Lake Yeruham

The story

Lake Yeruham is a water reservoir created by a dam in the channel of Nahal Revivim, and it fills from floodwaters. The dam stands at the point where Nahal Revivim leaves the Yeruham valley and cuts westward into the Yeruham ridge, after the meeting of the channels of Nahal Revivim, Nahal Yeruham and Nahal Shualim. It was built in the first half of the nineteen-fifties, as part of an experimental stage of a national project that examined the creation of dozens of storage lakes across the country; nine lakes were built within it, among them the Netofa reservoir and the Beit Zayit reservoir. The construction, by the Tahal company, began in the summer of 1952 and lasted a little more than a year. In the first winter a large quantity of water was stored which seeped away and disappeared; in the summer of 1954 sealing works were done, and since then the seepage was slow enough to hold water through most of the summer months. The water was intended for irrigating the fields of the kibbutzim of Ramat HaNegev — Mashabei Sadeh and Revivim — and flowed in a pipe from the dam to the fields from May 1955 until the end of 1981. The dam was built with no connection at all to the Tel Yeruham transit camp that arose nearby in those very years: the water of the lake was not intended for the transit camp, which stood some tens of meters above the level of the surface of the lake. Only in the nineteen-seventies was the area of the lake included within the jurisdiction of Yeruham, and only at the beginning of the two-thousands did it pass to the responsibility of the local council. The lake and the park around it are a focus for birdwatching, and the "Duchifat" center operates in them with a bird-ringing point.

• Water and wells
• Industry
• Yeruham