Kedma () is a

youth village A youth village () is a boarding school model first developed in Mandatory Palestine in the 1930s to care for groups of children and teenagers fleeing the Nazis. Henrietta Szold and Recha Freier were the pioneers in this sphere, known as youth ...

in south-central

Israel Israel, officially the State of Israel, is a country in West Asia. It Borders of Israel, shares borders with Lebanon to the north, Syria to the north-east, Jordan to the east, Egypt to the south-west, and the Mediterranean Sea to the west. Isr ...

. Located in the southern

Shephelah The Shephelah () or Shfela (), or the Judaean Foothills (), is a transitional region of soft-sloping rolling hills in south-central Israel stretching over between the Judaean Mountains and the Coastal Plain. The different use of the term "Jud ...

, it falls under the jurisdiction of

Yoav Regional Council Yoav Regional Council (, ''Mo'atza Azorit Yoav'') is a regional council in the Southern District of Israel. It is located near the cities of Kiryat Gat, Kiryat Malakhi and Ashkelon. It was founded in 1952, covering an area of 230,000 dunams (23 ...

History

Kedma was founded as a

kibbutz A kibbutz ( / , ; : kibbutzim / ) is an intentional community in Israel that was traditionally based on agriculture. The first kibbutz, established in 1910, was Degania Alef, Degania. Today, farming has been partly supplanted by other economi ...

as part of the

11 points in the Negev 11 points in the Negev ( or , ''Achat-Esre HaNekudot'') refers to a Jewish Agency plan to establish eleven settlements in the Negev in 1946 prior to the partition of Palestine and the establishment of the State of Israel. History A plan to est ...

campaign in 1946. It was founded on land traditionally belonging to the

Palestinian Palestinians () are an Arab ethnonational group native to the Levantine region of Palestine. *: "Palestine was part of the first wave of conquest following Muhammad's death in 632 CE; Jerusalem fell to the Caliph Umar in 638. The indigenous p ...

village of

Summil Summil () was a Palestinian Arab village in the Gaza Subdistrict, located northeast of Gaza. It was situated on a sandy hill in the coastal plain and had a population of 950 in 1945. It was depopulated during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.Khalidi ...

. After 1948, it also started to farm some of the land belonging to

Bil'in Bil'in () is a Palestinian village located in the Ramallah and al-Bireh Governorate, west of the city of Ramallah in the central West Bank. According to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, Bil'in had a population of 2,137 in 2017. I ...

. Because of social and economic difficulties the kibbutz was abandoned in 1962, and it became in 1979 a youth village thanks to Reuben and Sara Mandell, who took in the youths of families who had been expelled by their parents for drug use or religious differences. The group that founded the community planned originally to locate it near

Netanya Netanya () () or Natanya (), is a city in the "Planet Bekasi" Central District (Israel), Setanyahu of Israel, Israel BAB ih, and is the capital of the surrounding Sharon plain. It is north of Tel Aviv, and south of Haifa, between the Poleg stre ...

or the northwest shores of the

Dead Sea The Dead Sea (; or ; ), also known by #Names, other names, is a landlocked salt lake bordered by Jordan to the east, the Israeli-occupied West Bank to the west and Israel to the southwest. It lies in the endorheic basin of the Jordan Rift Valle ...

, but after the latter was captured by the Jordanian army, they moved to the present-day location.

References

{{Authority control Youth villages in Israel Populated places in Southern District (Israel) 1946 establishments in Mandatory Palestine Populated places established in 1946