In October 2023, Kibbutz Nir Oz member Gideon Pauker had just celebrated the 17th harvest of his locally made wines.
The wines were bottled with Nir Oz grapes grown and harvested with the help of his lifelong friends, Gadi Mozes, Chaim Peri, and Yoram Metzger, fellow founders and members of this small kibbutz near the Gaza border.
On October 7, Pauker, 79, was killed by Hamas terrorists in his home’s saferoom. Mozes, Peri, and Metzger were taken hostage to Gaza.
They left behind some 1,000 bottles of wine of the Nir Oz Red 2022, a blend of Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Petit Verdot, and Syrah, all stored in the kibbutz’s Yom Kippur War-era underground bomb shelter.
Now, 20 months later, Pauker’s grandson, Gal Pauker, 25, is expanding his grandfather’s work, transforming Pauker Winery into a commercial venture with the help of other Israeli boutique winemakers who wanted to ensure that Gideon Pauker’s wines would continue, even after his death.
“We stepped in to take care of the wine for grandpa — but it’s taking care of us, as we try to deal with our losses. This act of creation is doing good for us,” said Gal Pauker. “And it’s a continuation of his legacy.”
Gal Pauker pours a bottle of Pauker red on June 5, 2025, explaining the commercial enterprise in memory of his grandfather, Giedon Pauker, murdered at Kibbutz Nir Oz on October 7, 2023 (Jessica Steinberg/Times of Israel)
The original winery wasn’t commercial; its four members would distribute the 1,000 bottles it produced annually to their friends and family.
As Gal Pauker and his family expand this new enterprise, they produced 3,500 bottles of red with the 2024 harvest, and added a crisp white and dry rosé along with a new barrel room housed in a brand-new trailer.
The bottles’ new label includes an etching of Gideon Pauker walking among his grapevines.
In early June, Gal Pauker, his girlfriend Ziv, and his father, Raz Pauker, who was raised on the kibbutz, sat in the shade of the simple Pauker Winery outdoor visitors’ center, set with picnic benches and a small food truck where they prepare espressos and cheese trays for visitors.
The replanted Pauker grapevines are just across the way, behind a chain link fence that surrounds the kibbutz. The fence was trampled in dozens of places as 600 Hamas terrorists and Gazans poured into the kibbutz on October 7 and then dragged 76 Nir Oz kibbutz members into Gaza, most of them alive and several already dead.
One in four of the 400 Nir Oz residents were either killed or taken captive on October 7, and only six homes were left standing.
The last time Gal heard from his grandfather was around 10:30 a.m. on October 7, while Gal was traveling in Australia. His last text message included three emojis: of a glass of wine, a rose, and a heart.
His grandfather was shot in both hands as he tried to hold the door of his safe room shut, and he bled out in the room, his wife by his side.
Gideon Pauker in an undated photo. (Courtesy of the Pauker family)
After the massacre in the kibbutz, the surviving residents were moved to a hotel in Eilat, including Orna, Gideon’s second wife, and Gal’s grandmother, Pessia and her second husband, who also lived on Nir Oz.
While the kibbutz members were staying in Eilat, several Israeli winemakers came to visit Orna Pauker and asked her what was being done with the wine and whether they could help.
She hadn’t given it much thought.
By the end of October 2023, Gal, now back in Israel, joined a group of winemakers, including local wine guru Haim Gan; Meiram Harel from Amphorae, a non-kosher Israeli winery in Israel’s north; and Shibi Drori from Gvaot, a kosher winery located in the West Bank, to take care of Gideon Pauker’s wines.
“They couldn’t go to the grapevines, those were still the killing fields, too close to shelling from Gaza,” said Gal. “They opened the underground bomb shelter, and we entered my grandfather’s world. I could smell his wine, this live product that we had to take care of.”
They were still in mourning and still recuperating. Gal’s brother was in the hospital having been wounded in Kibbutz Kfar Aza.
Gal’s father, Raz, and his two younger brothers were home in Tze’elim, a nearby kibbutz in the south that was not attacked on October 7, and Gal moved home to take care of his grandfather’s wines.
He got the 2023 grapes into barrels with the help of the winemakers, who guided him through WhatsApp messages and during brief visits.
“They would taste the wine, and I would send questions, and my father came to help,” he said.
In a Paukery Winery vineyard in Israel’s south (Courtesy)
With the help of Raz, who is also a farmer, they planted more grapevines on Nir Oz, in the same fields that the Hamas terrorists had trampled months earlier. They also planted a new vineyard in Gideon’s name in Ein Habesor, a nearby moshav where one of Gideon’s other sons lives.
“I’ve never been a wine drinker,” said Raz, who is one of Gideon’s two sons from his first marriage. His father had two daughters with his second wife and a total of 10 grandchildren. “My father always said I wasn’t a member of the family because I didn’t drink wine.”
“My grandfather used to say that we skipped generations, given how I love wine,” added Gal.
Raz noted that he hadn’t paid close attention to his father’s wine project, though he occasionally handled small tasks that his father would ask of him.
When he and his son, Gal, along with the winemakers, walked into the underground shelter that served as the Pauker wine cellar, Raz was somewhat shocked to find a working wine cellar, with hundreds of bottles of wine in place.
He remembered that the shelter had been used as the underground children’s house during the Yom Kippur War, to keep the babies safe. When he was a teenager growing up in Nir Oz, the underground space was used as a disco.
Raz Pauker, in red shirt, showing visitors the entrance to the underground shelter used by his late father, Gideon Pauker, to store his kibbutz-grown wines at Nir Oz, on June 5, 2025 (Jessica Steinberg/Times of Israel)
He knew about the lift that had been installed so that the septuagenarian winemakers wouldn’t have to carry crates of wine down the staircase.
But he was as surprised as his son was by the width and breadth of the wine project that had been in place for some 20 years by then.
With the winery now being turned into a commercial enterprise, the bomb shelter wine cellar will be turned into a museum commemorating Gideon Pauker and his friends, said Raz.
“The Israeli nation is supporting us, they’re buying this wine,” he said. “It could be that they’re buying the wine to support us, but that’s okay. It’s amazing.”
The three wines of the Pauker Winery from Kibbutz Nir Oz, a dry red, dry white and dry rose (Courtesy)
Gideon was a farmer, raised in coastal Nahariya in the north and trained in an agricultural college, before he moved to Nir Oz as a young man, along with his friends Chaim Peri and Gadi Mozes. He worked in the kibbutz fields and always dreamed of making wine, following in the footsteps of his own grandfather, who was a farmer in Germany with wine always served at his table.
Gideon thought about making wine for some 40 years. Any travel, whether abroad or inside Israel, always included vineyard visits. In the early 2000s, he and his friends began meeting on Friday afternoons to drink wine that they purchased.
Mozes and Peri finally told Gideon to stop talking about making wine and start making it.
They and Metzger received a plot of land from the kibbutz to plant a vineyard that faced Gaza, overlooking Khan Younis and other Gaza neighborhoods. By 2006, they had planted vines and by 2008 they had their grapes. They were already making wine by then from grapes they purchased from Agur Winery in the Judean Hills and Galai Winery in nearby Nir Akiva.
Combination photo of (L-R) Chaim Peri, Amiram Cooper, Chaim Peri, and Yoram Metzger, three Israelis held hostage by Hamas in the Gaza Strip. (Courtesy)
Gideon studied winemaking, and each successive harvest included his family and friends picking the grapes and drinking his wines.
August 2023 brought another harvest, although Gideon Pauker didn’t know it would be his last, his grandson noted. They had started working on the wines and were getting close to bottling them when the October 7 attack took place.
On that day, nearly every part of the extended Pauker family was affected.
Gal’s brother in Kfar Aza sustained complex wounds in his hands as he held the door of his safe room closed against the terrorists, before he and his girlfriend ran for their lives to her parents’ home on the kibbutz.
Their cousin by marriage, Tamir Adar, a member of the Nir Oz security team, was killed and his body taken hostage. Their father’s brother, who lives in Ein Habesor, fought off the terrorists, and their great-aunt Miriam survived carnage in Kibbutz Be’eri.
Chaim Peri, 79, and Yoram Metzger, 80, Gideon’s best friends who were long part of the so-called “parliament” of around 20 friends who helped create and make the wine, were killed in Hamas captivity in February 2024. Their bodies were brought back by IDF troops in August and buried in Kibbutz Nir Oz.
Gideon Pauker was reburied in Nir Oz, when it became safe, after first being buried in nearby Kibbutz Tze’elim.
Released hostage Gadi Mozes speaks in a television interview broadcast March 20, 2025. (Screen capture: Channel 12)
Gadi Mozes, now 80, was released in February during a ceasefire after being held alone in captivity for 482 days, the last remaining living member of the original quartet of friends.
“This is a project of resurrection, as we wait for the remaining hostages to come home,” said Gal. “This was my grandfather’s life project.”
Now, said Gal, he sometimes sits and drinks a bottle of wine with Mozes.
“It’s pretty amazing,” said Gal. “It happened by chance that this fell to me, but I’m getting wonderful help, and I’m so thankful to the winemakers who are teaching me. I’ll stick with them every step of the way, and remember my grandfather as I do this.”
The Pauker Winery is open to visitors at Kibbutz Nir Oz; best to call or write ahead.
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