Nevatim

The story

Nevatim is a moshav in the northern Negev, about eight kilometers east of Beersheba, and one of the 11 points that were established together in the region. It was founded on 6 October 1946, at the close of Yom Kippur, on the lands of “Madsus” that the Jewish National Fund had bought, by immigrants from Iraq of the “Nevatim” garin and a minority from Europe; their base of departure was the Beit Eshel observation outpost, which had been set up three years earlier. Its history is a sequence of garinim that broke. In March–April 1947 the garin fell apart for lack of budget and some of its members moved to Beit Eshel; among them Aharon Mukhtar, who was murdered in August 1947 while traveling on an Arab bus from Gaza to Beersheba. A garin of immigrants from Romania that was brought in its place also broke up, and in August 1947 the place was manned by a third body, also from Romania, which held it together with Palmach men until November 1948. In the War of Independence the moshav was part of the “Beit Eshel — Nevatim bloc”, cut off from the rest of the Negev. On 17 December 1947 it was attacked by about three hundred men, and from nearby Beit Eshel a light aircraft that had landed there to evacuate a wounded man took off to its aid: to it were tied a machine gun with its muzzle pointing downward and bunches of grenades tied to one another, so that a single pin releases them all. After the IDF entered Beersheba the group broke up and the place was abandoned for about two months. Then a garin of the “Alexander” movement arrived, new immigrants from Hungary, who built the permanent settlement in its present place — about two kilometers from the temporary site, adjoining the Mandate road to Beersheba — with houses of clay in it. In the years 1952–1953 most of the settlers left, after heavy debts, drought, a plague of locusts and thefts. In April 1954 a group of sixty immigrant families from Cochin gathered at Sha'ar HaAliyah, and toward the end of May they settled at Nevatim; in order to clear a place for them the Agency evacuated the last of the Hungarians. The transition from a tropical climate to a desert climate was a challenge for them, and a team of instructors trained them for moshav life. They chose not to change the name of the moshav, and planted apricots and olives and afterwards flourishing rose farms.

• 1948
• Communities
• People
• War