“A Life Full of Meaning”: The Lifework and Educational Approach of Malka Haas

ABSTRACT

Malka Haas (1920–2021) was a key pioneer in the founding of Israeli kibbutz kindergartens, and she profoundly influenced both the curriculum and practice of early childhood education (ECE) for the entire country. The article reviews Haas’s biography, her professional development, and the main principles in her educational approach: “the kindergarten as a whole life,” based on the significant experiences of the child in connection with the community and the Jewish tradition. The article also describes the sources of inspiration from which Haas drew her ideas and the impact of her approach on educational concepts for ECE in Israel today.

KEYWORDS:

• Connection to community
• early childhood Jewish education
• kibbutz early childhood education
• Malka Haas
• the kindergarten as whole life

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This article is dedicated to one of the leading early childhood educators in Israel, Malka Haas, who passed away about 2 years ago. Malka Haas’s life and activity represented a different generation and values that might have been forgotten; however, she left a unique and lasting mark on early childhood education in Israel (Hoshen Manzura & Achituv, 2023; Brody, 2017). The purpose of the article is to profile the character of Malka Haas and to describe her educational philosophy for early childhood education. The article will begin with a biography of Haas and a description of her professional development over the years. It will focus on Haas’s educational approach to early childhood: “the kindergarten as whole life,” based on the significant experiences of the child in connection to community and Jewish tradition. The article will also describe the sources of inspiration from which Haas drew her ideas and the impact of her approach on educational concepts for early childhood education in Israel today.

Beyond the overview of Malka Haas’s life, educational philosophy, and actions, the unique contribution of this article is to assert the relevance of Haas’s concepts of early education even today, despite the great differences in living conditions and the period in which she lived and worked. Researchers, educators, and policy leaders in early childhood Jewish education who are looking for ways to create meaningful early childhood Jewish education for young children in the 21st century will find references to related ideas that concern them. Among these are the fundamental place of the child and the role of the kindergarten teacher, the connection between the kindergarten and the community, and the integration of Jewish tradition into the whole range of kindergarten activities.

Biography

Haas was born in Berlin in 1920, as Hilda Steinitz (Osem & Hertz-Lazarowitz, 2011), to a Jewish family who was far removed from tradition (Aviezer, in press). Her family was steeped in German culture and attached great importance to a liberal education, culture, art, and nature trips (Aviezer, in press; Serfaty, 2023). When Haas was interviewed for “Makor Rishon” on October 1998, she described her early upbringing: “Every day my mother and I went to the park, the zoo, the planetarium, and the museum, and we played Indians in the birch forest near the city. My childhood was full of experiences, art, trips, and good literature” (Lior, 1998, p. 18).

Hilda adopted the name Malka at the age of 15, under the influence of a character she portrayed in a play by Shalom Aleichem, and she was known to her students and admirers as Malka until the end of her life. At that time, she took it upon herself to be religiously observant. She was first exposed to the world of Judaism through her father, who was a lawyer and the legal advisor of an Orthodox synagogue. Occasionally he would go to the synagogue on his way to the office on Saturdays, receive an honor as a Cohen (one with priestly ancestry), and continue on to his office. Sometimes he took his young daughter with him. Following the rise of the Nazis to power, Haas was expelled from high school (Serfaty, 2023). Under the influence of Binyamin Aviel, the youth leader of the synagogue on behalf of the Bechad (Religious Pioneers Alliance), she left home in 1936, at the age of 15, made Aliyah to Israel as part of “Youth Aliyah¹” (Aliyat Hano’ar), and started her studies at the Mizrahi vocational high school (Beit Zeiroth Mizrachi) in Jerusalem (Am-Ad, 1998). This was a technical school and cultural center for adolescent girls in Jerusalem, which opened its doors in 1933, welcoming both German refugee and local girls for training in technical, secular, and religious subjects (Goldstein Gotsfeld, 1997).

After about 2 years, Haas understood she had to choose between art, a passion stemming from her upbringing, and pioneering; she chose pioneering. She joined a group of pioneers who planned to establish a new settlement and in the meantime worked in the orchards of Hadera. In 1939, members of the group founded Kibbutz Sde Eliyahu in the Beit Shan Valley, and Malka began her kibbutz career as a cook in the kibbutz kitchen “on a formidable Primus kerosene stove” (Serfaty, 2023, p. 96). In 1940, she received a rare letter delivered from Berlin by a friend of her father. Gold chains were attached to the letter, with the intention that the gold be sold and the proceeds used for studying a profession (Serfaty, 2023). Haas started a year of studies in a course for kindergarten teachers, in the second cycle of the kibbutzim seminar in Tel Aviv (Golden et al., 2017). Among her teachers were Mordechai Segal, the founder of the Seminar Hakibbutzim Teachers College and one of the founding fathers of kibbutz education in Israel (Am-Ad, 1998), and the zoologist and educator Yehoshua Margolin (Serfaty, 2023). When she returned to the kibbutz, she took care of its first four toddlers (Aviezer, in press; Osem & Hertz-Lazarowitz, 2011).

In 1941, she married Kloni Haas, whom she had met in the synagogue in Berlin that she visited with her father (Osem & Hertz-Lazarowitz, 2011). Later she wrote about their relationship: “Since at the age of 13 I set my eyes on the nicest boy in the youth group of the synagogue, we went through a path of life together that culminates in old age” (M. Haas, 2003, Personal communication, cited in; Osem & Hertz-Lazarowitz, 2011, p. 139). Indeed, those who were personally familiar with Malka and Kloni’s relationship (for 84 years!) were privileged to witness a partnership and mutual appreciation that undoubtedly served as a source of strength and power for Malka (Achituv, 2022).

One of the formative experiences in Malka’s life was the early separation from her home and family and the loneliness she experienced in building an independent life without parental guidance: “I left home alone, got married without parents, gave birth without a mother … No one helped me cope with life, I had to do everything by myself” (Osem & Hertz-Lazarowitz, 2011, p. 142). In 1941 Malka’s parents managed to escape from Germany to Spain and sailed to New York, where they settled permanently (Serfaty, 2023).

In most of the kibbutzim until the 1980s, it was customary for children to spend their days and to sleep in children’s homes (Plotnik & Wahle, 2010; Shner, in press). Haas, however, struggled to eliminate the communal sleeping arrangement system in her kibbutz and using extraordinary means, she succeeded in doing so for the older children, from the age of three. “I fought like a lioness,” Haas later described this struggle, which involved dealing with both the general ideology and the physical conditions:

It took years … more than thirty years before the babies could sleep at home. Even though they knew exactly that the whole business of familial sleeping arrangement is primarily about the babies. But how could they do it? There was no air conditioner, no water, no toilet, no refrigerator. There was one house where there was an air conditioner and a refrigerator and all the babies were housed there … Of course, it was impossible to talk about it at all. (Osem & Hertz-Lazarowitz, 2011, pp. 151–152)

Professional Development

Haas began her professional career as a kindergarten teacher at Kibbutz Sde Eliyahu. As part of the preparation for the transition to a family sleeping arrangement, she was involved in 1944 in planning and building the first kindergarten without bedrooms. During the years that she worked in the kindergarten until the mid-1950s, she tried to design quality education for the children of the kibbutz, doing so without the guidance of professionals or the accompaniment of experienced adults and under the difficult conditions that characterize the Beit Shan Valley, especially the unbearable heat at a time when there were no air conditioners nor refrigerators in the houses (Aviezer, in press). With hardly any formal academic education, she engaged in research and professional development through self-education, with the help of books, most of which her mother sent her from New York. Later, in the 1970s, she forged connections with lecturers from universities in the Boston area and with the psychologist and educator Rhoda Kellogg from San Fransisco following a 6-month training program that she attended there in 1977 (Osem & Hertz-Lazarowitz, 2011; Serfaty, 2023).

As early as 1960, Haas began teaching the courses “Education in Early Childhood Through Activity With Art Materials” and “Kindergarten Education as a Whole Life” at the Oranim College of Education; she continued to teach these courses until the late 1990s (Aviezer, in press). I was privileged to participate in them as a student in the mid-1980s. The experience of sitting in a class taught by Malka, as we called her, is well etched in my memory, as it is in the memory of many early childhood educators who had a similar experience. The class itself was organized as a kind of studio, in which we absorbed Malka’s teachings every week. She was always dressed in a simple, almost ascetic style, which included a white shirt, light-colored slacks, and flat, white shoes. We sat in complete silence and listened to her in an atmosphere of reverence mixed with anxiety. The demand was very explicit: to observe in depth and to work hard. Her teaching style required us to look inward, trying to understand how the theories that she developed relate to our own world and to share this with the group. We submitted the “homework” on small slips of paper, written in pencil, and when her eyesight weakened, written with a thin black Pilot pen (specifically), which required us to accurately summarize what we intended to express. The feedback on the assignments was returned to us on the same small notes. I remember the process as both an intellectual and an emotional challenge: the feeling of pride when we were able to express an idea or clarify a connection that was considered worthy in her eyes, that was given a smile of recognition and encouragement, and, on the other hand, the feeling of shame following her reprimands for statements that were not sufficiently profound. This learning experience, which was so different from the atmosphere in the other classes, caused the subject matter to be engraved deeply in our minds, perhaps also because of the dissonance between the rigid, structured educational framework and the open and creative ideas she expressed (Achituv, 2022).

Haas’s Pedagogy

Haas developed a progressive and holistic approach that she shaped over some 70 years and named “the kindergarten as a whole life” (Hoshen Manzura & Achituv, 2023). Her pedagogical approach emerged from the combination of the knowledge she acquired from reading the leading academic literature and her meetings with American scholars, while constantly developing her own insights. The progressive element of her approach was greatly influenced by the theories of Jean Piaget about children’s learning and development, which emphasize the spontaneous and independent activity of the child as a basis for their growth (Haas, 1998).

In the infrastructure of Haas’s holistic approach stands the ecological aspect, which looks at the environment as a whole. According to Haas’s philosophy, early childhood education does not operate in a vacuum and does not remain within the walls of the kindergarten classroom. The kindergarten and its immediate surroundings are connected to each other with deep ties and connections in a system of reciprocal relations (Hoshen Manzura & Achituv, 2023; Brody, 2017). Similar to Urie Bronfenbrenner (1979), the developmental psychologist known as the developer of the “ecological systems theory,” Haas referred to the first circles that create the environment. The first circle is the family, followed by the community circle, which should be tight and meaningful. The wider circles are the Jewish-Israeli culture and the general Western culture.

The kindergarten teacher is the one who mediates between the children and the different environmental circles. She should be curious and alert to the environment, feel its pulse, recognize the changes that occur in the close surroundings, and feel a sense of belonging to it (Aviezer, in press). This holistic fragment is expressed in Haas’s approach through three practical links.

The Daily Walk

During the daily walk of the kindergarten children in their close surroundings, the children not only follow the changes that occur in the natural world around them but also create reciprocal relationships with the members who contribute to the community in various ways: The cook in the kibbutz kitchen, the electrician, the doctor in the local clinic, and so on, some of whom are even related to the children (Achituv, 2022). An example of this can be the description by Elisheva (pseudonym), the kindergarten teacher and one of Haas’s students, about the walks with the kindergarten children during the holiday of Sukkoth:

There is a large sukkah near the dining room. The children come and help the builders move the poles, the jute walls … they prepare decorations in the kindergarten. During the holiday, we learn the names of the seven forefathers of the nation who “visit” the sukkah, and we visit the sukkah of a member of the kibbutz whose name is the same as that day’s visitor, and the family welcomes the kindergarten children with joy. After Sukkot comes the holiday of Simchat Torah. The children go to the carpentry shop and get sticks to make for themselves beautiful flags in honor of the holiday.

The “Junkyard Approach”

The second link to the holistic ecological structure is the “Junkyard approach.” Already in the 1940s, there were several attempts to establish junkyards as a pedagogical practice in Europe. In 1945 Professor Carl Theodore Sorenson, a landscape architect, envisaged his innovative “junk” playground for children in Emdrup, Copenhagen, as a reprieve from occupying German forces who considered children’s free play to be sabotage (Clark et al., 2023; Kozlovsky, 2008). Lady Allen of Hurtwood was subsequently inspired to replicate the model in London (Brussoni, 2023). Her additional innovation was to locate these playgrounds at bombed sites, as part and parcel of the regeneration of (literally) shattered communities (Golden et al., 2017).

A little earlier, in the early 1940s, Haas started to develop a junkyard in her kibbutz. She dedicated years of experiments and investigations that were based on daily observations of children’s activities in the yard, integrated with a theoretical background that was constructed and updated over the years (Golden et al., 2017). A summary of this knowledge was published by Haas and her partner Tzila Gavish in the book Mommy, Look, It’s Real: The Junkyard-Playground as a Model of Early Childhood Education (2008). The “junkyard” developed by Haas consists of real artifacts that were used in the real world by the children themselves, their parents, and the wider community but are no longer in use. This is an ever-changing setup in which children’s free play is encouraged with minimal rules for the use of time, space, objects, and social relations due to its being a kind of transitional territory and a link between the kindergarten and the community, between the children and their environment (Golden et al., 2017; M. Haas & Gavish, 2008).

A protected junkyard adapted to the children’s development allows them to delve into the investigation of materials and processes without the limitations and dangers that exist in the “real world” outside the kindergarten. The young children explore the immediate environment with all their senses within the kindergarten but only in a junkyard adapted to the children’s development can they actually bring about physical changes in the environment, make it interactive and changeable, and create their own world (M. Haas & Gavish, 2008). Constructing a junkyard requires a kindergarten teacher who is dedicated to this mission, who deeply understands the principles on which it is based and is willing to invest constant thinking, creativity, and hard work together with her staff, both in the stages of building the yard and in its continuous operation (Achituv, 2014).

In recent years, the living environment of young children is becoming more closed and sterile, due to fear of dangers of all kinds. Children no longer play outside with the neighborhood children, as they used to in the Israeli culture of the last century, but are chauffeured from one extracurricular activity to another in the afternoon or are enclosed in their homes close to the television, computer, and other digital devices that keep them away from the real world. Family recreation is often based on visiting sites that offer attractions and activities—or worse, trips to shopping malls that focus on materialism and consumption (Achituv, 2014). In this kind of environment, the junkyard is a unique place that allows kindergarten children to learn and experience an actual reality adapted to them.

Experiences with Art Materials

The third link to Haas’s holistic pedagogy is the experiences of young children with art materials. Haas regarded her own early exposure to art through her mother as a central element in her biography (Aviezer, in press; M. Haas & Gavish, 2014), and she perceived her studies in the course for kindergarten teachers in 1940 as an opportunity to combine her two loves: art and children (Serfaty, 2023). Haas dedicated many years of in-depth research to the experience of young children with art materials, which included connections with well-known art researchers including Professor Max Klaeger from Heidelberg University and Professor Clair Golomb from the University of Massachusetts, Boston (Osem & Hertz-Lazarowitz, 2011). Haas’s small kibbutz house was filled with some 250,000 children’s drawings, organized neatly in folders, a documentation of her many years of research on all the kibbutz children, starting at age 2. These drawings document the way in which each child builds their basic graphic concepts, starting with the appearance of the first lines to the stage of forming shapes and organizing them in space (M. Haas & Gavish, 2014).

Haas came out against the central place accorded to academic skills in kindergartens—reading, writing, and arithmetic—driving kindergarten teachers to steer the children toward results and achievements. Some approaches that are common nowadays place experience with art materials (or “arts and crafts,” as it is called by the kindergarten teachers) as a vent to balance out the effort invested in learning subject matter or as a means of processing the material that is being learned (Haas, 1998; Toren, 2007). Contrary to these approaches, Haas (1998) suggested a different role for art. She viewed expression through art materials as an opportunity for the sensory, emotional, and cognitive experiences that are necessary for the mental development of young children and a unique way of absorbing knowledge and processing it. A child, like an adult, does not think only in words but also in visual images. Creative activity with art materials, like the activity of observation, develops and fine tunes visual perception and thinking processes, and these expand through the kindergarten teacher’s mediation (M. Haas & Gavish, 2014). Haas published her approach to young children’s art in two main books: Kindergarten Children Experiment and Express Themselves With Art (1998) and her last book, published in 2014 together with Tzila Gavish, Mummy, Look How I Am Drawing; Observing the Beginning of Children’s Drawing.

Studying children’s art didn’t remain inside the kindergarten walls. In 1956 Haas’s son fell seriously ill and she had to leave her job as a kindergarten teacher and take care of him (Serfaty, 2023). That year she opened in her kibbutz the “Painting Pavilion,” which was dedicated to children from Grades 1 through 4. The studio was first located in a shack and then moved to the ground floor of the water tower near her house. Children visited the studio after school hours, experimented with color, shape, and composition, and shared common ways of problem-solving. Being together in the small, crowded pavilion required the children to control their movements and to be considerate of each other. Haas avoided dictating subjects for painting, providing models, or teaching defined techniques, which stemmed from her desire to nurture the individuality of each child. It was important for her to enable the children to experiment freely without having to provide a logical explanation for their actions (Am-Ad, 1998). The words of 7-year-old Rachel were hung on the pavilion’s wall:

In the pavilion of painting, you don’t learn to paint.

But you learn

To decide on your own.

To be happy

To think

To experiment

To do it yourself

To dare to spoil a job. (Haas, 1998)

In 1998 the Museum of Art in Ein Harod exhibited a collection of children’s paintings from the pavilion of painting. On the occasion of the exhibition, Haas’s book was published: The Pavilion of Painting: Children Express Their Feelings in Color and Line (1998).

Bible and Sages’ Stories

Haas regarded the stories of the Bible and the Sages as a basis for young children’s experiences and practices. She adapted some of the stories for kindergarten children and made sure the adaptations would relate to memories, feelings, and family relationships that are familiar to the children and describe activity similar to the children’s own activity. In this way, Haas made sure that the adaptations she created would expand the children’s knowledge and concepts. Many kindergarten teachers use the adaptations Haas wrote for the books of Esther and Ruth and for the story of Hannukah (Achituv, 2022). They tell the adapted stories to the children and connect the issues that arise from them to the children’s lives through group discussion. Afterwards, the children act out the stories with guidance from the kindergarten teacher.

An example of a story of the Sages that Haas adapted for kindergarten children is the story “Twelve Brothers,” which is based on Midrash Bamidbar Raba (b). She wrote the story in 1943 following a series of drawings she had made, which were intended especially for the first kindergarten children of the kibbutz. The story describes the 12 sons of Jacob in short rhymes, all of them, “from Reuven to Benjamin, include the subject of a child taking responsibility” (M. Haas, 2010). For example, here is the section in the story that relates to the brother Naphtali:

I am Naphtali, the swiftest of the brothers,

No one can catch me of all the runners.

I once went to the mountains alone,

Among the rocks I found a wounded doe.

I brought her to my tent and tended her on my own,

Until she leaped and skipped again

Together with me in the fields of grain.

In the explanation Haas added to the book in 2010, she mentioned that the story about Naphtali addresses a natural competitiveness of movement that characterizes the young child, as well as the value of compassion for animals. As in all other components of her approach toward stories from the Bible and the Sages for kindergarten children, the central role of the kindergarten teacher is evident as a mediator for the children of the reality they face and the culture that characterizes the community they live in (Aviezer, in press).

Haas’s adaptations of the Bible and Sages stories left an emotional impression not only on the children but also on her students, including those who didn’t belong to a religious community. One of her veteran students, who used to be the director of the early childhood division in the educational department of the Kibbutz Movement, described her memory of Malka. She heard from Haas the story about Hannah, who parts from her little son Samuel and hands him over to Eli the Cohen, sews a coat for him, and brings it to him in Shiloh. Listening to the story, this student felt that it was being told about herself, a young mother, who hands over her child to the communal sleeping arrangement in the children’s house. She shared that since then, and for many years, this story continues to accompany her (Achituv, 2022).

An example of the nature of Haas’s holistic approach and the connections between the Jewish content and the different layers of the children’s experiences with the link to the community can be found in a description she wrote in the kibbutz newsletter about the children collecting pottery shards for building Hanukkah menorahs:

Every year after the first rains, before the ground is covered with new foliage, the children of the Zayit and … Rimon kindergartens go to “Bab El Antar” … and collect pottery shards. They know that all these shards were once jugs and pitchers, like the pitcher in the story of Rebecca and the servant [Eliezer] and like the jug of oil in the story of Hanukkah. On the next outing, the children go to the carpentry shop and look for pieces of wood in the scrap box. Grandpa Shmuel helps them and cuts pieces suitable for them to make Hanukkah menorahs. For an entire week, the kindergarten children take turns sitting at the pasting table … and paste … clay shards, until each child has prepared a menorah that can be lit at home. And from the most beautiful pieces, they glue together a menorah to light in the kindergarten. (Hoshen Manzura & Achituv, 2023)

Sources of Inspiration

When Haas was asked to speak about a person who had a meaningful influence on her, she chose to mention Professor Nechama Leibowitz, a noted Israeli Bible scholar and commentator. “Nechama,” as she was known, was one of the most influential figures in the world of education and Bible teaching in Israel as well as in the entire Jewish world (Deutsch, 2008). Haas found in Nechama a close and respected figure with whom she could consult and was impressed by her simple appearance and her sincere investment in her inner world (Serfaty, 2023). This is how she explained her choice:

I was privileged, from the age of 15 to the age of 17, to study every day at Beit Zeirot Mizrachi with Dr. Nechama Leibovitch. It was in 1936, with the outbreak of the events [s.a. Arab pogroms] … It can be said that Nechama opened up to me not only the world of the Bible and language but also the life and experience of the Land of Israel. This provided a basis for the rest of my life. The educational material that Nechama taught is preserved in her library (and perhaps to some extent in the back of my mind). But when I look back today, it becomes clear to me that the most important thing I learned from Nechama is to be a woman-teacher. Her life demonstrated that a woman could achieve academic achievements in a field, which then, almost 70 years ago, was reserved for men only (interpretation of the Bible). A woman can be broad-minded and at the same time, meticulous about details (Nechama returned every test the next day and corrected every comma with red ink). A woman can combine devotion to her profession with devotion to her family (Nechama always took physical and spiritual care of her blind husband.) A woman can conduct herself modestly in her own consistent personal style that emphasizes her inner world rather than the exterior. (Achituv, 2022)

It is interesting to note that even though Haas didn’t perceive herself as a feminist woman in the way we relate to this term nowadays, she chose to relate to feministic aspects in her description. In 2004, in an article she wrote for the Kibbutz newsletter, Hass referred to the pedagogical aspects that characterized Nechama and that influenced her:

I learned from Nechama:

That a true teacher loves learning for its own sake.

That a true teacher relates to each student in an individual way.

That a true teacher is passionate about what she teaches.

As a student of Haas and based on a long acquaintance with her and her students, I can testify that she fully applied what she learned from Nechama.

Examining Haas’s pedagogy in a broad context reveals that it is possible to find parallel ideas between her approach and educational theories developed in the past and present that were a source of inspiration to her. Her ideas about the central role of sensory input in child development are similar to the process that Rudolf Steiner, the father of the Waldorf approach, called Self education (Mathisen & Thorjussen, 2017). Haas was greatly influenced by the Reggio Emilia approach (Serfaty, 2023) and its in-depth reference to the expressive languages of children through the projects they develop (McNally & Slutsky, 2017). According to Tal (in press), Haas’s approach together with Gideon Levin’s² approach, which was developed in Oranim parallel to Haas’s, interfaces with the Reggio Emilia approach, regarding the historical, geographical, and social conditions in which they were developed and their common source of influence in Dewey’s progressive approach.

Haas’s pedagogical approach was a source of inspiration for early childhood educational approaches that developed in Israel in the last few years. In 2017, the Early Childhood Education Department in the Israeli Ministry of Education developed “the kindergarten of the future” approach, which emphasizes the importance of sociocultural relations and meaningful learning through the construction of knowledge (Ministry of Education, 2021). Key elements of this approach are based on Haas’s pedagogy (Achituv & Hoshen Manzura, 2019).

Summary

Even after her retirement from formal teaching at Oranim, Haas continued her educational mission. Every Monday, students, especially women students, came together at Kibbutz Sde Eliyahu to learn from her and to deepen the educational pedagogy she developed. She kept on teaching in this format until 2011. During that entire period, she continued to write down her philosophy, together with her partner, Tzila Gavish, even after she became completely blind.

In the questionnaire she filled out for Gabi Osem’s doctoral thesis (2009) on women Holocaust survivors in the kibbutz, she indicated the four most significant factors that shaped her life: the ability to be independent in the various frameworks of one’s life; the ability to know what is the most important thing and what is less important; the ability to perform tasks thoroughly; the ability to derive meaning from life’s events.

Haas, who moved all her life on the axis between maintaining the formal framework and breaking out independently, in a constant search to find meaning, believed that the search for meaning begins at the youngest age, and that it is the role of the adult to develop the necessary qualities in the child to be able to find meaning. It is interesting that among these qualities, she mentioned the courage to break free of fixed patterns:

A baby arrives into the world looking for meaning. The youngest baby creates a picture of the world for himself that continues to develop with each encounter with the environment. We need to enable the baby to search for meaning … our job is to help children develop the qualities that will enable them to search for meaning … What are these qualities? For example, the courage to experiment, the courage to break free of conventional patterns. (M. Haas, 2008)

Haas developed her educational approach in a different era and under conditions completely different from those of today, but her demand to treat the young child as a whole within the child’s family and community and to allow the child to the search for meaning, continues to resonate even after Haas’s passing. Early childhood educators who continue their practice according to her approach succeed in creating a unique environment based on Jewish content as a background and framework for their action. These educators avoid merely transmitting formal knowledge translated into chunks of data that the children must acquire (Hoshen Manzura & Achituv, 2023).

Following the events of October 7 and the war that consequently broke out, at a time when Israel is going through one of the most difficult crises in its history, it is significant to remember and note the impossible challenges that the pioneering settlers in the land underwent. Haas was part of a group of young people who faced tasks that required sacrifice, total partnership, and the taking of responsibility by everyone who did their part in building the land and defending it, while also combining Jewish and academic studies. Despite the difficult conditions, Haas succeeded, thanks to her wisdom, dedication, and adherence to the goal that characterized her: to build an infrastructure for the kibbutz early childhood education system, which still resonates powerfully within early childhood education in Israel in general. Early childhood educators and scholars in the flourishing and forward-looking State of Israel, which celebrated its 75th anniversary this year, along with Jewish educators and scholars around the world, can be encouraged and inspired by her personality and the legacy that she left.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Professor Elisha Haas, Malka Haas’s son, for his help in gathering the exact historical details for the purpose of writing this article.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sigal Achituv

Sigal Achituv is the director of the Early Childhood Education Graduate Program in Oranim Academic College, Israel. Email: [email protected]

This article was originally published with errors, which have now been corrected in the online version. Please see Correction (http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15244113.2024.234275)

Notes

1 A Jewish organization that rescued thousands of Jewish children from the Nazis during the Third Reich.

2 A prominent teacher and an influential figure at Oranim College, teaching generations of ECE students and taking on a leading role in shaping early education in the kibbutz and beyond. Levin’s humanistic-democratic approach premised that the freely chosen activities of the child should determine the kindergarten program. The task of the child is to learn through freely chosen play opportunities within a stimulating environment that has been thoughtfully set up by the teachers (Aviezer, in press).