Most of the Jews who have emigrated…

Most of the Jews who have emigrated to Palestine from Europe live a more secular lifestyle than those whose forebears have for generations lived in Palestine, and are committed to the goals of creating a Jewish nation and building a modern, independent Jewish state.

One such colonist, David Gruen, is the son of Victor Gruen, one of the leaders in Plonsk of the "Lovers of Zion."

By his mid-teens, David led a Zionist youth group, "Ezra," whose members spoke only Hebrew among themselves, and at the age of eighteen he became a teacher in a Warsaw Jewish school and joined the Poale Zion.

Fascinated by Zionism, he has become convinced that the first step for the Jews who want to revive Israel as a nation is to immigrate to Palestine and settle here as farmers.

The twenty-year-old Gruen arrives in Palestine in 1906 and will work for several years as a farmer in the Jewish agricultural settlements in the coastal plain, where he will adopt the ancient Hebrew name Ben-Gurion.