Zviki Bar Chai, a former head of the South Hebron Hills Regional Council and the settlement division, recounts the story of Lucifer Police Station and its connection to settlement in the area as part of the Heritage Ministry and the Council for Conservation of Heritage Sites in Israel project, "Documentation of Veteran and Founding Settlers." The interview is one of hundreds in the project, which aims to preserve the early history of settlement across different parts of the country for future generations.
The documentation effort has been carried out in the Jordan Valley, Judea, Samaria, Binyamin, the Golan Heights, and the Galilee by Mordechai Kreshner and Noam Damski. Bar Chai says that in 1981, when Beit Yatir was still in a temporary camp, then-minister Ariel Sharon visited Lucifer Police Station and suggested bringing livestock and several families to the site so they could begin building there.
According to Bar Chai, five or six families from their group were ready to move, and the settlement division received funding to renovate the police station. He says they traveled every day from Kiryat Arba to Lucifer, worked through a harsh winter, and had no electricity or water, but did all the labor themselves. He adds that the effort was physically difficult and sustained by a strong determination to develop the place.
The turning point came when the government decided to establish a settlement at the station's coordinates, intended for Beit Yatir. Beit Yatir supporters told Bar Chai's group that if they entered the station after a government decision, it could create confusion and possibly block the community's eventual arrival at its intended site. Although Bar Chai argued that the settlement would still be built within a year and a half or two years, a discussion in the movement in Jerusalem ended with the decision not to move into the police station. Bar Chai says this was a painful setback, but one that ultimately made the group more united.
