On Wednesday, November 6, Israeli news reported the death of an 18-year-old named Sivan Sadeh who was killed by Hezbollah rocket fire in the agricultural fields of Kibbutz Kfar Masaryk. After more than a year of bitter war on multiple fronts, it’s become all too easy to read a headline like that and not think twice.
But there’s more to the story than just a name, a location, and a cause of death.
It’s the story of Sivan Sadeh, a young man who left home one day to irrigate the broccoli fields and never came back.
It’s the story of the Sadeh family, a family rooted in the northern kibbutz of Kfar Masaryk, four generations of farmers, who lost the thing most dear to them.
It’s is the story of the irrigation team of Kibbutz Kfar Masaryk’s field crops sector, the best of the best of Israel’s pioneers—no less pioneers in 2024, decades after the swamps were drained and while irrigation had long become mechanized—and the story of the persistence of Israeli agriculture despite the most challenging conditions.
A strong soul
Sivan Sadeh joined the Kibbutz Kfar Masaryk field crop staff after a childhood spent on the kibbutz, which is located near Akko. Son to Assaf and Racheli and brother to Ido and Yoav, he was remembered as a beautiful child. “He was a diligent, working child who did things in his own ways,” his father Assaf told Davar. “He was as special and as beautiful as they come—that, you can see in photos—but he never bragged about it. He was a modest child with many friends, and his friends were the most important to him.”
His aunt Ilit described him as street smart. “We also said he knew how to get by anywhere. He had a sense of survival. He was injured many times through his mischievous behavior, but it never hurt him too much. He had a strong soul,” she said.
Sivan studied at the Ofek school on Kibbutz Evron near Nahariya. Three of the school’s graduates were killed at the Nova festival, one fighting in Gaza, and one fighting in Lebanon. School was difficult for Sivan, his father said, but he committed himself to graduating with all the required matriculation exams. “So he worked his ass off for it and he succeeded,” Assaf said.
After graduating, Sivan was intent on enlisting in a combat unit, ideally to become a paratrooper. He was set to enlist in four months.
“He didn’t do any special training,” Assaf said. “He had natural strength. We told him to put in effort, to prepare, but he, like always, went his own way, and he felt that working in the fields would be sufficient.”
So after graduating, Sivan joined the kibbutz’s field crops staff. On November 6, he finished a day of work on the fields and came back home. In the afternoon, he went back out to the fields to turn on the irrigation system for the broccoli crop.
Assaf’s last conversation with his son was at 5:56 p.m. that day, minutes before sirens would go off warning of a Hezbollah attack. Assaf had been in the Haifa suburbs to renew the family’s passports for a ski vacation they were meant to take in February.
“I called him to ask whether to bring him something to eat,” Assaf said. “He managed to say yes, and then the sirens started, where we were in the Haifa suburbs too. We went to the shelter and then went back to ear. We returned to the kibbutz around 7:00 p.m. and Sivan wasn’t home, so I called him to tell him that I had brought him what he wanted, and he didn’t answer, and the phone made a tone that it was turned off.”
He tried calling from another phone and received no answer. “At that point I saw a report that they had found a body and I already felt this wasn’t good. I took the car and went to the fields, and there I saw the Magen David Adom ambulances and the police. I saw our friend, the manager of the agricultural sector, and I said to him, ‘Tell me the truth. I know it’s him,’ and that was it. Right there I understood it was him. We recognized him by his nose ring.”
A family tradition of agriculture in the land of Israel
It was only natural that Sivan joined the field crops sector. His last name, which means “field” in Hebrew, is no coincidence. Sivan’s grandfather, Shaul Sadeh, was born in 1943 to kibbutz founders Yitzhak and Sarah Rosenfield, who Hebraicized their name to Sadeh. Yitzhak Sadeh worked on the kibbutz fields and in the chicken coop. Shaul, Yitzhak’s oldest son, had a technical inclination, and he would become the “sheriff” of the kibbutz.
Shaul managed the water resources for the kibbutz and its fields. The water from the well next to the cemetery was used for irrigating the fields and for the residents of the kibbutz. The sewer that emptied back then into the Naaman River was also Shaul’s responsibility, until a wastewater treatment facility was established. “He would go around the fields in his car, fixing tractors that got stuck in the fields, solving problems in the water system, managing all the infrastructure,” Shaul’s brother, Yaron, said.
Sivan’s mother, Rachelli, grew up in the southern kibbutz of Yad Mordechai. She, too, was from a family of pioneers. Her own mother, Idit, lost her father in the War of Independence when she was just a year old, and her father was one of the founders of Kibbutz Kerem Shalom.
Rachelli went to live on Kibbutz Kfar Masaryk and joined the Sadeh family. All three of Assaf’s siblings worked in the kibbutz fields at one point or another. “Turning on the irrigation was our childhood,” Sivan’s aunt, Ilit, said. “It’s our life, it’s completely us. It’s a cruel act of fate that specifically when he went out to turn on the irrigation he was killed—in our fields, in our home.”
The fields of Kfar Masaryk are used to grow wheat, cotton, corn, chickpeas, broccoli, and watermelons. The field crop team is made up of 14 workers, the youngest of whom are Sivan’s age and the oldest of whom are in their eighties. Their shoes are always filled with mud.
Kibbutzim in the area have been working the fields for 85 years, since the area was swampland. The high-quality produce still finds its way to Israeli grocery shelves, which is even more important in these days of export boycotts from Turkey and Jordan.
“Sivan fit in naturally on the team,” Uriyeh Brummer, another worker in the field crops unit, told Davar. “He fit it well because of his family tradition and also because of his character. He was always ready for any task. Modest. Diligent. And above all a big rascal. He was always getting up to nonsense. We would finish laying down an irrigation line and he would start a mud fight. Every day in the afternoon a water fight with the pressure hose your use to clean the tractors, and then Sican would turn it into an ice fight. In the middle of the day we would rest a bit and he would stop by the kibbutz and return with cans of Red Bull for everyone. He was a rapscallion like that.”
Planting, harvesting, and irrigating, no matter what
The war has proven yet again how important Israeli agriculture is. Yet it’s also doubled the burden on the field crops team, as a result of workers serving in the military reserves, foreign laborers who have returned to their countries, and the constant threat of rocket fire.
Sivan’s partners in the field crop team describe a challenging reality: more than 40 rockets have exploded in the kibbutz’s fields in just the last two months. “When you hear in the news that one rocket struck and three others fell in open areas—you have to understand that the open areas are our fields,” Nevo Cohen, another worker, said. “We’re there. Our work is going around in fields that aren’t protected.”
The field crop team is currently in their most busy season, even as rockets continue to strike. They’re planting wheat, picking avocados, and irrigating the new crops until the rainy season, working hard to put chickpeas, watermelons, and broccoli on supermarket shelves.
“Giant rockets fell on us. It’s no longer some little mortal that only damages that which is a few meters away,” Nevo said. “Some of these rockets are rockets of a few meters with an explosive load of half a ton. Even if it lands at a distance of ten meters from you, you’re getting injured by the rocket. We are trying to protect ourselves, to lie on the ground, whatever you can do. Unfortunately, for Sivan, that wasn’t enough.”
This article was translated from Hebrew by Leah Schwartz.
