When a Community Has to Be Built Again: Designing Homes for Beeri |
Every once in a while, one project comes along that shifts everything. This is the Beeri project.
In November 2023 just a month after October 7, I got on a plane with a few hundred evacuated residents from the towns on the Gaza border area – the ones that had been hit hardest, lost loved ones, and were displaced from their homes. While their lives and homes were totally shattered, a generous donor chartered a plane to fly them to Budapest for a few days to watch the Israel national soccer team compete.
I was lucky and blessed to staff this mission of incredible people, and there I connected with them, and immediately after, I created a team of interior designers like myself to work on their destroyed homes pro bono.
A Community That Was Planning a Future
Before October 7th, Kibbutz Beeri was already looking ahead. New neighborhoods were being marketed, land was being plotted, families were signing on. Like most kibbutzim in Israel, Beeri had that particular quality of life that’s hard to describe if you didn’t grow up with it — pastoral, quiet, fields that stretch out in every direction, the kind of place where kids ride bikes until dark and everyone feels like cousins. The new neighborhood was supposed to be an expansion of all of that. More families, more life, more future.
So many families were already living in temporary caravans, waiting for the build to begin.
Then October 7th happened.
You already know what happened at Beeri. It was one of the hardest-hit communities in the massacre. 132 murdered lives, homes terrorized and burned to the ground, a community that had been a living, breathing heartbeat for decades was torn apart in hours. Barely getting out alive, families were evacuated first to the Dead Sea area, then moved again, and again, eventually settling temporarily. Multiple displacements. Multiple times packing up whatever you could carry and starting over somewhere unfamiliar.
And then, in the middle of all of that grief and uncertainty, Beeri made an announcement: the building is moving forward. Ready or not.
A Decision That Felt Impossible
The project moved forward like any other building-on-paper project in Israel: take the standard package, or customize the interior layout and design.
The decision-making process was close to impossible for so many of the families. Choosing between bathroom tile options and refrigerator models felt absurd and disconnected.
Why would it matter what the shower looks like when the world you knew no longer exists? When so many people you loved were brutally murdered or kidnapped and are now gone? The cognitive and emotional distance between “which door handle do you prefer” and “I am surviving what happened to me” is so vast that it is not even fathomable. And most people in the design and construction industry don’t account for that.
I had to........