Hatzerim

The story

Hatzerim is a kibbutz west of Beersheba, in the Bnei Shimon Regional Council. Its name symbolizes the life of the shepherds in the sheep-rearing enclosures of the western Negev. It was founded at the close of Yom Kippur of the year 1946, on the lands of Qalta, as part of the operation of the 11 points, by the Scouts' Training Group Gimel. Garin Gimel of the Scouts numbered about one hundred and fifty members who were divided into two groups and were enlisted in the Palmach in mobilized training groups in 1944 and in 1945; they served in various companies in battalions 1 and 3, mainly at Afikim and at Genigar, and after their discharge they took part in the founding of the kibbutz. After the founding about fifty people lived here. In the War of Independence the kibbutz was besieged, and contact with it was kept by wireless and by an Auster Autocrat aircraft that brought supplies; one position from that period still stands in it. At the center of the kibbutz is the security house — the first permanent building put up here, completed in March 1947, its walls of concrete twenty centimeters thick with firing slits in them, and it was intended to serve as a last defensive stronghold. On its wall is a relief of Moshe Shaluah, “Musa”, one of the founders of Hatzerim, a field guard and an intelligence man of the Negev Brigade: at one of his meetings with an Arab informant he was shot from an ambush on 24 September 1948 and was killed, and his grave was the first in the kibbutz. At the beginning of the 1950s the kibbutz fell into a crisis, when it was discovered that the lands on which it sat were saline and not suited to agriculture. After many discussions, among them attempts at persuasion by Levi Eshkol who came to the place, it was decided to stay and to wash the lands; the affair is known by the name “the salt crisis”. In 2000 the Sculpture Route was made outside the kibbutz, the work of the artist Marga Fishtein and her husband Israel.

• 1948
• War
• People
• Water and wells