This morning, the poet Dorit Tzamarat, author of the poem “The Wheat Grows Again”, who passed away yesterday at the age of 80, was laid to rest in Kibbutz Beit Ha’Hashata. In an interview with the program “On the Half Day of the Sixth” here on Network B, which was given today (Friday) by Kibbutz member Hagai Ben Gurion, he said that Her death shocked the kibbutz. “It was a surprise,” said Ben-Gurion in an interview.
Listen to the full interview with Hagai Ben-Gurion here on Network B
“Dorit was a unique character from a young age,” said Ben-Gurion. “I am older than her by several months, throughout our 80 years we have been together. From a very young age she rhymed and wrote. When she was 11 years old, for the end of our class, she wrote a poem about the chickens and goats that want to be taken from us and transferred to another farm. She was very sensitive to two things – mainly For the suffering of others and her desire that there be no more martyrs in Israel, especially after the trauma of Yom Kippur.”
The song “The Wheat Grows Again” was written by Zameret in 1974, following the fall of 11 kibbutz members in the Yom Kippur War. “Dorit wrote the song out of a desire to say – ‘The wheat grows again, and we need to do everything so that it grows without memorial songs and in the name of martyrs,'” said Ben-Gurion. “It was a trauma for her and some kind of service she thought she had to give.”
“This song did not find a melody for him,” Ben-Gurion pointed out. “She gave it to the farmer’s friend, Yuki, who went with it for six months in clothes. Yuki couldn’t find it and returned it to her after six months. She gave the poem to Naomi Shemer, who kept it with her for three months, returned it to Dorit and told her – ‘I can’t write, It’s as if I wrote it.”
Ben-Gurion added that on Shemer’s advice, Tzameret sent the song to composer Haim Barkani, a member of Kibbutz Shaar Golan, and the very next day he composed the song. “When he died, he put the notes of the repeated hymn on his tombstone,” he said. First the song was published performed by the Hagavetron band. But his most well-known and well-known performance is by the singer Chava Elberstein, released in 1983.
Today, January 6, 79 years ago, the late composer and arranger Yair Rosenblum was born, who composed the poem “And gave effect” in memory of the members of Kibbutz Beit Al-Hashiteh who fell in the Yom Kippur War. Ben-Gurion said in an interview that Rosenblum composed the song when he was on the kibbutz in 1978 to mark the 50th anniversary of the establishment of the kibbutz, after being impressed by the commemoration of souls held by the members of the kibbutz every year.
The two songs that were written against the background of the heavy disaster, very quickly entered the pantheon of Israeli songs, and especially of the Remembrance Day songs. “Every year on the eve of Memorial Day and on the eve of Yom Kippur, words are read about all the deceased from Rosh Hashanah to Rosh Hashanah, and the ceremony always ends with the song ‘Vantana Hafet’ by Hanoch Albalak,” said Ben-Gurion in an interview. “It always shakes the heart, you can’t stop the tears.”
Ben-Gurion pointed out that Tzamarat devoted more than a decade of her life, together with her husband Nissan Arenberg, to bringing children from the Palestinian diaspora to treatment in hospitals in Israel. “She would go to the Jalma crossing and transport families to hospitals and at the end of the treatment return them to the border crossing,” he added. “She always said that the most important thing we must do in our lives is to be sensitive to the suffering of others, to their hardships and that we are commanded to give our hearts and hands to help them. It was in her soul.”