As locals made their way along the winding, tree-lined paths of Kibbutz Bar’am on their way to the communal dining room for lunch, visitors could see that most of the displaced residents of this small farming collective in the Upper Galilee have returned home.

Inside, over a lunch of schnitzel and rice, kibbutz member Avi Ifergan gestured around the spacious dining hall. “You see it in here,” he said. “It’s like everything is back to normal.”

The Times of Israel visited the kibbutz on the eve of the first anniversary of the November 2024 ceasefire with the terror group, after more than a year of war had left much of Israel’s north heavily damaged and deserted.

The community, which lies just 300 meters (roughly 1,000 feet) from the border with Lebanon, was evacuated in its entirety on October 9, 2023, two days after the bloody Hamas invasion of Israel’s Gaza border communities on October 7, amid fears that the Lebanon-based Hezbollah terror group could attempt a similar onslaught.

Bar’am residents were among the 60,000 people of 32 communities in northern Israel who were evacuated after Hezbollah and allied terror groups began firing missiles and drones into Israel in solidarity with Hamas on October 8, 2023.

On October 9, Ifergan, the 70-year-old volunteer curator of the kibbutz’s Bar-David Art and Judaica Museum, hurriedly stored much of the museum’s permanent artwork in a basement storage room and rolled up a collection of sketches that were on display, stuffing them into his car to return to the artists in Tel Aviv.

“It was very tense,” said Ifergan. “Some of the artists wanted to know what was happening with their artwork, some couldn’t care less; and I just took care of it.”

Some 90 percent of the displaced kibbutz members are now back home after returning in the spring and summer of this year — including Ifergan, who spent much of the time with his sister in Beit She’an.

The Bar-David Museum is now open again, with three new exhibits that opened on November 8 and will remain at the museum through February 20.

The exhibits include Noam Edry’s first solo show, “Red Day,” a broad,........

© The Times of Israel