It was two weeks before Rosh Hashanah, and baker Yaki Sagi was pouring honey cake batter into loaf tins at the Lalush bakery in Kibbutz Be’eri.
The scents of honey and chai masala — Sagi’s secret ingredient — suffused the small space behind the kibbutz kitchen in the community’s dining hall complex.
“This is where it all happens,” said Sagi. “We pump up the music, we measure and pour and stir and bake, and when we need to, we tell the stories.”
Tomer Even, 13, wandered in recently, looking for a taste of Sagi’s famed brownies. Once the boy had left, Sagi told his staff that the boy’s parents and two siblings were killed in the Hamas terrorist attack of October 7, 2023, while he and his younger brother survived.
“[Sagi] calls them ‘Shoah moments,’” said Paz Dror, one of the bakers who commutes to work from a nearby moshav community.
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Dror laughed a little at her boss’s black humor, her face quickly sobering as she thought about the teenage boy.
Paz Dror, a worker at Lalush, pours honey cake batter at the Be’eri bakery on September 2, 2025 (Jessica Steinberg/Times of Israel)
“Everyone has a story after October 7,” said Sagi.
“And a story like Tomer’s is the hardest for me — these two kids who are left behind, and somehow they keep on going with the support of the kibbutz,” he said.
“We cry and laugh and go on.”
Rinat and Chen Even with Alon, Tomer, Nir and Ido (Courtesy)
Sagi returned to running Lalush, his bakery in Kibbutz Be’eri, about a year ago.
The indefatigable baker now commutes between the bakery and Hazerim, a kibbutz outside Beersheba where Be’eri residents were relocated to.
He’s not the only Be’eri resident back at work at the kibbutz. The dining hall was about a quarter full during a recent lunchtime as members dined on chicken, potato-stuffed kreplach and salads.
But it’s far quieter than it ever was before October 7, when the kibbutz was home to 1,300 members — toddlers and teens, families and retirees.
On the day of the devastating Hamas attack on southern Israel, 101 civilians and 31 security personnel were killed at Kibbutz Be’eri, and 32 people were taken hostage. The bodies of six of the Be’eri hostages killed in captivity still remain in Gaza.
“It’s a quiet that I’ve never experienced here,” said Sagi.
A new neighborhood being built at Kibbutz Be’eri near the Gaza border in southern Israel. (Tekuma Directorate)
Sagi, 54, came to the kibbutz at age 14 from Eilat. His parents were getting divorced, and he joined the kibbutz high school program for teens from around the country.
He loved the sense of community, of sitting around with friends, strumming on a guitar and working in the cowshed.
The kibbutz became his home, offering him full membership after he completed his army service as a medic in the paratroopers. He first wanted to sow some wild oats, which included travel abroad and a stint operating an ice cream truck in Texas.
When he returned, Tel Aviv beckoned, and eventually, culinary school, inspired by the love of cooking he inherited from his Moroccan maternal grandmother from Beersheba whose very first move each morning was to turn on her oven.
“It was all about the dough and shopping at the shuk and a kitchen full of scents with chickens running around the yard,” said Sagi. “I would see her knead her breads and challah and watch it in the oven, and it was like magic for me.”
After cooking school, Sagi worked for the top chefs of the time, including celebrity chef Yonatan Roshfeld.
Chef Yaki Sagi appearing on ‘Master Chef’ in 2018 with judge Asaf Granit (Courtesy)
But it was a stint with bread baker extraordinaire Erez Komorovsky that turned him on to baking.
He went back to school, traveling as far as Kyiv, Ukraine, to take workshops taught by French pastry chefs, and then returned to work at Komorovsky’s chain of Lechem Erez bakeries.
At some point, the Be’eri administration told Sagi he had to decide if he was returning to the kibbutz.
A friend encouraged him to build a business plan for opening a bakery at Be’eri.
Sagi’s plan for Lalush — the name translates to “kneading” in Hebrew — was approved, and he started small, baking one day a week in a spare storage room while keeping his job in Tel Aviv. He baked yeasted cakes for the kibbutz for Shabbat, and quickly found there was demand for his goods at Be’eri and the other communities in the Gaza border area.
By 2010, Sagi was working around the clock with five staffers at Lalush, churning out cakes, cookies, and breads — gluten-free and vegan options as well — with catering for local events.
Chef Yaki Sagi readying blintzes at Kibbutz Be’eri’s Lalush, prior to October 7, 2023 (Courtesy)
Even the steady drizzle of rockets and mortars fired from the Strip over the years, and the short-lived 2014 Gaza war, didn’t interrupt his business’s growth.
“We were situated here, in the ‘southern state,’ and the situation affected us but we continued to work,” he said. “We just lived with the reality. It’s crazy that you let it be part of your life, but you think, what’s the alternative?”
Sagi got married and had three children, all of whom were born into a reality of rocket attacks and safe rooms.
“Now I say, ‘How did I allow it?’ I did, because I so love this place.”
“I would leave work at 5 p.m. and see my kids sprawled on the grass with their friends, and I was a five-minute walk from home,” he recalled
Yaki Sagi of Kibbutz Be’eri and his family (Courtesy)
Just before October 7, 2023, Lalush was at its peak of productivity, with a full catering schedule, regular sales to all the moshav and kibbutz communities, and plans to build a larger bakery and cafe at the entrance to the kibbutz.
It was a place for the community as well, with the Lalush breads, cakes, cookies, and pastries available in the local kibbutz store, and where pensioners often peeled apples for batches of the bakery’s famed apple strudels.
The week before the Hamas terrorist attack, Sagi and his family vacationed in the Black Forest mountain range of Germany with their best friends, the Or family from Be’eri.
Dror Or, husband to Yonat Or and father to Yahli, Alma and Noam, was also a chef and one of the three cheesemakers at Be’eri Cheese, a boutique dairy located down the hallway from Lalush and planning a similar expansion.
“We went around to bakeries and cheesemakers and I looked at these storefronts and said to Dror, ‘That’s what our place will look like,’” said Sagi.
Dror Or, who was murdered by Hamas terrorists on October 7, 2023 at his home in Kibbutz Be’eri, and his body abducted to Gaza, the kibbutz announced on May 2, 2024 (Courtesy)
They returned to Israel — the Ors to Be’eri, while the Sagis went north to Kiryat Motzkin to visit his in-laws.
“That’s what saved us,” said Sagi. “If we had come home, we wouldn’t be speaking right now.”
Dror Or and his wife, Yonat Or, were killed at their home on October 7. Their two younger children, Noam and Alma, were taken hostage and released in November 2023. Their older brother, Yahli, was away for the weekend and survived. Dror Or’s body is still held captive in Gaza.
“We sat and experienced it all on our phones,” said Sagi. “I spoke with my kibbutz father, who was trying to get help as it all unfolded.”
His kibbutz “father,” Avia Hetzroni, 69, was killed, as were Hetzroni’s twin grandchildren, Liel and Yanai Hetzroni, 13, and Sagi’s kibbutz “aunt,” Ayala Hetzroni.
Liel (left), Avia (back) and Yanai Hetzroni, from Kibbutz Be’eri. They were killed along with their aunt Ayala Hetzroni in the Hamas assault on Kibbutz Be’eri on October 7, 2023. (Courtesy)
The Sagis left Kiryat Motzkin and joined their kibbutz community as they were evacuated to a Dead Sea Hotel. It was there that Sagi quickly realized that if he didn’t start baking, he would lose his tether to reality.
He contacted a friend, baker Uri Scheft of Tel Aviv’s famed Lehamim bakery chain, and asked if he could take over a corner of his kitchen.
Sagi wanted to make something that would tell the story of Be’eri and the surrounding communities and decided on spanakopita, a savory pie of filo dough stuffed with Be’eri’s cheeses, spinach grown in the greenhouses of nearby Moshav Ein Habsor, and eggplant from Moshav Yakhini.
Working with a skeleton staff, he baked thousands of spanikopitas, with customers lining up to buy them. As local companies ordered spanikopita and other Lalush baked goods for events, Sagi delivered the confections and told the story of Dror Or and Lalush and what happened in Be’eri on October 7.
“It caught on crazily because of the story and because it was delicious,” he said.
Lechamim’s Uri Scheft and Yaki Sagi of Lalush after October 7, 2023 (Courtesy)
Sagi ended up with 17 staffers and a 2.5-hour daily drive each way between Ein Gedi and Tel Aviv. With his wife’s encouragement he took advantage of an available room at a Tel Aviv hotel for evacuees so he could make the round trip less often.
As the Be’eri community made plans to move to Hazerim last summer, the kibbutz administration told Sagi that he was needed back at Be’eri, despite the solid paycheck and intense demand he was experiencing at Lehamim.
“It was an engine to reinvention,” said Sagi.
He returned to Be’eri for work about a year ago, hiring new staff and continuing to bake for Lehamim, but from the Be’eri kitchen.
His sous chef isn’t back yet; her mother, Pessi Cohen, was killed on October 7 after her home in Be’eri was the site of a standoff between Hamas terrorists who holed up inside with 14 Israeli hostages — including the Hetzroni twins — and IDF forces who gathered outside.
The remains of the home of Pessi Cohen, where Hamas held 14 Israelis hostage on October 7, 2023, in Kibbutz Be’eri, seen on November 19, 2023. (Chaim Goldberg/Flash90)
“It was very hard at the beginning,” said Sagi. It took about six months for the normally garrulous baker to be able to work full-time, go home, and make dinner for his family.
“I understood that this is the new reality,” he said. “I have to be an example for my kids and my community.”
He encourages friends who aren’t yet back at work to find something new, get used to the situation, and perhaps consider coming to work for him.
“Working here is therapeutic,” said Sagi, showing off his new rotating oven, a gift from the Israeli importer.
Be’eri baker Yaki Sagi and his Zucchelli Forni Italian oven at the Lalush bakery in Kibbutz Be’eri on September 3, 2025 (Jessica Steinberg/Times of Israel)
The Sagi family will move into a newly constructed home in a Be’eri neighborhood of 53 homes in about six months.
“The will to live is strong, and it’s a cliché, but it’s the reality,” said Sagi.
He’s moving forward with plans to build the larger bakery and cafe that he and Or dreamed of, and hopes it will be completed in about a year and a half.
His eldest daughter — whose best friend is Alma Or, the youngest daughter of the slain Dror and Yonat Or — tells him that he’s giving strength to others as he rebuilds what he had in Be’eri, for himself, and for his community.