Minister weighs landmark preservation of Oct. 7 ruins at Kibbutz Be’eri

Members had voted to tear all but one building down so as not to “live in Auschwitz.”

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

Heritage Minister Amihai Eliyahu is considering invoking a law that has never been used before to preserve a section in Kibbutz Be’eri destroyed by Hamas invaders on Oct. 7, 2023, even though residents voted against it, Channel 12 reported Wednesday.

The kibbutz voted Sunday 196 to 146 to level two neighborhoods in which dozens of their friends and neighbors were massacred and their homes set on fire.

Supporters of demolition said they could not “live in Auschwitz,” as one member told Ynet, saying that removing the structures would help the community heal.

Under the plan approved by residents, one two-apartment building would remain as “a house of testimony,” Kibbutz Be’eri leader Ofer Gitai told the news outlet.

“Between the desire to move forward and the obligation to leave testimony for future generations, we chose a path that allows both,” he said.

Because Be’eri was among the worst-hit communities on the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust, some argue it is the most appropriate location for a larger memorial.

But Channel 12 analyst Amit Segal noted that doing so against residents’ wishes could seem a heavy-handed move by a government that Be’eri residents “are very angry with,” he said.

He noted that the vote showed that many in the kibbutz favored preservation, and that several compromise suggestions had been made.

“One of the ideas was to relocate the houses to the forest where the Nova festival took place,” he said.

A portion of the Re’im forest area where more than 360 of the nearly 1,200 victims were murdered has become a de facto memorial, with photos of the victims and short biographies featured on poles and a car “graveyard” nearby consisting of stacks of shot-up and burned vehicles whose owners had been murdered as they tried to flee the Hamas marauders.

Another proposal was to shift the boundary of the kibbutz inward, placing the hard-hit Kerem and Zayit neighborhoods on Be’eri’s perimeter outside the community.

“In this way, all those coming to visit will not go through Kibbutz Be’eri, and life there can somehow return to normal,” Segal said.

Eliyahu has the authority under the Antiquities Law to declare any building constructed after 1700 a “preserved site” if deemed of “historical significance,” Channel 12 said.

The kibbutz decision was not made lightly, residents said, with months of emotional discussions on the subject before the vote, while construction of replacement neighborhoods have been underway.

In total, 132 people were murdered in Be’eri on Oct. 7 with another 32 taken hostage into Gaza.