Belonging to a social group is essential to build identity; to be part of a specific social group includes to familiarise oneself with rituals, rules, and norms of being together. The Youth Movement Blue-White (1912-1926) installed known rituals from other movements like hiking to educate the body, they applied rules on weekly meetings, and informed its members on Jewish life course creating a community. Those practices should help youth to gain strength to follow Zionist ideas. This highly normative notion of education can be analysed in terms of emancipation from ascriptions and self-attributions as decadent bourgeoisie living.

But the relationship to others is built on emotions, too: when we express feelings and emotions we refer to a relationship to others (Burkitt 2014). In this sense, emotions are no longer just individual but become ‘social currents’ (Durkheim 1915; Burkitt 2005). In that case the Blue-White movement not only provides an emancipation from urban living but also from other movements by creating a certain emotional climate (Kanyangara et al. 2007): It was not an education for the stronger (moving) body alone, by using a passionate language leaders of Blue-White strove to create an emotional climate that helped the youth to refer to collective feeling and to relate to one another. The presentation will focus on the ambivalent role of emotions in this setting: emotions are a medium of communicating ideas and thinking of emotions in this way makes them subject to conventions (Scheer 2012). At the same time engaging in certain emotional practices hold the potential to emancipate from (other) social fabric.