Massage, Not Work, on the Kibbutz in Israel

Rina Castelnuovo for The New York Times

Water massage at Kibbutz Lotan.

“WHY don’t you try Kibbutz Haon?” a friend asked as we sat in her apartment in Herzliah, poring over a map of northern Israel.

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Rina Castelnuovo for The New York Times

Camel tours are also available at Kibbutz Lotan.

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Rina Castelnuovo for The New York Times

Kibbutz Haon’s visitors stay in guest cottages, not communal sleeping quarters.

My partner, Ian, and I were looking for someplace more authentic to stay, someplace more Israel and less Hilton. We certainly didn’t want to spend a small fortune. It didn’t help that it was April, the week before Passover, and most hotels were booked up.

And so, at our friend’s suggestion, we found ourselves in a two-room cottage with a small porch, a tiny blue cotton couch, an old-school television set and a large functional bathroom at Kibbutz Haon, steps from the Sea of Galilee. We were the lone guests in a glorious pocket of calm. The kibbutz was scrubbed fresh; the guests due in had not yet arrived. We wandered around like children past the ostrich farm and groves of fruit trees. That night I went to the little kibbutz disco and danced with teens to a local D.J.

We were taking part in an oxymoron: the newfound capitalist success of the kibbutz hotel movement. Across the country, kibbutzim have increasingly encouraged visitors to be paying guests rather than volunteers — travelers like us who indulge in comparatively hedonistic pursuits like lolling by pools, alternative health remedies or using a kibbutz as a base to stroll the countryside. These visitors won’t be waking at dawn, getting a little hat and a blue work shirt, or rubbing their hands raw washing dishes. But renters of kibbutz lodging rooms make as great a contribution to the success of modern-day kibbutzim as volunteers do. In fact, some would argue, more so.

Kibbutzim, the socialist collective farms created by early Zionist pioneers primarily from Europe and Russia, are an enduring symbol of Israel. Hewing to socialist dogma, the kibbutzniks created agricultural marvels out of desert soil. To work on a kibbutz was to be a part of the dream; if you were to visit a kibbutz in the ’50s, ’60s or ’70s, you were there to work — ironing, washing, picking oranges, peeling potatoes in the kitchen or, if you had some Hebrew, helping out in the gan, the collective kindergarten. Children and parents slept in separate houses; raising children was one of many rotating jobs.

For residents, everything was taken care of, from birth, to aging, to education, to food. But they would not have owned a car, were not fully free to choose what to study, and received only the amount of money the kibbutz distributed.

So while it was a tremendous success at first, by the mid 1980s the kibbutz system was in trouble.

“There was a major crisis in the kibbutzim that started in 1985; we lost 50,000 people from 1985 to 2004,” said Aviv Leshem, a representative of the Kibbutz Movement, which represents kibbutzim all over Israel. “It was an economic crisis. The kibbutzim debt was very, very high, some 70 billion shekels to Israeli banks, and also a lot of young families and young kibbutz members didn’t want to continue to live in this way of life.”

With the beginning of the second intifada in 2000, and subsequent periods of violence, the numbers of visitors and volunteers to Israel dropped dramatically. But, with a couple of years of relative peace and a few capitalist changes, kibbutzim have become a draw again both for Israelis sick of city life, for volunteers from around the world and for tourists.

“Guests have more freedom here than they have, let’s say, in Tiberias, where they have to be careful,” said Nurit Katziri, the manager of “country lodging” at Kibbutz Shaar Hagolan.

Founded in 1937 at the foot of the Golan Heights, Shaar Hagolan stopped taking volunteers 20 years ago. With only 55 guest rooms, it is a working kibbutz with 700 residents. Its primary industry is plastics, though there are also banana and avocado groves. Guests become, for a short time, a non-working part of kibbutz life.

“It is very personal here,” Ms. Katziri said. “They can borrow our bikes, nothing is locked; guests feel very at home.”

Shaar Hagolan encourages tours of the agricultural lands, and everyone eats together in the dining room. Off site, tourists can raft on the Jordan and see the meeting point of three countries: Syria, Israel and Jordan.

Not all kibbutzim are so focused on activities and the kibbutz experience. In the Carmel Mountains, Kibbutz Dalia’s zimmerim (“rooms”) near Haifa are nine wood cabins — sleekly designed spaces for those who want more “country chic” and less “communal.” Bathrooms have whirlpools, and living spaces have flat-screen televisions. At Kfar Giladi, near Tel Chai in the northern Galilee, the feel is of a modern hotel with a big swimming pool, tennis courts and a health club.

SOME kibbutzim have integrated projects for visitors that can be as short as a few days, or extend for several months. Kibbutz Lotan, in the desert about 30 miles from the southern tourist city of Eilat, offers alternative medicine, meditation and “holistic workshops” — as well as cranial sacral massage, tai chi, shiatsu, watsu (water massage) and yoga.

But its biggest focus is ecology. Calling itself a “leader in alternative/natural construction,” the kibbutz invites tours of its mud buildings, recycled-tire playgrounds and organic farm. Workshops held throughout the year offer courses in mud-building. A 10-week “green apprenticeship,” according to its Web site, “offers a highly practically-based immersion into the processes and challenges involved with the design, building and running of sustainable communities, linking together ecological, social, economical and spiritual aspects into a unified whole.”

But it, like many other kibbutzim, also gives into pure touristic hedonism, with desert trips on camel or by jeep. Marx — let alone Ben-Gurion — wouldn’t know what hit him.

CAPITALIZING ON SOCIALISM

Many kibbutzim are listed at www.kibbutz.co.il. Rates, often given in dollars, usually include breakfast.

At Kibbutz Haon (www.net-travel.org/kibbutz/kibbutzhotels/haon.htm) rates start at $144. A spa faces the Sea of Galilee.

Kibbutz Shaar Hagolan (972-4-667-7544; www.elmulgolan.co.il) has double rooms from $94. There is an enormous pool and a museum of prehistoric artifacts.

Kibbutz Dalia (972-4-989-7777; www.dalia.org.il for general information, and www.zimmer.co.il for guest information, using link on left of page) has doubles from 500 shekels, which is about $146 at 3.42 shekels to the dollar.

At Kibbutz Lotan (972-8-635-6935; www.kibbutzlotan.com) rates begin at 340 shekels for two.

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Happy thoughts may dampen cravings

Want to quit smoking? Next time the urge to light up strikes, think of snow-capped peaks instead of the fleeting pleasure of a white cigarette. That's the conclusion of a new brain study which shows that thinking happy thoughts could help dampen cravings.

Mauricio Delgado, a cognitive neuroscientist at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey, and his colleague Elizabeth Phelps of New York University measured the brain activity of 15 volunteers as they played a simple game.

The researchers told their subjects to associate blue cards with a real $4 payoff, and yellow cards with nothing. To control for potential biases, they swapped the colour assignments for half the volunteers.

Before either a yellow or blue card flashed onto a computer screen, the volunteers received an instruction to either concentrate on their prize or instead on some calming, natural object – a blue ocean, for instance.

Delgado's team measured how excited volunteers were by attaching an electrode to each volunteer's finger, as increased excitement changes the electrical behaviour of the skin, possibly because of changes in sweat levels. When there was not $4 up for grabs, volunteers stayed perfectly calm no matter what they were thinking.

Sweaty palms

But with the flash of a blue card and money on the line, volunteers who thought about the cash showed more excitement than those who pictured the sea, the sky or some other succour. The same trend held for the volunteers told to link yellow cards to cash.

Under an fMRI scanner, thoughts of clouds and oceans slightly lowered activity in the brain's reward centre – the striatum – compared to thoughts of money, but only when the card promised a payoff.

Phelps, for one, isn't surprised. Whether it's a child ignoring the smell of cookies baking or a former smoker fighting the itch to light up at a bar, we all fight our impulses. "Anybody who's functioning well in the world is doing it," she says.

Holding back

If drug addicts, gambling addicts or alcoholics are worse at ignoring their cravings than others, cognitive control might help them kick their habit, Delgado says. Yet promise of a high will be harder to temper than the chance to win a few bucks.

Brian Knutson, a neuroscientist at Stanford University in California, notes that in the study, as well as in real life, people can't totally subvert their brains' whims. "If it were so easy to do, then why do we eat the chocolate cake when we're on a diet, why do we smoke crack cocaine when we see a pipe?" he says.

But Delgado says that making addicts think about more precious things could make the technique even more powerful. "The cocaine addict might not care about fluffy clouds, but they'll really care about thinking about their family or loved ones," he says.

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Cancer 'Cure' In Mice To Be Tested In Humans

Scientists at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center are about to embark on a human trial to test whether a new cancer treatment will be as effective at eradicating cancer in humans as it has proven to be in mice.

The treatment will involve transfusing specific white blood cells, called granulocytes, from select donors, into patients with advanced forms of cancer. A similar treatment using white blood cells from cancer-resistant mice has previously been highly successful, curing 100 percent of lab mice afflicted with advanced malignancies.

Zheng Cui, Ph.D., lead researcher and associate professor of pathology, will be announcing the study June 28 at the Understanding Aging conference in Los Angeles.

The study, given the go-ahead by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, will involve treating human cancer patients with white blood cells from healthy young people whose immune systems produce cells with high levels of cancer-fighting activity.

The basis of the study is the scientists' discovery, published five years ago, of a cancer-resistant mouse and their subsequent finding that white blood cells from that mouse and its offspring cured advanced cancers in ordinary laboratory mice. They have since identified similar cancer-killing activity in the white blood cells of some healthy humans.

"In mice, we've been able to eradicate even highly aggressive forms of malignancy with extremely large tumors," Cui said. "Hopefully, we will see the same results in humans. Our laboratory studies indicate that this cancer-fighting ability is even stronger in healthy humans."

The team has tested human cancer-fighting cells from healthy donors against human cervical, prostate and breast cancer cells in the laboratory -- with surprisingly good results. The scientists say the anti-tumor response primarily involves granulocytes of the innate immune system, a system known for fighting off infections.

Granulocytes are the most abundant type of white blood cells and can account for as much as 60 percent of total circulating white blood cells in healthy humans. Donors can give granulocytes specifically without losing other components of blood through a process called apheresis that separates granulocytes and returns other blood components back to donors.

In a small study of human volunteers, the scientists found that cancer-killing activity in the granulocytes was highest in people under age 50. They also found that this activity can be lowered by factors such as winter or emotional stress. They said the key to the success for the new therapy is to transfuse sufficient granulocytes from healthy donors while their cancer-killing activities are at their peak level.

For the upcoming study, the researchers are currently recruiting 500 local potential donors who are 50 years old or younger and in good health to have their blood tested. Of those, 100 volunteers with high cancer-killing activity will be asked to donate white blood cells for the study. Cell recipients will include 22 cancer patients who have solid tumors that either didn't respond originally, or no longer respond, to conventional therapies. The study will cost $100,000 per patient receiving therapy, and for many patients (those living in 22 states, including North Carolina) the costs may be covered by their insurance company. There is no cost to donate blood.

For more information about qualifications for donors and participants, go to http://www.wfubmc.edu/LIFT (Web site will be available the evening of 6/27.) Cancer-killing ability in these cells is highest during the summer, so researchers are hoping to find volunteers who can afford the therapy quickly.

"If the study is effective, it would be another arrow in the quiver of treatments aimed at cancer," said Mark Willingham, M.D., a co-researcher and professor of pathology. "It is based on 10 years of work since the cancer-resistant mouse was first discovered."

Volunteers who are selected as donors -- based on the observed potential cancer-fighting activity of their white cells -- will complete the apheresis, a two- to three-hour process similar to platelet donation, to collect their granulocytes. The cancer patients will then receive the granulocytes through a transfusion -- a safe process that has been used for more than 30 years. Normally, the treatment is used for patients who have antibiotic-resistant infectious diseases. The treatment will be given for three to four consecutive days on an outpatient basis. Up to three donors may be necessary to collect enough blood product for one study participant.

"The difference between our study and the traditional white cell therapy is that we're selecting the healthy donors based on the cancer-killing ability of their white blood cells," said Cui. The scientists are calling the therapy Leukocyte InFusion Therapy (LIFT).

The goal of the phase II study is to determine whether patients can tolerate a sufficient amount of transfused granulocytes for the treatment. Participants will be monitored on a regular basis, and after three months scientists will evaluate whether the treatment results in clear clinical benefits for the patients. If this phase of the study is successful, scientists will expand the study to determine if the treatment is best suited to certain types of cancer.

Yikong Keung, M.D., a medical oncologist, is the chief clinical investigator of the study. Gregory Pomper, M.D., assistant professor of pathology and the director of the Wake Forest Baptist blood bank, will oversee the blood banking portion of the study.

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