Beersheba court keeps residents' clubroom in apartment building
A Beersheba Magistrate’s Court has rejected a developer’s bid to take over a residents’ clubroom in a mixed-use lobby area and convert it into a spa. The dispute centered on a room in the Henry Kendall 10 building, part of the Ramam Square project in the city’s Old City neighborhood, where three high-rise buildings were built about 20 years ago around a shared plaza.
The room, which shares a lobby with Henry Kendall 12, was originally equipped as a gym and later used as a residents’ room for building committee meetings, residents’ events and, at times, paid events. The developer, Y.S. Barakha Company for Development and Investments, has been insolvent since 2013. In 2010, the residents were first contacted by the developer’s son, Doron Barakha, who claimed he had bought the space in 2005 through D. Barakha Investments and Construction. In 2020, he and another company that said it had bought half of the common area filed suit against 344 residents, seeking control of the space.
The court initially faced conflicting records: another lobby-area room in the same project has long operated as a Holmes Place gym, and the residents did not dispute that it had been sold to the company. But they said they had occupied the disputed room from the buildings’ completion to the present. Because the documents described the property differently, Judge Rechli Tiktin Edalom appointed a court expert.
The expert concluded that the plaintiffs had not proven the room was lawfully removed from the common property, and that it was unclear whether it formed part of what the sale agreements called the “health club,” part of which is now a Holmes Place branch. She also noted that although common areas had clearly been allocated to the apartments, no document was produced defining their exact location or characteristics. Under Israeli law, any removal from common property must be explicit and specific, and cannot be based only on a general clause leaving such decisions to the developer. On that basis, the judge dismissed the claim and left the clubroom with the residents. Their lawyer, Assaf Shimoni, called the ruling precedent-setting and said the court accepted that the residents’ clubroom, used as an events hall, would remain theirs.
