Remembering Gershon Fradkin

Gershon established a natural and close connection between the training system that dealt with the problems of Israeli farmers and the farmers from developing countries. In the 1960s and 1970s a special system of Israeli agricultural extension training was created, and many of its elements were successfully adapted in the developing countries.

The Foreign Training Department (later called CINADCO, Ministry of Agriculture) dealt mainly with training and extension, organizing courses in Israel for foreign students as well as on-the-spot courses. Gershon Fradkin was responsible for and very successful at implementing this system that generally emphasized the dissemination of training methods and techniques, on the one hand, and a specific professional subject, from the field of crop production, animal husbandry, irrigation, plant protection or production economics, on the other.

Gershon played an essential role in promoting the concept that Israel has a lot to share with the developing world given its location in an arid and subtropical climatic region and the combination of possessing abundant advanced cultivation techniques and extraordinary experts. He was able to recruit funds from countries highly interested in agricultural development in the developing world but lacking experts and climatic compatibility, mainly Germany and the Netherlands, which eventually granted funds for foreign aid through the Foreign Training Department.

Difficult and sometimes unglorified work is needed to organize the courses in Israel and around the world, hosting the participants and maintaining open communication with instructors and agricultural institutions in Israel. Nevertheless there is no doubt about the great contribution of these courses to agricultural development and especially to the personal development of the participants. For many of them, their visit to Israel is the first time outside their country. Their Israeli hosts are professionals who do not share other countries' colonial approach. And they are exposed to a new practical, informal and warm approach.

Gershon Fradkin travelled throughout the world and knew at first hand the problems of agricultural development, and he shared this knowledge, experience and vision in his book, written with David Macarov ("The Short Course in Development Training," 1973). He saw in each student a protege and showered them with true fatherly love.

The seed planted by this work can be seen in every corner of the world. Many years of systematic work in Israel and around the world trained hundreds and thousands of students from developing countries. I have encountered such graduates in the most remote and unexpected parts of the world. All of them remember the names of the places where they studied in Israel: Shefayim and the Ruppin Institute, as well as Gershon's name and those of their instructors even from 15 or 20 years ago. Many of these graduates today occupy lofty positions in their countries in various fields of economy and government. It seems that the training they received in Israel was excellent because all of them are today ambassadors of good will and feel that the State of Israel contributed significantly to their personal and their country's development.

Gershon Fradkin orchestrated this sensitive and important work for many years and he deserves the gratitude of his colleagues in Israel. That of the graduates he received during all his working years and well after.

For 25 years Gershon was Director of the Foreign Training Department and when I look back remembering the most characteristic traits of his personality, I think that there is one thing which strongly expresses his involvement and commitment to his work. Often when people would ask him what his hobby was he would answer: "I am a very lucky man - my work is my hobby."

Indeed, agriculture, people and extension for him were values which meant a great deal. When he came to lecture to the trainees of the international courses he used to present himself first of all as a farmer, saying: "I am a farmer and my father was a farmer." This for him was the most precious title of all. And then he would simplify the essence of his teaching by showing the palm of his hand, explaining the meaning of the five fingers: "5 F - Farmer - Family - Friend - Farm - Future." In the centre of all development efforts stands the farmer and his family who are our friends and together we need to improve his farm in order to create a better future.

His direct and simple approach reached the hearts of all participants, regardless their language, and inspired them deeply. His was a sort of fatherly attitude toward the trainees which opened channels of communication for his ideas. Maybe one of the reasons he had such an effect on them was the genuine way in which he lived his life and shared it with all those people who came from all over the world. Course participants, delegations and guests were all invited to Gershon's home in Moshav Yarkona where they were warmly received by him and his beloved wife Ruth, who took part in all activities as friend and full partner in this way of life - at home on their farm in the moshav and in the great labour of international cooperation. Guests would also meet his old mother who lived together with them and who had a very special personality, and of course his children and then his grandchildren.

I think that for many people, as for me, of all the things he did in his capacity as Director of the FTD, in the office, in the classroom, and many official events, this visit to Gershon's home was the most unique and inspiring. It was usually in the afternoon that the groups arrived at his home - very modest and warm and surrounded by a beautiful garden. We used to walk around and visit the moshav and then go back to the house, sit together under the pecan tree in the garden, at twilight time, sip fresh squeezed juice of grapefruit picked that morning and eat delicious, home-made cookies... and talk. There were questions about the moshav way of life, stories about the family and mostly his belief in simple, affordable innovations which can bring about important changes.

This harmony between Gershon's professional outlook and his way of life, shared in such an informal and warm encounter with other human beings, left an indelible impression which inspired us all.

Gershon's warm smile and ready sympathy made for immediate heart-to-heart contact wherever he went the world over. He had a knack for using down-to-earth words and simple stories to make his point. He felt equally at ease with subsistence farmers in Africa and with the heads of their newly-independent states.

Above all Gershon wanted to help people help themselves. He wanted to show them how to make big changes in their lives by simple means. This was the guiding principle in his work with new immigrants in the 1950s and his development of a training program for instructors for the new settlements in the Lachish area. From this there grew the idea that this experience might well be useful to the countries in Africa just then beginning to achieve independence, and the beginning of the Foreign Training Department which he established and headed for almost 25 years. As the scope of the program enlarged to include Asia, Latin America, the Middle East (Iran, Turkey, Cyprus), with courses given in exotic languages such as Persian and Turkish as well as English, French and Spanish, Gershon found himself crisscrossing the globe, everywhere to meet with potential or former students, to make plans for new courses in Israel or on-the-spot courses abroad. The direct personal contact, his openness and enthusiasm, won friends and disciples wherever he went.

After he retired Gershon's main concern became the subsistence farmers, for whom he felt nothing had been done. He wanted to help them climb one step upwards out of their hunger and poverty. All his efforts were directed at obtaining support for his program for using rural schools to help bring about change. This decade was enriched by a long chain of youngsters who stayed with us on the farm in Yarkona for various periods - including Friends World College students Kilonzo, Palapala, Dawit, Daniel and others - and some of these were helpful in promoting the program in Kenya and Ghana, to Gershon's great gratification. To the end, he was steadfast in his faith that this simple program could have brought about considerable change, if only given a real chance.

It was this continuing concern for others and never-ending enthusiasm that kept Gershon young to the very end of his 77 years. How to sum up the 45 years shared with this dreamer? A never-ending adventure for all of us, his family, as we tried to keep up with him in his leaps from idea to idea, from project to project. We are left with a rich inheritance.

Mr. Fradkin Goes to Students
( From Shalom Magazine, February 1962)

The Director of the Foreign Training Department of the Ministry of Agriculture, Mr. Gershon Fradkin, recently returned from Tanganyika and Kenya where he visited former students in the Seminars in agricultural extension work and cooperation. He wanted to see how they had progressed in the application of their studies in the seven months since their return. He was also able to gain first-hand knowledge of the problems and conditions of the two East African countries.

Despite heavy flooding in Kenya at the time of his visit, four of the students who had heard of his arrival managed to reach Mr. Fradkin. He was overjoyed to learn that a son born to one of the trainees was to be named "Gershon." In Tanganyika a former student travelled 550 miles with his wife and infant to see the teacher.

One field worker in cooperatives explained to Mr. Fradkin his difficulties in readjusting after studying abroad. At first he had spent a great deal of energy lecturing enthusiastically about the Israel cooperative movement in the hopes of influencing quick changes and enlarging existing Kenyan cooperatives. After initial discouragement when things did not move at a very fast pace the field worker realized it would be "far more profitable to work within his own cooperative society to effect changes gradually since it is unwise to destroy institutions and patterns before there is some concrete structure to take their place." Starting on a small scale he planned to "build a model from my family and farm."

An agricultural instructor now employed at a coffee research station in Moshi, Tanganyika, described the changes in his attitude. "At first I only talked and had an appalling lack of success with the ten farmers in my charge. Now I work with more than 100 farmers and am not ashamed to take tools in my hand - something I hadn't done for 12 years or more. I am able to talk to the farmers more effectively. I had to work by their side to gain their respect."

Mr. Fradkin said this is the point that was mentioned by almost all former students. For the first time they feel like instructors in their approach to local farmers. "They realize," he said, "that to teach, one must serve as an example."