With an objective of keeping Mahatma Gandhi’s concept of the village as the basic unit of development, Indian leaders who were exploring ways to implement the socialist ideals of the Sarvodaya movement namely, Bhoodan and Gramdan’, made several visits to Israel to study the social structure of different forms of Israel’s communal and cooperative institutions — Kibbutzim and Moshavim’.

Jayaprakash Narayan, the leader of the Sarvodaya movement, visited Israel in Sept 1958 on a nine-day visit as the guest of Histadrut, the Israel Federation of Labour. His visit received wide attention in Israeli media, which warmly welcomed him and carried long biographical articles.