Bror Hayil
kibbutz in Israel
Bror Hayil (Hebrew: בְּרוֹר חַיִל) is a kibbutz in southern Israel. Located near Sderot, it falls under the jurisdiction of Sha'ar HaNegev Regional Council. In 2024 it had a population of 1,085.
Etymology
The name Bror Hayil means "selection of soldiers". It may be associated with the Bar Kokhba revolt against the Romans in the first half of the 2nd century CE.
A Jewish village called Bror Hayil existed during the Talmudic era, where is now the ruins of the Palestinian village of Burayr, and was the site of a yeshiva headed by rabbi Johanan ben Zakai. According to the Talmud (Sanhedrin 32b), candlelight at night in Bror Hayil was a sign that a male child had been born, and that the villagers were to prepare for the child's impending circumcision. The present kibbutz takes its name from the ancient village of the same name.
History
Bror Hayil was the only Jewish village founded between the UN Partition Plan on 29 November 1947 and the Israeli Declaration of Independence on 14 May 1948. Its establishment required a number of stages; on 10 April 1948, a group of Jewish immigrants from Egypt set up a camp in the area on land purchased by the Jewish National Fund, with the procedure resembling the "Tower and stockade" settlement operation from the time of the 1936–39 Arab revolt. A few days later, The New York Times reported,The Jews yesterday [April 19] founded a new settlement called Brur Hayal at the edge of the Negeb desert, in that part of southern Palestine where Egyptian volunteers are reported to be preparing a “second front’’.
“Bror Hayil” enters the record as kibbutz in Israel. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Bror, Hayil and kibbutz can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q990653. VIAF identifies the subject as 152981117. Authority coordinates are 31.558, 34.647. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2024, 1947, 1948 and 1936.
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This entry incorporates text from “Bror Hayil” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.