Eviatar “Tari” Kipnis was born in Kibbutz Ma’agan Michael near the sea, and from that point on, water never ceased to be a part of his life. He served in the Israeli Navy, and following his service he continued to enjoy sailing around the world, leading him to experiences and adventures worthy of a book. He reached every corner of the globe, including places few Israelis visit, such as Papua New Guinea and the Maldives. He successfully combined his hobby with work and even served as the skipper of a Singaporean yacht used to monitor and study whales. He even learned how to swim alongside them.
On one of his trips, he encountered Lilach. Like him, she was also born and raised on a kibbutz – her parents were among the founders of Be’eri – and she had never left it since. Tari decided to go with her to Be’eri – first for a trial period of one year, before eventually deciding to settle down for the rest of his life.
Tari and Lilach Kipnis lived, loved, and made art in Kibbutz Be’eri. Lilach was a social worker; she worked at the Cohen-Harris Resilience Center which is dedicated to caring for and advising people dealing with crisis situations, while also helping those coping with trauma at the personal, collective, and communal levels.
Her work at the center and her experiences with local children from the Gaza border region led her to write Shirat Hatrigger: Al Tzlilim SheMavhilim (“The Trigger Song: On Sounds That Scare Us”), a book for children dealing with the anxieties of living near the Gaza border, where falling rockets have been a routine part of everyday life for decades. The events and aftermath of October 7 have made this book relevant for all Israeli children.
Tari Kipnis worked a variety of jobs, including at Kibbutz Be’eri’s famous printing press. Alongside the sea, art was an inseparable part of Kipnis’ life. He attended Betzalel Art School where he was directed to the crafts department because of his skill working with his hands. As part of his final project, he prepared a special series of kitchen knives for celebrity chef Yisrael Aharoni. He also became an expert watchmaker and knew how to fix almost anything himself.
In his later years, Kipnis was afflicted with a rare infectious neurological disease called chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy or CIDP and his body steadily weakened. This did not prevent him from continuing to create art. After he became sick, he was hospitalized for an extended period at Sheba Hospital for rehabilitation. He understood that to return to function and live, he needed to find a new way to continue to create art. At Sheba, Kipnis discovered a new form of art to create: painting.
“On Wednesday afternoon, there were painting classes in the rehabilitation department. I remember accompanying him to classes and loving it. The instructor there helped everyone paint as well as their level of disability and physical state allowed them to. And this way Tari was exposed to the world of painting and was able to develop his artistic skills,” recalled his sister Tsafra.
Since his stay at Sheba, Kipnis never stopped painting, and the watches and sharpened knives were now replaced in his workshop by brushes and colors.
Kipnis was also a man of action and resourcefulness. He found creative ways to create, contribute, and maintain an active lifestyle – even with both his arms and legs becoming ever weaker due to his chronic illness. He crafted himself a special bicycle which was adapted to his weakened body, and which allowed him to continue to ride around the area. When his hands weakened and it was harder for him to hold brushes, he taught himself to add thickness to the brushes by wrapping them in rags so they would be easier for him to hold. Even when he was forced to move around with a wheelchair and required the aid of his caretaker Paul, he never stopped making art.
Some time after he became ill, Kipnis decided to realize an old dream and sailed for Antarctica of all places. “I have to prove to myself that I can still do it,” Tari said, explaining his decision to take one last trip to such a distant destination. Tsafra feared his decision to sail for the distant continent by himself. “He was already sick but he nevertheless decided to travel alone. There were places during the expedition where he did not get off because it was hard for him and he could no longer walk. But he returned with a crazy high from the trip: both from realizing his dream and from not giving up on himself,” she said.
Nature and life on the kibbutz – first at Ma’agan Michael and later in Be’eri – were a repeated motif in his art. Nature, plants, plowed fields, tractors – all common kibbutz sights which featured often in Kipnis’ art.
The 1973 Yom Kippur War broke out when Kipnis was just thirteen years old, and almost all the men were called up to fight. The responsibility of keeping the farm work going at Kibbutz Ma’agan Michael was transferred to the local youth. Kipnis was sent to work in the kibbutz’s cotton fields, reaping the cotton every day. Some of his paintings portray this work.
In Be’eri, the frequent fires breaking out due to Hamas’ rockets and incendiary balloons changed the landscape Kipnis so loved to see and paint. “He very much liked to go out and gather mushrooms,” Tsafra said, “and when the incendiary balloons started and everything in the area burned down, the Bedouin would no longer bring their goats and sheep there to eat the grass. With everything burning and no grass for them to eat, there were no longer mushrooms to grow, because the mushrooms needed the goats’ and sheep’s feces as fertilizer, and without that they didn’t grow.”
But it wasn’t just art that interested him. When Kipnis was captivated with something, he studied it until he became an expert. This happened with coffee as well: Kipnis became interested in coffee beans and how they are roasted, and he ultimately planted a number of coffee plants. Not only did he manage to grow them, he was even able to produce his own coffee.
“He would buy green coffee, mix all kinds and then roast the coffee he grew. He was very proud of the trees he grew,” Tsafra said. On October 7, Kipnis’ coffee plants, like other trees and houses on the kibbutz – were burned down.
That cursed Saturday, Tari Kipnis was home with his wife Lilach and his Filipino caretaker Paul. At eight in the morning, they spoke with their son Yotam. It would be their last conversation.
Tari, his wife Lilach, and caretaker Paul Vincent Castelvi were all murdered in their home in the kibbutz. After the murder, the whole house was burned down. Paul’s body was immediately identified and there was initially a fear that Lilach and Tari had been taken hostage to Gaza – but their bodies were later identified.
Caretaker Paul was the husband of Jovelle Santiago, a caretaker who treated an elderly woman at the nearby Kibbutz Or Haner. She was eight months pregnant with their first child when Paul was murdered. She survived the events of October 7 and gave birth to their son Paul, who has never known the father he is named after, in November 2023.
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A few months later, Tari’s family and friends moved the coffee plants to Kibbutz Ma’agan Michael. “Now the plants are truly blooming nicely. They came burnt and dry, and they haven’t yet produced flowers, but they have already begun to bud again,” Tsafra said.
Despite, and perhaps because of the difficulties of life on the Gaza border, Tari Kipnis was both a man of peace and an atheist – principles he adhered to all his life. His relatives are sure that if he had survived October 7, he would have stuck to both principles.
At the eulogy given by his son Yotam, he said:
“Do not recite ‘David’s Lamentation’ for Dad – recite ‘On the Slaughter’ by Bialik,
Without forgetting what he meant when he wrote ‘No such revenge – revenge for the blood of a little child – has yet been devised by Satan.’”
A few days after October 7, with volunteers working to clean up the kibbutz, they found a burnt page from a book of Hayim Nahman Bialik’s poems in one of the burnt houses. It was not “On the Slaughter,” but it was no less fitting:
Who by a miracle escaped the great fire
Your fathers lit an eternal fire on their altar.
And who knows if not the streams of their tears
Took us across and brought us this far
And in their prayer from God asked us;
And in their deaths commanded us life
Life until eternity!
Tari Kipnis’ family have collected his paintings and produced a book and exhibit entitled “Striving for Spirit.” The exhibit is now being shown at Beit Daniel in Tel Aviv until November 3, 2024.
Read more at: Lives Lost: The Works of the October 7 Fallen – A Special Project
