Be’eri artist and gallery director finds clarity in temporary home, art and family

Sofie Berzon Mackie, Kibbutz Be’eri’s art gallery director and curator, has lived and worked in more than one temporary home since the Hamas onslaught on October 7, 2023, decimated her home and community.

On that day, Berzon Mackie and her family fled Be’eri after hours of hiding in their home, darting among the bullets still flying between IDF forces and terrorists as they fought for control of the kibbutz.

The battle didn’t end for another 48 hours.

The Be’eri gallery, an art institution cherished on the kibbutz since 1986, was torched by Hamas terrorists, leaving nothing untouched. Berzon Mackie and Ziva Jellin, co-directors and curators of the gallery, walked away from the beloved kibbutz art space founded 40 years earlier in the original dining hall.

The October 7 terror attack marked the start of intense bereavement and anguish, as well as more than a year of personal and professional nomadism for Berzon Mackie.

Now, a year and a half later, Berzon Mackie, her partner and their three kids are living in a temporary new home in Kibbutz Hatzerim outside Beersheba, under the roar of fighter jets taking off from the nearby IDF air force base, amid fresh rows of newly landed caravans and strips of green grass.

“The kids have been elated,” said Berzon Mackie. “To have a home again, to have bedrooms and a kitchen. It was really strange to get used to that again.”

After moving in, Berzon Mackie bought fruit trees, planting them in ceramic tubs around the simple wooden deck attached to their caravan.

“I made it, we can rest now,” said Berzon Mackie.

But it’s an uneasy rest.

After October 7, residents of Kibbutz Be’eri were moved to hotel rooms in the Dead Sea, where they remained for months.

Berzon Mackie and her family had stayed with friends during those first frightening days after the massacre, before moving with the rest of the kibbutz to the David Hotel.

Within weeks, Kibbutz Hatzerim invited the Be’eri residents to move into caravans placed on their land. Some houses were ready by June 2024, allowing kibbutz families to move out of the hotel and into new homes at Hatzerim.

Berzon Mackie’s house and others were delayed, and while they could stay at the hotel, there would no longer be an educational system in place at the Dead Sea.

The kibbutz children had already been enrolled for the new school year in local preschools and elementary schools in Hatzerim and at high schools in the region.

“I heard that, and I felt something break inside. I felt like, I can’t do this anymore. How can you?” said Berzon Mackie. “And we’re talking about really badly traumatized children, 13-year-olds. What crazy idea is that? So we said, no, that’s not going to happen.”

The families began scrambling for solutions, looking for temporary rentals or apartments for lease in the area. About 18 families, including Berzon Mackie’s, decided to move back home to Be’eri for the time being.

“It was very difficult, but at least when we thought about what we could do in the situation, there was really only one place,” said Berzon Mackie. “Nobody is going to kick me out of my own house. So I decided I was going to go home, and that’s it. It was nice.”

Nice, of course, was relative. Their neighborhood at the kibbutz was relatively intact, with just one house burned by the terrorists and already removed, and the war still raging in nearby Gaza.

The parents drove carpools to the Hatzerim schools, an hour each way, until their homes were finally ready in December.

“We moved in and did Christmas in the new house,” said Berzon Mackie, the daughter of an Israeli kibbutznik father and English mother who came as a volunteer in the 1970s to Be’eri.

Berzon Mackie had a mixed upbringing — first in England, then on kibbutz, where her own mother died after a brief illness. She has spent most of her adult life at Kibbutz Be’eri, raising three children with her partner and living near her father and younger sister, who also lives on the kibbutz with her family.

Her father is now back home at Be’eri, while Berzon Mackie, her sister and their families are in Hatzerim.

Each family received a small budget from the Tekuma Directorate set up to rehabilitate the Gaza border area to furnish their home, NIS 80,000 (around $21,000) to buy all the furniture,  appliances and household items, and in Berzon Mackie’s case, those fruit trees for the squared-off backyard.

Their contracts stipulate that the Be’eri residents will be at Hatzerim until September 2026, nearly two years in total.

At that point, the plan is to move back home to Be’eri, but Berzon Mackie doesn’t believe the kibbutz will be rebuilt by then.

In March, Berzon Mackie still wasn’t sure if she wanted to return to her previous home where they hid in terror on October 7, or to one in a new neighborhood being built on the kibbutz. The family ended up deciding to build a house in the new neighborhood.

“I feel tired,” said Berzon Mackie. “I feel that I would be so happy to just be able to sit here, watch the sunset, the beautiful sky, and not worry about these life-changing, serious things. I made it. We can rest now. When I look into the future, it’s not clear. When are we going to be able to rest? Only after we go back home. It’s years from now.”

When the Hamas terrorists invaded Be’eri and other Gaza envelope collectives on October 7, they set fire to buildings and homes, including the Be’eri art gallery, which Berzon Mackie had been co-directing and curating for the last five years.

The gallery was given a temporary space in Tel Aviv, offered by the municipality for the next three years, with rent waived by the landlord and the municipality forgoing property tax. It’s situated on the upper floor of Beit Romano, off a main road in the southern end of Tel Aviv, and the gallery’s exhibits had to be curated again, with a new team in place.

“There were all sorts of challenges,” said Berzon Mackie.

But she pushed ahead, although her co-director Jellin had left the gallery after October 7. Berzon Mackie knew the whole project could fall apart, but felt that it didn’t matter in the bigger scheme of things, in the world of bereavement and mourning and hostages.

The gallery reopened in January, much to Berzon Mackie’s surprise and satisfaction.

“It was just the only thing I knew how to do and the only thing I could do,” she said. “It felt familiar. It’s my superpower, I know how to make things happen.”

Since then, there have been more than half a dozen shows at the gallery, all planned anew since October 7, 2023.

“I was living day by day, placing one foot in front of the other, really putting my faith and trust in the universe that the right people and the right opportunities would show themselves and that I would be able to recognize them when that happens,” said Berzon Mackie. “When you’re stripped of everything you know, you’re left with your body and really strong intuitions about what decisions are right for you. And they were the right decisions.”

Berzon Mackie found, after October 7 that her art world colleagues were supportive and available, a world full of professional, dedicated, amazing people who knew how to make things happen.

“Artists and the creative layer of society, they know how to put it all together,” she said. “That’s what we do. Creativity is taking two pieces and making it work. So, I didn’t do anything alone. I was surrounded by professionals and a lot of support and foundations and people from here and there. And I was also very lucky.”

In a sense, the biggest tragedy of her life and for the country helped create a sense of focus for her.

“You’re in this massive identity crisis, you have nothing left,” she said. “But also, all distractions are eliminated. You’re left with these crystal clear truths and a really strong intuition of what needs to happen. All the noise is just gone. It was just so easy. It sounds like it’s counterintuitive. But it’s not. Some clarity of thought comes out of this time.”

It has been different running the gallery in Tel Aviv, without the art community of the south in her sphere, far from home, with a different team and new rules.

“You have to reinvent yourself as a person in this new world with new rules,” she said. “We don’t know our way around. We don’t know anyone.”

For now, though, the Tel Aviv space for the gallery feels like something of a safe space and Berzon Mackie is now in the process of choosing an architect for rebuilding the gallery in the kibbutz.

The kibbutz gallery will now be housed in an old silo, a building that is being repurposed after 50 years of disuse.

Berzon Mackie, a visual artist also known for her curated photographs, has also been busy with her work, including a solo exhibit at Jerusalem’s Studio of Her Own, and other pieces included in recent exhibits at Israeli museums.

She returned to her artwork within a few months of October 7, while living at the Dead Sea. The first piece was a tiny work, as she picked up microscopic pieces of detritus on the beach, and made a tiny collage, photographing that work.

One of those pieces is hanging on her living room wall in Hatzerim, a small, bleached, shell-like image against a far larger black background that made Berzon Mackie think of stars in a sky.

“It was bits and pieces of my past and something that made some sense,” she said. “It’s sort of like a crystal, because when crystals grow, they have a structure and it’s alive, but not as alive as something living.”

Berzon Mackie is trying to find hope and come to terms with the disaster, using her art in the process, as well as conversations with her neighbor, and reading works that have been written by Holocaust survivors.

“I don’t feel like I have anything big to say, but what is left felt very true to me,” she said. “I want to try and understand this world, and make sense of it. Because everything, for me, at least, seems very wrong. Everything seems wrong. Truths I thought were true are not true. So we have to do this work together. We have to have this open discussion about who we are, what happened to us, where we are going, and how we can have a future. How can we lead a happy life?”

She finds it hard to imagine where she’ll be three years from now, or even the next 48 hours, aside from knowing she has to pick up her youngest at 3:45 p.m. every day from preschool.

Yet her art endures and this new house, this temporary home, is a balm as well. Berzon Mackie looked around, at her son sprawled in the living room, at a new couch purchased from the sale of some of her art.

“It’s home for now,” she said. “That helps.”