In the first days after October 7th, while the entire country looks with tearful eyes at the harsh scenes from the settlements of the surrounding area, we thought about what could be done to bring back a little joy in life to a place that suffered such a severe blow. In our view, a pub is not a foreign word for a tavern, a place where people come to drink.
For us, perhaps with its English name derived from the word PUBLIC, meaning "public," it is a community center for adults. To talk with a friend that is not about work matters, meet new people, fall in love, gossip, laugh, speak from the heart, drink something more to remember and then another drink to forget. It will be a long time before the sounds of glasses being thrown are heard at the Gaza border, but one thing we can guarantee: we will be there until it happens. In the video, we visited the temporary pub in Kibbutz Bari. In Bari, a settlement of about 1,250 Simchat Torah Arabs, about 120 pubs have been closed since October 7th. The residents-customers are far away, evacuated to hotels or other settlements. This week, we took a small step, the first of thousands of steps that we will have to take hand in hand with the communities and those responsible for the pubs in the various localities. The goal is to restore the pub so that it fits the needs of the community, and these - as we've come to know in recent months - are very, very complex. The only thing they all have in common is what is also common to all the communities in which they operate: since October 6th, they have all been closed, while the residents have been evacuated. The first step is to contact the people responsible for all the pubs. The second step is to find out if any of the pubs are still open. The third is to try and find out whether any of them still serve alcohol.