Maayan Bar

Maayan and Yuval Bar, a 65-year-old married couple, were murdered by Hamas terrorists in their homes on Kibbutz Be’eri on October 7.

The Bars were parents to four children and grandparents to six.

According to their children’s account on social media, contact was lost with them at around 10 a.m on October 7 and they were considered missing for 10 days before their deaths were sadly confirmed late on October 17.

“Dad, mom, where are you???” wrote their daughter Tom Bar in a Facebook post asking for any information on their whereabouts, a day before the family received the devastating news. “You were so worried about us on that cursed Saturday and asking for updates every 10 minutes,” she said, adding that it was “so hard to breathe” without knowing where her parents were.

The Bars were kibbutz veterans and were both active in conservation projects. Yuval Bar founded a collective recycling program on the kibbutz. Maayan Bar was responsible for kibbutz job placements.

Their daughter Noya Bar shared a harrowing picture from the home’s safe room, which was destroyed and burned, and where the family “once felt safe,” she said.

“Watch over us from above. We miss you and we’ll miss you forever,” their son, Itay Bar, wrote on Facebook on October 18, adding that their deaths left a “huge hole in our hearts.”

“I’m sure you were together until the last second… the best parents and grandparents,” he wrote.

In his eulogy, which he shared to Facebook, Itay Bar described a tight-knit family, with loving parents and grandparents who were actively involved in their children’s lives and careers, and who offered a warm upbringing and a music- and story-filled home.

“You and your home were for me a kingdom of freedom, love and contentment. Visiting you at the kibbutz after all the craziness of my life outside of it was, for me, like sitting on a rainbow,” wrote Bar. He recounted long nights of working as a deejay or out with friends, crashing at his parents’ home, and waking up to his mother’s singing and hearing his father puttering around the house waiting for him to emerge from his childhood bedroom to talk.

It was “a house of freedom and chaos, talking, shouting, jumping from conversation to conversation and topic to topic within seconds. I miss it so much.”

He joked about his father quickly falling asleep in the armchair for Thursday night basketball games on TV and abruptly waking to cheer when he heard his son, before falling asleep again 30 seconds later.

“There were times I woke him up on purpose and got excited even when I didn’t need to be, just to see him like that again.”

“They took my amazing father and mother from me and my sisters, they took from my nephews the grandparents they loved so much, they took from my grandmother her oldest and dearest son, they took from my uncles such a good brother and sister. Wherever I look I will notice who they took you from, because that’s who you were. A huge light and an open and giving heart to everyone. For me, you were my most basic and natural security and home in this world,” he wrote.

“People, or rather monsters, full of darkness, evil and war cut short the lives of my parents full of light, love and peace. You will forever be the king and queen of our family kingdom,” he said.
Source: The Times of Israel