The Mysterious Kibbutz

The people of the Pardailhan kibbutz are celebrating New Year's this week, though the wind howls cold in their unheated rooms and the food in the larder is plain. The week before, there had been a Christmas tree for the children and toys around it, and some sober merrymaking. In fact, there was more Christmas at Pardailhan than in all the other kibbutzim in the world combined. Pardailhan is not in Israel but in Southern France, and its members are not Jews.

Some say that they are Protestants without knowing it. They have been labeled practically everything from Quakers to Quixotes. The leader of Pardailhan once described his group as being "closely united by the same religion," but none of the members will say what it is.

Leave the Pebbles. Their way of life, however, is pioneer Israeli. Three years ago a Parisian metallurgical engineer named Vincent Thibout, then 33, took his pregnant wife, Therese, to Israel, where they spent 18 months in a kibbutz (collective). He learned how to farm and speak a fluent facsimile of Hebrew; he strews his talk with as many shalom as an ordinary Frenchman with alors.

In Israel, Thibout became convinced that kibbutz communalism "plus Judaism" was the way of moral and material life that he had been looking for. After becoming a Jew himself, he returned to the eleventh arrondissement of Paris and began talking it up. He and his friends took to meeting on Sundays, wrote 2,000 letters to local authorities in farmed-out, underpopulated areas in France. Finally they settled on Pardailhan, near Nimes, and 89 of them pooled their funds ($40,000) and took up residence last spring.

The neighboring peasants were amazed. The Parisians had rented 900 unfertile acres. "When we cleared away huge amounts of pebbles," recalls Vincent's great uncle, Chief Farmer Abel Thibout, "the peasants shook their heads and said, 'Don't remove them; they shade the soil and help the crops grow.' " But in eight months the city kibbutzers had cleared 185 acres and planted potatoes, beans, barley and other grains. Their potato crop astonished local government agriculture experts, and they have done so well with their other crops that government agencies have lent them better land, banks are considering loans, and property values in the neighborhood are on the rise.

Star of David. The kibbutz is run along strict Israeli lines; members carry no money, present lists of their personal requirements, are assigned to the day's work groups as the need arises. The nine babies live in the communal nursery; parents are allowed to take them home and play with them for an hour each evening and on Sunday afternoons.

Founder Vincent Thibout had himself and his young son, Israel, circumcised when he was in Israel, but his followers emphatically deny that they are Jews or even judaisants--Jewish sympathizers.

"We accept some and reject other aspects of Judaism," they explain. "But we do the same with Christianity." Some visitors from the Jewish community in Beziers, 25 miles southeast, reported seeing a floral design in the form of a Star of David on the ground in front of the settlement's common room, and an engraving of Moses on the office wall. Like Orthodox Jews in the synagogue, men and women are seated separately in the common room. But, says a local priest, "these are people who are seeking the truth, and for the moment occupy a no man's land between Christianity and Judaism."

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