June 29, 1939
Kibbutz Givat Brenner is established about 20 miles southeast of Tel Aviv by halutzim from Lithuania, Italy and Germany. Originally working as laborers in surrounding agricultural communities, the founding members of Givat Brenner set up an agricultural and industrial infrastructure for the kibbutz and quickly make it financially stable and self-sustaining. Producing a range of goods from textiles to fruit jams, Givat Brenner grows to become one of the largest kibbutzim in the Yishuv (the Jewish settlement in the Land of Israel before the founding of the state) and afterward. The kibbutz develops an advanced metal foundry and produces numerous specialized goods that are exported worldwide, including the metal boxes that house emergency telephones along the New Jersey Turnpike.
Givat Brenner, which means “Brenner Hill,” is named after one of the Yishuv’s most prominent literary figures, Yosef Haim Brenner. Born in Russia in 1881, he was given a traditional Orthodox Jewish education, which he abandoned to affiliate with the secular Jewish socialist Bund movement. He became an ardent but sharply critical Zionist. Immigrating in 1909, he was the greatest writer in the Land of Israel in his time and helped to move the center of Jewish literature from Europe to Palestine while working as a writer, laborer and teacher. His nihilistic novels include Breakdown and Bereavement, Out of the Depths and Around the Point. Brenner was killed during violent clashes between Jews and Arabs of Jaffa in May 1921.
Today, Givat Brenner continues to produce a wide array of goods. In addition to growing avocados, wheat, corn and cotton, it has a dairy farm, a jazz club, a plant nursery and a sod plant.
