since 1963, thousands of volunteers have come to Nes Ammim and lived here for periods ranging from a few months to a few years During all six wars, the volunteers did not fly home to their families, but remained in the village. This impressed the Israelis in the neighborhood. The volunteers also remained in the village during the second Lebanon war in 2006 despite the danger due to the fact that the village is located 15 kilometers south of the border with Lebanon. They spent the nights in the bomb shelters for four long weeks. Nobody was injured, no Katyusha rocket hit Nes Ammim. Many Israelis thanked the Nes Ammim villagers and volunteers for not leaving them alone during this difficult time, but instead going through the hard days together with them.
Nes Ammim became the plausible symbol of solidarity with Israel.

Nes Ammim has remained a challenge right to the present day.