Yoram Bar Sinai

Yoram Bar Sinai was the son of Avraham Borisonik and Miriam Eckstein, of Kitat Dror, and a member of Kibbutz Be’eri.

Yoram was born in July of 1948, at the height of the War of Independence. The young kibbutz was built on a patch of land in the northern Negev, just a stone's throw from Gaza, on the "Eve of Eleven Points" – Yom Kippur, 1946. At that time, there were only men and single women. The married women and the children, among them Miriam and Yoram’s older brother Udi, remained in the training camp in Gedera. Due to unusual circumstances, Miriam, already in the advanced stages of pregnancy, had to go down to the Negev to relieve the medic. When she felt her first labor pains, she was taken by command car to Rehovot. The driver dropped her off at the beginning of the path to the hospital, and by the time Miriam reached the ward, Yoram had practically wriggled himself out.

Yoram was taken directly to the children's house, where children slept apart from their parents, but together with their peers; he and Meira even shared a crib. In 1951, the kibbutz became a permanent settlement. The women and children were transported from Gedera to the kibbutz by trucks, together with the iron bed frames and the straw mattresses. The young parents lived in tents, along with an additional "friend" (the kerosine lamp known as a “primus”). The children lived in one of the two remaining abandoned houses and witnessed the kibbutz’s first – and last – snowfall. One night, Fedayun (a group of Palestinian militants) snuck in from Gaza and stole all the coats.

While communal education was difficult for his mother, Yoram thrived. He was a very sociable child, trusting the world, content with his lot. He liked to wander through the fields, walking on his hands, running and jumping; he was always curious. Rivka’le, his preschool teacher, enchanted him with her stories. Like all kibbutz children, Yoram participated in every aspect of farm life: calving in the cowshed, working the fields, picking fruit in the orchards. His father, an amateur astronomer, taught him the names of constellations and their paths in the sky. At his grandparents’ home in Nesher, he saw his first synagogue and restaurant, and his three siblings provided abundant opportunities for lively clashes.

Kitat Dror was the young kibbutz’s third class. The majority of the students were from the kibbutz, with an ever-changing contingent of "yaldei hutz" who lived on the kibbutz, but whose parents lived elsewhere. Yoram was a good student and a well-behaved child. He learned from his house-mother, Hasya, how to wash floors (making sure not to overlook the corners) and mastered all thirteen pre-Bar Mitzvah tasks (including learning how to sew a button). Additionally, because he was skilled in calligraphy, he may have been the one who wrote the sign “We pledge our allegiance to the flag and to nothing else.”

It was no surprise that he would take the youth movement’s leadership course. The friends he made there remained with him throughout his army service and his entire life. He loved working in all the different branches, and learned a little of everything: carpentry, plumbing, welding, auto mechanics, and milking cows. Like all the kibbutzniks of his day, he finished school with an abysmal knowledge of the multiplication table but a deep familiarity with all three volumes of The History of the Labor Movement. In between all his other activities, he learned to play the mandolin and guitar, took drawing lessons, grew a glorious pompadour, and knew how to park a tractor and trailer in reverse.

During his third year of community service, he was a counselor in a branch of the youth the movement, HaNoar HaOved in Holon; from there he went on to the army. To his delight, he was drafted into the Seventh Brigade. He loved the jeeps, the terrain, the cheerful vibe in his squadron. He did his part, drawing caricatures of all his friends and of the commander, Shlomo Baum, who had come from the legendary Unit 101. His comrades relied on his innate navigation skills, the campfires he built, and the coffee he prepared at every opportunity. And then there were the chocolate "snakes" his mother Miriam would send from the kibbutz. At the conclusion of his military service, Yoram returned to the kibbutz and relieved Omri in overseeing the orchards. He learned to remove caterpillars from the apricot trees, to thin out peach blossoms, and to organize groups to pick fruit. He was tanner and handsomer than ever. This was when he met Nili, his future wife.

They were both guests at friend Ariel’s wedding, he from the groom’s side, she from the bride’s. When she saw him walking across from her, rejoicing at the prospect of seeing his friends, she couldn’t resist the temptation and stopped him. Asking him to show her his hands, she said, “If you don’t have a ring, I want to marry you.” He was naïve and didn’t realize she was serious.

Meanwhile, Yoram began studying in a preparatory program for the Technion. When the Yom Kippur War broke out, he was called in for reserve duty. He spent eight months in the sand dunes of Tasa, while Uziel helped prepare him for the entrance exams in architecture. He was surprised, and pleased when he was accepted.

During his five years of study, he married Nili, and had two children, Michael and Ruthie. Every two weeks he returned home to his family, working a Shabbat shift in the cowshed, organizing meetings, working in the orchard, and assembling groups to work in the cottonfields. When they returned to the kibbutz, his wife gave him an ultimatum: either they did away with communal sleeping arrangements for the children, or they moved back to Haifa.

Yoram understood what this entailed but agreed to broach the topic anyway. He facilitated discussions, attempted to convince the old-timers, participated in local politics, examined the economic feasibility, negotiated with the movement – whatever was necessary. By the end of the year, the decision was ratified: they would make the change. The conditions were agreed upon: an extra room would be built for every house, the transition would take place in a single day, and the public services would be at a higher level than the private houses. And so it was. Yochai was three years old when he left Ofarim; Noa was born into sleeping at home.

Yoram planned the expansion of the houses. He was also asked to help out with building, as everyone who came back from studying had to serve the kibbutz for a year. He poured cement, learned from Brandy how to supervise the execution of architectural plans, and led the Dagan class. At the end of the year, he was told that the teacher of the Kitat Haruvi had left, and so he, Yoram, would have to take his place. Architecture would wait another year.

Finally, he began his work in the planning department, studying under Vittorio Corilandi. He loved sketching houses and trees with B6 pencils, drawing maps with special markers, and studying his impressive set of rapidograph pens, back when they still erased ink from parchment paper with an exact-o knife. Eventually, he specialized in planning settlements. He had a comprehensive understanding of the rules of planning and construction, mastered the politics of the local and national planning committees, and assisted many kibbutzim through the exhausting process of getting their building plans approved.

His expertise in planning agricultural settlements brought him to Africa. His favorite project was Elda Nova, a village in Angola where people wanted to build an agricultural cooperative for soldiers released from both sides of the civil war. Not far from there, he also planned and built a neighborhood for wealthy expatriates who had returned home. There were other projects, and dreams of projects, in a range of places – from Senegal to China – but the house he loved most was Kibbutz Be’eri’s print shop. He was particularly excited by the ability to build The Calanit Site – the new division of credit cards – that was carried out according to the highest international standards. And all within one hundred days.

In his personal life, Yoram was a beloved space cadet. Most people forgave his chronic lateness and absent-mindedness. They loved his intelligence, his gentleness, his equanimity, and his remarkable ability not to fight with anyone, ever. He simply refused to get drawn into any power struggles or hidden agendas. He was a decent man, the kind of kibbutznik proponents of cooperative education envisioned: a hard-working, cooperative man with a socialist and politically-aware conscience – and at the same time, a creative individual. “The grandfather who can do anything,” he liked to say when people asked him to repair something.

On Shabbat morning, when he realized that the terrorists had infiltrated the kibbutz, Yoram took the automatic pistol he’d received from his grandfather Yehoshua, got on his bicycle, and rode to Ruthie’s house halfway across the kibbutz. He went out to her porch, chose a good lookout point on the stairs, and stood there with his coffee in one hand and his gun in the other. He was killed while trying to prevent seven terrorists from forcing their way into his daughter and grandchildren’s home.

He was seventy-five years old. This is how we will remember him:

The story of the Tree Project is best told by the trees themselves. Some of them ten years old, the tallest of them are those that were planted at the edges of the rows of jojoba trees, allowing them to be attached to the nozzles of the irrigation pipes. They were initially supported by wooden stakes, and marked in a different color every year. He checked on them whenever he rode his bicycle, and once every two or three weeks he would go with his golf cart and his blue barrels of water, the electric saw he’d recently purchased, and his top-of-the-line pruning shears. He tended to every tree until it was a head taller than him; then he took it out for financial independence.

Eventually, Dan and the grandchildren joined the project, along with members of his kibbutz and his unit.

May he rest in peace among the carob-tree plot that he planted, at the fork between the road leading up to Nahabir and Derekh Habitzurim.