Temple Sinai Looks to Partner with Kibbutz Be’eri
Trip planned by Sandy Springs congregation later this year to the Israel community devastated by Hamas terrorist attacks.
Kibbutz Be’eri was once the picture of a perfect Israeli community. Established in the Western Negev just before the partition of Palestine in 1948, it flourished. Its residents lived in neat rows of homes, with red tiled roofs. Flowers grew along the paths that wound through the well-tended streets. The 1,200 residents who lived there treated one another like an extended family with a strong sense of community.
Over the years, a well-equipped printing house was established. All of the country’s drivers licenses and credit cards were printed there. Outside its gates, miles of rich and verdant farmland stretched to the east. Acres of avocados hung heavily from trees nearby.
While other collectivist communities struggled with bankruptcy and privatization, Kibbutz Be’eri remained a strong and a widely admired ideal. Despite its close proximity to the Gaza Strip, just three miles away, it was said to have had a long waiting list of young couples eager to start married life there.
But all that changed in the early hours of Oct. 7, 2023, when 3,000 Hamas terrorists swept across the border and into Kibbutz Be’eri and several other border communities. In a matter of hours, 102 people in the kibbutz were murdered. They ranged in age from an infant of 10 months to an 88-year-old widow. Most were shot point blank. Thirty-one others were kidnapped and taken back to Gaza. An entire neighborhood of 120 homes was destroyed and 13 of the community’s buildings were devastated.
At a Sunday morning brunch in the Temple Sinai Learning Center in Sandy Springs earlier this year, an audience of about 60 sat silently listening to Nieve Higgins, who was born in the kibbutz, recount that terrible day — how his aunt had died, how his kindergarten teacher had perished, and how his former boss and mentor had his life ended on that day. Miraculously, most of his family survived in the kibbutz, as did he, safely living in a Tel Aviv suburb when the attack came.
“I don’t think there’s ever been something quite similar to this,” he said on the Zoom call with Temple Sinai, “where a close community, in a Western kind of society, loses so much in one day.”
But his talk that morning was not to go over, yet again, the losses he suffered, but to enlist the Temple Sinai community in the rebuilding process.
“There’s a grand rebuilding campaign, we are rebuilding a new medical clinic, as well as the bookkeeping offices that were burned to the ground. We don’t want to just bring Kibbutz Be’eri back from Oct. 7. We want to make it better. We want to encourage young families to come back to the kibbutz and raise their kids with a sense of freedom and security.”
The Israeli government has appropriated $100 million for new homes to be built and is housing 800 of the former residents in a hastily constructed community 45 minutes away, but Nieve Higgins believes that’s just a start. He is part of an organization called We Are All Be’eri, which is aimed at creating support and raising a rebuilding fund to supplement government grants.
We don’t want to just bring Kibbutz Be’eri back from Oct. 7. We want to make it better.
Temple Sinai has started a committee to strengthen ties between itself and those working to rebuild Kibbutz Be’eri. It’s chaired by Steve Gerson, a retired CPA, who visited Israel last year, saw the destruction and devastation at the kibbutz and came away with a determination to do more.
“I never felt a sense of powerlessness, if anything, I felt reinvigorated with strengthened commitment. Unfortunately, as they say, it’s not our first rodeo. This is the story of our people. And somehow, over the ages, we’ve survived, and we’ll survive this one,” Gerson said.
Rabbi Natan Trief, who works on adult education at the temple, hosted the discussion about the kibbutz and is advising Gerson’s committee about what comes next. He recently returned from a trip to Israel with other educational leaders from the temple who visited Kibbutz Be’eri and learned firsthand about the community that is rising from the ashes.
During a visit he affixed to an educational building at the kibbutz a mezuzah that had been created by a member of the congregation as part of his Bar Mitzvah preparation. It was, he said, “like a gesture of solidarity with the global Jewish people.”
“I think it amplifies and it brings to life the idea of Jewish peoplehood in a way that nothing else can The congregation is planning a trip to Israel, probably close to Chanukah to spend a couple of days on the kibbutz, whether that’s to show solidarity or to help rebuild is yet to be worked out, but we have a place and address to go to.”
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