Rakhma

The story

Rakhma is an unrecognized village in the Yeruham area, divided into three parts: on the two sides of Route 204 at the northern exit from Yeruham in the direction of Dimona, beside Route 224 at the northwestern exit, and east of the industrial zone. Most of its residents occupy themselves with agriculture and the pasturing of flocks, and some of them work in Yeruham. The residents of the village are counted with the al-Azazma confederation, which before the founding of the state numbered tens of thousands of people and spread over the Negev highland, the Avdat area and the area of the Great Makhtesh. After the War of Independence thousands of the members of the tribe moved or were moved to Jordan, and in Rakhma about seventeen families remained; in the fifties and the sixties families of that same confederation were added to them, who were moved here from their areas of dwelling. In 1951 the immigrants' transit camp “Kfar Yeruham” was set up in the place, and at the beginning of the sixties the transit camp was demolished and the building of the town began. Since the establishment of the local committee in 2003 its members have worked for a planning regularization of the village. In 2014 the Yeruham local council and the Ramat Negev Regional Council agreed each to reduce its area of jurisdiction in favor of the establishment of a new locality for the dispersion of Yeruham, and in 2015 the plan was frozen. In 2016 and in 2017 the establishment of a center of essential services in the village was approved, with an elementary school in it; its establishment is delayed because the area designated for it lies on the margins of a firing zone. In the village live about a thousand residents, in about one hundred and fourteen compounds of extended families gathered in fourteen clusters.

• Bedouin
• Communities
• Yeruham