Back to Be'eri, this time for its 'desert' Gruyere
A visit to the kibbutz dairy, with cheesemakers wracked by sadness but still making their goudas and blue cheese, manchego and 'desert' gruyere
I keep attempting to work on an article I need to write, since spending last Thursday in Kibbutz Be’eri, one of the southern kibbutzim with hundreds of residents who were massacred or taken hostage on October 7, their homes burned and torched, their lives changed forever.
The article is about one of the businesses at Be’eri, a band of artisanal cheesemakers who built a small but successful dairy that was launched on the kibbutz some 25 years ago, and which was deeply affected by the Hamas attack.
For weeks, I sent Whatsapp texts and voice messages to the lead cheesemaker, Dagan Peleg, who, it turns out, was the Be’eri resident who first got the cheesemaking business off the ground.
But, like many survivors of October 7, he’s struggling to figure out his life, evacuated from his home, temporarily living in a kibbutz outside Jerusalem while working back at Be’eri, but commuting hours each day and, I imagine, not always sure he feels like sharing his story with reporters or influencers or tourist missions.
I’d spent a lot of time over the last months thinking about the Be’eri Dairy, as one of the cheesemakers, Dror Or, figured so prominently in the ongoing hostage crisis. On October 7, Dror Or’s wife, Yonat, was killed, her body found only a few days later. Dror and two of his three children, Noam, 17 and Alma, 13, were presumed hostage. Their older brother was away that weekend, in the north where he was attending a mechina, a pre-army year-long program.
When Noam and Alma were released at the end of November after 50 days of captivity, as part of the week-long hostage deal, Dror, one of the many men and fathers still held in Gaza at the time, wasn’t part of the deal.
It took until May for the army to determine that Dror had also been killed on October 7, and his body taken hostage to Gaza, where it still remains.
But for all those months in between, the posters of Dror Or were everywhere, raised in protests and rallies, along with the visages of all the other 251 hostages, the number of which has been whittled down to 120, after some 100 were released in November, a handful were rescued and others have been identified as killed on October 7 or in captivity.
Throughout that time, I kept hearing about the Be’eri cheeses, and wondered why I had never visited the Be’eri Dairy in all my years of writing about artisanal cheeses and cheesemakers. (Ditto for the Be’eri Gallery, which I can only hope will one day return to its location on the kibbutz, after being temporarily relocated to Tel Aviv.)
During these last months, as we volunteered at the Castel Winery, and would sometimes bring our visiting friends for a taste of the wines at the visitor’s center after working in the vineyard, we would order one of the cheese boards and sample the Be’eri cheeses served. Dror’s photo and story are visibly displayed at Castel. Be’eri cheeses are also served at Agur Winery, where I interviewed the owners a few weeks ago, as part of a wine event taking part in the Mate Yehuda region.
At some point, I figured out who was running Be’eri Dairy and made contact with Dagan. I initially wanted to get down to Be’eri before Shavuot, in order to hear his story and get a sense of what Shavuot would possibly be like this year, given that it’s such a dairy-focused holiday that is also one of the most centered on kibbutz life, with the focus on harvests and the pastoral life.
That didn’t happen. But Dagan was responding to my texts and eventually we set a day and time.
The drive to Be’eri was hard, harder than the last time I did it, probably because I was alone this time. I passed so many of the landmarks that are now familiar from the terrible events of October 7, communities that were attacked and invaded by Hamas, field shelters that held those trying to hide, ditches and trees that presumably were part of some peoples’ escape routes on that day, or where they were killed by terrorists.
There are small signs of destruction, like curbs that are broken and crumbling, presumably from the warfare of that day, or roadside memorials, set up by families or friends of those killed.
I got to Be’eri around 9:30 am last week and found my way into the dairy, which is attached to the dining hall and kitchen complex. Dagan and I ended up sitting in the dining hall for more than an hour, as the kitchen staff set out lunch and a group of army officers sat at a nearby table.
The interview went like so many others; Dagan told me his story and the history of the Be’eri Dairy, started as an offshoot of the kitchen by him, as he learned to make simple cheeses for the kibbutz meals. The process grew and changed and he eventually brought in two partners, Yaakov and Dror, who had trained as a chef and married Yonat, Be’eri born and bred, but was working in the Be’eri printing press at the time.
Dagan and I moved our conversation over to the offices and storerooms of the dairy, where his surviving partner, Yaakov, was packing up slabs of Gouda. I met Tom, another kibbutz member who’s been making Be’eri’s first wines and is filling in at the dairy right now, helping out with the cheesemaking. His mother, Galit, was killed on October 7, and he and his young family are evacuated to a hotel in the Dead Sea, like so many other Be’eri families.
But despite the pervading sadness about Dror, and the losses that surround each of them, Tom opened a bottle of his wine, and Dagan laid out some cheeses and we stood in the breezy walkway between the kibbutz kitchen and the dairy, drinking a chilled rose and noshing on the herb-flecked Gouda and some blue cheese. We laughed and chatted and talked about everything besides October 7 in those moments.
I left Be’eri after a couple of hours with Dagan and his workmates, having heard many stories about their cheeses, their history, and everything that happened before October 7 as well as what they’re thinking about now and planning.
And as I usually do, I began thinking about the lede paragraphs of the story as I drove home, in between phone calls and podcasts and all the ways I fill the time spent in the car.
I brought home a bag stuffed full of Be’eri cheeses that we’ve been eating over the last week, sharing with anyone who comes in the house, smearing the blue cheese on my sourdough, slicing Gouda onto pears and apples.
For some reason, I’m finding it hard to actually sit down and write this story, even though I plan on working on it each day. I look at my notes and I’ve transcribed the audio, but I can’t seem to get myself to really dig into it.
I think about Dror Or and his wife Yonat, who had her own boutique furniture business in Be’eri, both of them murdered, their lives taken from them and their children. I think about their three teenage kids, orphaned, surely being loved and cared for by family but how are they supposed to go on? And I think about Dagan Peleg, who loved his work with Dror, and appreciated their work process, because they always had different opinions, and felt so grateful what they built together with their other partner, Yaakov.
I’ll write the article because I want to tell their story and have readers understand this one small section of Be’eri and how it was so deeply affected by the events of October 7. I’ll write it because I want to share what I heard, and have it known beyond our world here in Israel, where it’s a known entity.
And as always with this Substack, for which I’m so grateful, writing this piece has made it that much easier to move ahead with the Times of Israel piece, and that’s a good thing.
Wow! My emotions are deep from your vivid descriptions. You draw a picture in words while driving there, your time there and your struggles to write the article for work. What a gift you have to allow the reader to “ be with you “ no matter what you are experiencing.
I ache for their losses, their sadness and their grief and I rejoice in their resolve to keep living and working amidst their deep emotions and in the locations where they first experienced their pains.
Thank you Jessica for sharing your talents with us all.
Beautiful story, wonderful look behind the scenes of how these resilient Be’eri residents whose lives were upended in unimaginable ways are carrying on one batch of delicious sounding cheese at a time .