Kfar Ahim

Kfar Ahim lies alongside Highway 40, north of Kiryat Malakhi, approximately 10 kilometers southeast of Ashdod.[2][3] Administratively, it is part of Be’er Tuvia Regional Council in the South District’s Ashkelon subdistrict.[6]

The community’s history links agricultural settlement by Jewish immigrants with Holocaust survivors’ lives in Israel and the commemoration of soldiers killed in the War of Independence.[1][2] It also has connections to national public life through Benny Gantz and Israel Katz, both of whom grew up in the moshav.[3]

Kfar Ahim was established in 1949 by Hungarian-speaking Jewish immigrants who had survived the Holocaust.[1] Initially called Kastina A, the settlement was assigned the permanent name Yechiel before residents chose to rename it in memory of Ephraim and Zvi Guber.[2] The brothers were sons of Rivka and Mordechai Guber of neighboring Kfar Warburg; Ephraim was killed at Kubeiba on March 26, 1948, and Zvi near Hulikat on July 8, 1948.[2]

Malka and Nahum Gantz were among the founders.[5] Malka was a Holocaust survivor from Hungary, while Nahum came from Romania and was arrested by the British while attempting to enter Palestine before reaching Israel.[5] Both were Holocaust survivors, and they met aboard an immigrant ship on their way to Israel.[7] The family of Israel Katz also belonged to the moshav’s founding generation.[4]

Britannica describes Kfar Ahim as having been built on the site of a Palestinian village destroyed during the War of Independence.[1]

Kfar Ahim was affiliated with T’nuat HaMoshavim, the Moshav Movement.[8] In May 1970, Nahum Gantz, identified as a member of the new immigrant moshav Kfar Ahim, was chosen as one of the movement’s two deputy secretaries.[9] The other appointee, Simha Assaf, came from the established moshav Kfar Yehoshua.[9]

In May 2025, two Israeli citizens were reported arrested in Kfar Ahim on suspicion of spying for Iran.[10] They were accused of undertaking intelligence-gathering missions, including moving a buried bag believed to contain an explosive device.[10] Israel Katz, then Israel’s defense minister, was living in the community at the time.[10]

Kfar Ahim had 240 residents in 1968 and 861 in 2022.[8][6] A separate description from 2019 put the community at 220 families.[4]

In 2010, the moshav’s established residential area contained 70 households, with another 70 households in an expansion built approximately six years earlier.[11] An admissions committee participated in selecting applicants for that expansion.[11]

Agriculture formed part of the moshav’s working life: in a 2019 speech, Benny Gantz recalled working its fields first with a horse and later with a tractor.[12] He also recalled growing up and receiving his education there alongside his sisters, praying in the village synagogue, and leaving the community for military induction.[12] In the same recollection, he described religious, traditional, and secular residents living side by side.[12]

Holocaust survivors were a substantial presence in the community of Gantz’s childhood.[13] In a Holocaust Remembrance Day speech in 2020, he recalled that many residents were survivors but that few spoke about their experiences.[13]

Israel Katz was born in Kfar Ahim on September 21, 1955, and Benny Gantz on June 9, 1959.[14] In 2019, Katz was a Likud politician and transportation minister who still lived in the moshav, while Gantz, a former military chief of staff, was leading the Blue and White electoral list.[3][14] A resident recalled that both had left the moshav after eighth grade.[3]

During the 2019 election campaign, party posters were visible in Kfar Ahim, although residents generally avoided publicly declaring their political preferences.[3] In the 2015 Knesset election, 386 of the community’s 484 eligible voters cast ballots, a turnout of nearly 80 percent.[14] Likud received approximately 31 percent of the local vote, the Zionist Union 26 percent, Yesh Atid 17 percent, and Kulanu 11 percent.[14]