Be’eri’s boutique cheesemakers carry on, without Dror Or’s ‘golden hands’

Dagan Peleg, chief cheesemaker at Be’eri Dairy, has struggled to continue making his local gruyere, Manchego and blue cheeses following the Hamas attack of October 7.

On that day, Peleg’s longtime partner Dror Or was killed when their kibbutz was invaded by terrorists from Gaza. In total, 101 Be’eri civilians and 31 security personnel were killed and 32 people were taken hostage. Much of the kibbutz was destroyed.

Or was at first thought to have been taken hostage with two of his three teenage children, Noam Or and Alma Or. But months later he was identified as having been killed on October 7 and his body taken to Gaza. His wife Yonat Or, another Be’eri entrepreneur known for her vintage carpentry, was killed on October 7 too, with her body discovered several days later.

Noam and Alma, 17 and 13, were released during a weeklong ceasefire at the end of November.

Months later, Peleg is able to speak of Dror, but can’t quite wrap his head around the loss.

“Dror fit me like a glove simply because we didn’t agree on most things,” said Peleg. “That’s what made us work so well.”

A boutique operation

Nine months after the devastating attack, Peleg showed The Times of Israel through the Be’eri dining hall. The dairy is housed down the hall from the dining hall and kitchen, part of a sprawling set of buildings in the middle of the community.

At a nearby table were army personnel, now ever-present at Be’eri, which is considered part of a military zone extending from the Gaza Strip.

The cheesemaking operation includes a kitchen where the cheeses are mixed, a walk-in refrigerator where wheels of Manchego are soaking in brine, and another stacked with wheels of herb-studded gouda drying in their coating of yellow wax.

Across the breezeway is the outer room of the dairy where Yacov Benacot, 65, Peleg’s other partner, was slicing and packaging gouda, and several more inner storerooms.

“These shelves are usually filled with cheese. We had crates filled with cheese, lined all along the walls,” Peleg said, pointing around the dairy.

The three business partners didn’t start out in the cheesemaking world. Peleg, 63, came to live in the kibbutz after marrying a Be’eri native and after finishing his degree in graphic design. He worked at first as a designer.

Or, 49, born and raised in Kibbutz Re’im, had trained as a chef and spent several years working at Tel Aviv restaurants. When he married Yonat and moved to Be’eri, where she had grown up, he first worked in the kibbutz’s printing operation. Benacot was born and raised in Be’eri and had worked for years in the kitchen.

It was Peleg who started making cheese for the kibbutz.

This was in the early 1990s when, like many kibbutz communities, Be’eri was overflowing with milk from its cowsheds. Rather than sell it at cost to the Israel Dairy Board, the decision was made to use it for basic dairy products, part of a larger kibbutz trend.

Peleg got the operation started with a small pasteurizer set up in a corner of the kibbutz kitchen, where he bagged milk, made soft, creamy white cheese, yogurt, labneh, feta-like bulgarit and other simple products.

Ten years later, however, many kibbutz cowsheds were shut by the Israel Dairy Board to prevent over-milking and a concurrent runoff of manure. Be’eri started getting its milk from Kibbutz Gvulot, making Peleg’s job largely unnecessary.

He didn’t want to leave the work, however, having gained an appreciation for the process.

“It was like touching the holy grail. I loved it,” he said.

Instead of closing the operation, the kibbutz agreed to expand it, with Benacot joining Peleg to make more complex cheeses for the kibbutz, and with the aim of obtaining a business license to sell outside the community as well.

Peleg spent a month in Provence, France, in “a village of 100 people,” where he learned “not how, but why to make cheese.”

From experts there, he learned complicated types of cheesemaking, studied the simple pleasures of bartering wine and cheese with one’s neighbors, along with the satisfaction of doing things the way they’ve been done for generations.

He brought those customs back to Kibbutz Be’eri, to Israel’s so-called Gaza Envelope communities, and set out to create cheeses influenced by his own Negev environment.

Prior to October 7, the Be’eri Dairy was producing 16 different cheeses, selling in local kibbutz stores as well as at Israeli wineries around the country.

“People taste my Gruyere and say, ‘That’s Gruyere,’ but it’s not the kind that you eat in the Alps made from the milk of cows that eat 10 kinds of flowers,” said Peleg. “It’s totally different here, it’s the desert. I’m creating a conversation between the Alps and the desert and this is my terroir. The cheese is made from cows that eat the carrots grown here in the desert. And the cheese is eaten by people who are from here.”

It was that sense of “being able to feel the cheese in our fingers and hands,” that described Peleg’s work with his partners.

Part of the ability to make more complex cheeses came about from his partnership with Or, whom Peleg described as a chef “with an amazing touch, God touched him.” It was Peleg who convinced Or to leave the print shop and join the dairy by enticing him with their gelato operation, which no longer exists.

“We didn’t agree on the small things,” said Peleg, “but that was part of what made us work. He had a golden touch, he knew all kinds of things.”

The three cheesemakers would make time to enjoy their own products, Peleg said, gathering with friends from other kibbutzim to sample their latest offerings with a bottle of wine “made in someone’s garage.”

On October 7, all of that ended.

Changed lives

Throughout that day, as terrorists assaulted the community for long hours with the military overwhelmed and in disarray, Peleg, his wife Neta, their daughter and her boyfriend spent hours together in the sealed room of their house, holding the door shut against the marauders. They survived, somehow overlooked by the raiders who ransacked and burned their neighbors’ homes, and killed or kidnapped their relatives and friends.

Benacot’s two in-laws were also killed — the siblings of his wife Racheli, including her brother Arie “Arik” Kraunik, the head of the kibbutz security team. And Dror Or and Yonat Or were murdered and two of their children taken hostage.

After the army began to regain control late in the day, Peleg, Benacot and their families were evacuated with the rest of the Be’eri survivors to two hotels in the Dead Sea area. Peleg and his family later moved to Kibbutz Tzora, where he was born and raised.

By November, he and Benacot were back at work, driving a daily three-hour round trip to their now deserted kibbutz, where they still had hundreds of cheeses in the process of being brined and dried. At first they had to be accompanied by soldiers, as the entire area was considered high-risk.

“It was unreal to be back,” said Peleg.

Eventually they brought a third person in — Tom Carbone, a younger Be’eri kibbutznik who studied winemaking in Italy and had worked at the dairy.

Carbone, a wiry redhead, is himself processing the atrocities of October 7 and the loss of his mother Galit Carbone in the attack. He, his wife and their one-year-old child survived for 20 hours in their shelter.

Eventually Peleg and Benacot built a travel schedule around the cheesemaking. “It’s not the same as being able to come to work on bikes,” but they’re producing 70% of their usual output, said Peleg.

“We have to live here in order to make more cheese,” added Benacot.

But locals were craving Be’eri cheese, even at the Dead Sea, where many evacuated kibbutz members remain in hotel lodging. The cheesemakers located a refrigerator, placed it in the main Dead Sea hotel housing Be’eri evacuees and stocked it with their product.

“That’s exactly why I make cheese,” said Peleg. “They wanted something from home, something that maybe offered some optimism.”

The dairy is still a business, and a profitable one.

“In the beginning, you just want to make the cheese,” said Peleg. “Today I have the ability in my skills to change textures and flavors and bring my audience what it wants, along with the flavors from here, from this place.”

Peleg’s acquired expertise has made him popular around the world, and he has been brought to destinations as far-flung as Tibet to teach locals how to make cheese from yak milk.

In September, the three partners were putting the finishing touches on plans for a new dairy to be constructed at a junction near the kibbutz, working with a French advisor. At the time, they were discussing whether to purchase new equipment or wait to move into the space with their current equipment and gradually adjust to the larger workshop.

“Dror kept saying we should get the new equipment, and bring in a fourth partner who thinks differently than we do,” said Peleg.

Now, it’s all about doing what they can, said Peleg and Benacot, who are moving ahead with their plans, as painful as that is without Or.

“We’re back to talking about the future, and there are opportunities now, but it’s hard to think about doing this without Dror,” said Peleg. “I was pessimistic at first but now I’m in, because Dror would want it. And I want to make cheese.”

Be’eri cheeses are available at several wineries, and are sold in Tel Aviv at Cafe Otef, a new chain of cafes begun as an effort to employ evacuated Gaza area survivors living in Tel Aviv.

The newest branch of Cafe Otef is run by Reut Karp, a former student of Peleg’s wife and the ex-wife and business partner of Dvir Karp, a chocolatier from Re’im who was killed with his partner, Stav Kimchi, on October 7.

“It’s a small world around here,” said Peleg. “We would hang out together at all the outdoor food fairs, me with cheese and Dvir with his chocolate.”

The dairy’s business consultant is Alon Gat, another Be’eri member whose life was shattered by October 7. His mother Kinneret Gat was killed and his wife Yarden Roman-Gat and sister Carmel Gat were taken hostage. Yarden was released while Carmel remains in Gaza.

Peleg and Or used to have cheese and wine together on Fridays at the kibbutz “parliament,” an informal regular gathering with Peleg’s wife’s uncle, Gideon Pauker of Kibbutz Nir Oz. Pauker was murdered beside his wife on October 7. He was known for making wine with his Nir Oz friends Chaim Peri, taken hostage and killed in captivity, and Gadi Mozes, still in captivity.

Pauker’s son is now continuing the work at the winery, planting new vines in his father’s memory.

Now, months later, the three surviving cheesemakers stand in the breezeway outside their kitchen, opening a bottle of Be’eri rosé and tasting their latest “besor,” a creamy, tangy blue cheese.

“I lived the slow food life and nose-to-tail [approach] before Tel Aviv had even heard of it,” said Peleg, referring to culinary efforts to preserve traditional and regional cuisine, including the food trend in which chefs incorporate as much of an animal as possible into their menu.

“I’ve won medals and studied abroad, but I’m most proud of my local dairy that operates here, with customers from the area. When locals want cheese, they come to Be’eri. They’re our backbone,” said Peleg.

“It’s kind of a miracle that we got here.”