Mazi Bachar
Mazi (Mazal) Bachar was born on December 24, 1959 in Nesher, a city on the foothills of Mt. Carmel. She was the firstborn of Eliyahu, of blessed memory, and Rachel. Since she was born on the eve of Hanukkah, her parents considered naming her either Orit (Light) in honor of the holiday or Mazal after Eliyahu's mother. In the end, they chose Mazal, yet the light of the holiday remained in her and radiated through the gentle kindness she showed everyone around.
When Mazi was a year old, the family moved to Kiryat Yam, where her sisters were born: Etti, two and a half years her junior, and Hagit, who was twelve years younger. Eliyahu worked for the Solel Boneh construction company while Rachel raised the girls, cleaned, cooked, and baked - the aromas of her Friday cakes traveling far and wide. The parents spoke Ladino at home, and Mazi picked it up, charmed by the humor and richness of the language. Even as an adult, she sometimes peppered conversations with amusing Ladino expressions remembered from childhood.
She was a very clever child, a good student who liked learning - a "nerd" as she referred to herself. Her homework was always done, her grades were always high, and her parents were always proud of her. As a serious bookworm, she would bring a book even to the dinner table and read until her mother scolded her. Sisters Etti and Hagit admired her, and if Etti sometimes interrupted her studies, it was only to get the attention of her beloved older sister.
Mazi attended the Amirim Primary School and the Rodman High School in Kiryat Yam, and though she was quiet and somewhat shy, she made good friendships that remained with her all her life. With her friends, she joined the HaNoar HaOved VeHaLomed (The Working and Studying Youth) youth movement, which may have been the source of her dream of living on a kibbutz – a shared life where the community becomes family. In the IDF, she was in the Nahal Brigade's Bereishit group, based in Kibbutz Ein Gev by Lake Kinneret. During leave from the army, she often visited her beloved Grandma Mazal for whom she was named. Grandma Mazal lived in Jaffa, and her gorgeous garden was famed for its unique plants and objects of beauty. Mazi inherited her grandmother's green thumb and love of plants, which she carried to her dying day. This love reflected her passion for beauty – for Mazi loved beautiful things. She recognized, needed, and created beauty. With a natural aesthetic inclination, she instinctively knew how to place items in space to form harmony.
Despite this attraction to design, Mazi chose to focus on education. She studied pedagogy at Oranim College after the army and returned to Ein Gev as a teacher. She taught history and Bible – two subjects that had always interested her – and when a few years later she received the offer to become a teacher in Be'eri, she accepted the challenge and redirected her life to the kibbutz that became her home.
Mazi adored Be'eri: its landscape and its people. The students she cared for in Be'eri never forgot her, many coming to visit even after graduation. She had endless patience and would explain things as many times as needed, always quietly and with a profound desire to convey knowledge. Her beloved niece Moran, who saw in her as sort of an older sister, asked for her help preparing for her finals in Bible and history, and though she found the material "really boring", Mazi managed to make it engaging by finding new angles, telling exciting stories and anecdotes.
Despite her vast love of her students and the fact that she saw education as her purpose, doubtlessly Mazi's greatest mission in life was realizing her dream of becoming a mother. She called her choice to become a single mother "the bravest decision of her life", since in 1994, when she brought Ofri to the world, single parenthood was still a rare thing in Israel in general and especially on kibbutzim.
Ofri, who later added the name Ayala, was Mazi's only daughter, the apple of her eye, and her joy. For her, Mazi would have brought the moon down from the sky. Their relationship was especially powerful: an independent, small, very close family unit. When Ofri was small, her mother nicknamed her "my tail", so inseparable they were. Mazi did everything to afford Ofri the sense that she had a large and caring family. The extended family – Grandma Rachel, sisters Etti and Hagit, their partners and children – were an important and central part of their lives, with whom they spent as much time as they could.
At family gatherings, Mazi was always examining the recipes and asking how each dish was cooked, even though everyone knew she would never make them herself. She collected the recipes of her mother's household as rare treasures: like mogados, Turkish marzipan, or bimuelos, a Passover treat she loved so much that she named the family women's lively WhatsApp group after it.
In addition to the larger family, Mazi had friends from her teaching days: Ayelet, Mati, Pesi, and Yona – together with their partners and children, they became vital parts of Mazi and Ofri's life. They all dined together on Friday nights, went on trips, and spent time together. In this wise way, Mazi created a warm, loving environment for the two of them. Once the school in Be'eri closed down, Mazi stopped teaching and worked for a few years as a medical secretary. Like everything she did, she was very helpful in that setting as well, and everyone loved her, much like at the kibbutz shop where she worked for another few years until her retirement a year before her death. Since then, she was finally free to engage in her favorite hobbies: traveling the word with her "Octet", giving design advice to anyone who asked, caring for her garden, and dedicating time to the family she so loved.
Mazi learned the art of visual journals. Batya guided her in turning her thoughts and feelings into artistic material, and she drew, wrote, collaged, and designed diaries into which she poured her heart in her signature aesthetic. She left behind these creations as well as the funny animals she knitted and the collages through which she expressed her beautiful, sensitive soul. Everything she touched exhibited that soul. Her crafts, her potted plants, her cyclamens that blossomed even in summer because she was the cyclamen whisperer and cared for them even in her final hours, as she was locked in the safe room. But most of all she poured her soul into the people she loved: her friends, girlfriends, family, kibbutz members, and her daughter, to whom she devoted her love and her entire heart. Through all the beloved people she has left behind, her light will continue to shine forever.
May her memory be blessed.
