‘Kibbutz Buchenwald’ is the name chosen by a group of Jewish survivors who came together after their liberation from the Buchenwald concentration camp with the goal of establishing a kibbutz in the land of Israel. The group was formed through agricultural training farms in Germany and in Israel until they established Kibbutz Netzer Sereni in June 1948.

One week after the group was established, on June 11, 1945, the members began to write a shared journal, beginning in Yiddish and continuing in Hebrew, which they wrote consistently over a decade. Writing in their shared journal provided them with a means through which to deal with the trauma they had lived through and to refashion their identities and their lives. The Kibbutz Buchenwald journal is an exceptional collective work that presents the dreams and considerations of the group members in real time through their process of rehabilitation and construction, against the background of post-war Europe and in the period preceding the establishment of the state of Israel.

The journal was carefully preserved by the group members for 80 years, but until recently only a few individuals knew about it and only selected passages were translated. In this volume, for the first time, the complete work is published in Hebrew translation.

here is the full journal of the first three years (from June 1945 to June 1948), including the members’ biographies, scanned pages of the journal, its translation, historical photographs, maps and notes.

Lilach Naishtat's book "Rebuilding Together: The story of Kibbutz Buchenwald Diary" (HaKibbutz HaMeuchad and Yad Tabenkin Press, 2025) presents the annotated diary from its first day, on June 11, 1945, in Egendorf, Germany, through the group’s immigration to Israel on September 9, 1945.