Chavik Segal, of Netiv Ha’asara, was a handicraft workshop and an act of quiet charity embodied in a single woman. On October seventh she was murdered in the very place she believed she had found shelter

Today as well Chavik Segal is dead. Chavik (Chava) Segal, seventy-eight years old, of Netiv Ha’asara, had golden hands. She knew how to restore and recycle, to knit and sew and embroider and weave and braid and patch, and to turn any object into a colorful, ornamented work of art.

Chavik was born on Kibbutz Genigar, in the Jezreel Valley. She grew up alongside Yigal, a son of the kibbutz, and the two became a couple and married. In the early nineteen-seventies, they moved with their two children, Adi and Tzur, to the moshav of Sadot in Sinai. There, Noa, Hila, and Ron were born to them as well. Chavik worked the farm and raised her children. After the signing of the peace agreement with Egypt and the evacuation of Sinai, the family relocated to Netiv Ha’asara. Yigal eventually became head of the regional council, and Chavik devoted her time to the household and her family.

Tzur Segal, Chavik’s son: “The thought kept drilling into my head: wait, what about Mom? She’s not answering, she’s not reading messages. You understand that you’re about to receive bad news”

As the bereaved sister of Yigal Shiloni — who was killed in the Yom Kippur War — Chavik devoted herself deeply to the documentation and commemoration of fallen soldiers. She was also involved in social projects in the rough, impoverished neighborhood of Jessie Cohen in Holon. After retiring, she turned to helping those in need — quietly, without fanfare: mending clothes, cooking, baking, and driving people where they needed to go.

In her wooden house, she harnessed her extraordinary gift for handicraft to the collecting and preserving of old objects, because, as she had put it, “we have an obligation to care for future generations”. With a mind as creative as hers, rather than toss them in the trash, she breathed new life and color into them. In recent years, she had taken to making vibrant mandalas together with friends from the moshav. And, on top of everything else, Chavik was a devoted and talented swimmer who dove into the water every single day, for years.

On October seventh, three terrorists infiltrated Netiv Ha’asara on powered paragliders, after disabling the “See-and-Shoot” defense system. When the sirens and missiles came, Chavik left her wooden home for the nearby reinforced shelter room. From there, she spoke with her grandchildren, Uri and Yaara. Their father, Tzur — the security coordinator of Kibbutz Gevim — had set out in the direction of Netiv Ha’asara, but just as he was leaving he came upon a car full of wounded people. “From that moment, I felt myself entering a kind of robotic functioning”, he said. “I understood that they needed to be evacuated”.

Tzur finished there and wanted to press on toward Chavik, but then he spotted his dog on the sidewalk across from him — the dog had been frightened by the explosions and fled the house. “On autopilot, I put her in the car and intended to drive to Netiv Ha’asara. But then a very heavy barrage began in our direction as well, and I went back home”, he recounted in the 710 Testimonies Project.

From that moment on, Tzur was consumed by what was unfolding in Gevim, yet “the entire time, the thought kept drilling into my head: wait, what about Mom? She’s not answering, she’s not reading messages. You understand that you’re about to receive bad news. And around two-thirty in the afternoon, the security coordinator of Netiv Ha’asara informed us that she had been identified”.

In her eulogy, Chavik’s friend Smadar Harpaz Sa’ad wrote that Chavik “knew how to mend a torn sock, to sew back a fallen button, to wrap everything neatly with a rubber band and a little note. She embroidered her love in colored threads. With my characteristic chutzpah, I once asked her to knit me a sweater. And she knitted one. A beautiful, painstaking sweater — at the level that only Chavik could achieve. I knew that she loves me”.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)