When Plastic Was the High-Tech of the Kibbutzim

Long before IKEA, Toleman’s, Habitat or even Keter, we ate, drank and furnished our homes with colorful, simple, cheerful plastic items produced at the Tama factory, products of Mishmar HaEmek, a pioneer of industrial design in the Jezreel Valley. These items are remnants of an Israeli design and art adventure of which almost no trace remains. Even if you never ate a soft-boiled egg from an egg cup, you certainly washed dishes in army dining halls during basic training and encountered the blue plastic cups for dairy and the yellow or orange ones for meat in military dining halls. Indeed, until the 1980s, the most common plastic utensils in kibbutzim, dining halls, picnics and airplanes were made by Tama, in a modern blue-and-white design.

"Back then it was the high-tech of the era. Industry in the kibbutzim was always based on technological progress, and plastic was at the forefront. The industries in the kibbutzim tried to produce substitutes for noble materials that did not exist in the country. Plaster replaced marble, veneer replaced wood and plastic replaced ceramics אצלנו," says Dafna Doron, a Mishmar HaEmek kibbutz member, art curator and also an employee in the kibbutz management office. On a joint tour, we delved into the history and archive of these plastic objects, preserved in the Kibbutz Museum and the factory archive. "Unfortunately, only in recent years did people realize that these items need to be preserved, documented and displayed. In the meantime, they even appeared in an exhibition at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, ('1965 Today,' in 2015), which led us to begin collecting them for the Kibbutz Museum, many of them having already been thrown away and lost."

It is not only their retro look, in the mid-century modern style, with a connection to the Space Age design of the 1950s and 1960s and the advertisements of the past, but also the fact that they were created in the State of Israel and are tied to its development, history and culture. Despite the simple design that suited the austerity period, it is hard not to admire the ambition behind founding a factory in the young State of Israel by members of Mishmar HaEmek, from the Hashomer Hatzair kibbutzim. Tama was founded in 1950 with the intention of serving as a source of income for the kibbutz, and it also had a communal aspect, providing employment for the kibbutz’s veteran members. Among Tama’s founders was the painter Yitzhak Ben Menachem (1903-1969), a graphic artist and poster designer for Hashomer Hatzair, who designed Tama’s first logo.

At Tama, they produced light, glossy, durable and very easy-to-clean items in large quantities from melamine, a hard plastic material molded in forms. The main design shift came in 1956, when Tama purchased the "Ornamin" patent from a Swiss company, a technology that made it possible to mold melamine and print on it, creating beautiful, colorful and durable promotional objects. The factory’s financial situation began to improve, and Mishmar HaEmek artists Yitzhak Ben Menachem and Hillel Pesach Pesel took part in designing the items. In 1958, one of Tama’s most striking items was created, a 10th anniversary plate for the State of Israel, designed by the artist Ora Ron Bentov, a Bezalel graduate and daughter of the kibbutz movement elite. Her father was Mordechai Bentov, one of the founders of Hashomer Hatzair and Mapam and editor of Al HaMishmar.

Although the utensils and the designs printed on them looked very Israeli, the overwhelming majority were ready-made templates and designs purchased as decals in Europe. Since the Ornamin patent was also marketed to factories abroad in the 1960s, the same graphics can still be found today on products made in England, France, Canada, the Netherlands and Switzerland.

Today, the Tama Group is a manufacturing company specializing in packaging products and agricultural protection materials. It is owned by the kibbutzim of Mishmar HaEmek and Galed, and is one of the largest kibbutz industrial companies in Israel. The company has production plants in Poland, Hungary, Brazil and Italy. It has registered many patents for the production of nets, fibers and synthetic ropes in the field of agricultural mechanization.

For most of its life, the utensils factory struggled economically, and only at the end of the 1990s did a revolution take place at the plant that brought Mishmar HaEmek financial stability. It did not happen in product design, but in agricultural technology. "The real breakthrough came when Tama hit its golden economic egg, agricultural wrapping production," Doron explains. "In cooperation with John Deere, we invented the round, breathable plastic wraps that encase hay as it is collected by tractors. Utensil design became very secondary. Tama still produces designed and safe household plastic items under the Tama Home brand, but today what leads is agricultural high-tech, TamaNet. Just as the kibbutzim once led, already from their earliest days, mechanized agriculture, the kibbutz’s concept of technological progress continues."