Here with Nissim, it’s a different reality. “People told me I was crazy to come here,” he told me, “but just compare what’s outside, and then tell me who the crazy one is”

The walls are intricate mosaics made of broken pieces of ceramic that Nissim rescued from the trash. The rooms have been hand-hollowed out from the mountain itself, although no team of operators or technicians was ever used. Excavated pottery is displayed next to a black armchair, and the wind chimes tinkle gracefully, lending a certain spirit to this industrial-size cave.

Nissim Kachlon built it all with just a hammer and chisel, and, for some of the more resilient stones, he invented a kind of giant iron spear that could break rocks to pieces. For the construction, he only used spatulas and shovels, with which he poured the cement against netting or tubing he’d collected. The ledges of the balconies are created from plastic or other scraps left at nearby construction sites, and the intricate ceramic designs are byproducts of factory scraps.

Kachlon says he should be getting an award for all his years of eco-friendly construction and for what’s known as “vernacular architecture,” a term for intuition-inspired structures that are protected in many countries.

“Instead,” he says, “I’m being slapped with a court case. I built a museum here. I’m endangering the environment? For 48 years, no rocks ever fell, no natural structures ever cracked. Everything here is strong. It’s a real engineering feat. Even the town engineer who came to inspect the place was shocked. ‘How does this balcony stay in the air, with nothing holding it? You studied engineering?’ I told him, ‘I taught myself everything. If I make a mistake, I fix it.’ ”

Meanwhile, the authorities have advanced in a judicial process with the aim of evicting Kachlon, claiming that this construction threatens the environmental security of the area. The thousands of petitions from all over the world and letters from local residents calling for a reversal of the litigation against the Hermit House, as it’s popularly known, have so far been ignored. Kachlon himself has spent over 70,000 shekels on legal fees, a fortune for an elderly citizen living off national insurance payments.

While the suit claims the Kachlons’ massive structure has left the cliff in danger of collapse and has damaged the shoreline, he claims, in opposition, that rising sea levels caused by the city’s construction of a marina poses a threat to his home and that damage to the shoreline has nothing to do with him. He says the authorities damaged the entire ecosystem by building a marina.

“There used to be fish here,” he says. “Now there are no fish, and it no longer smells of the sea, it smells of soap and fuel.”

In both the early 1980s and late 1990s, the exterior of the house was virtually destroyed by the sea when the Herzliya Marina was built and later extended, which caused the beach north of the marina to erode.

Meanwhile, a group of his supporters is trying to protect his unusual home by having it recognized as a national heritage site.

The municipal authorities say the structure is in danger of collapsing, but five decades in, Nissim is holding his own. “I’m not budging from here until they take me out dead”

For all the uniqueness of his sprawling dwelling, we wanted to know why 77-year-old Nissim Kachlon, with his big knit yarmulke and tzitzis outside his T-shirt, is living in this cave in the first place.

He’s not exactly sociable and isn’t an especially skilled host, but this “Hermit of Herzliya” isn’t living a life of isolation either.

“They call me a hermit,” he says, “but I’m never lonely. Passersby and tourists are always stopping by to see what I’ve done, to tour the house, and to give me chizuk.”

Still, Nissim doesn’t like to talk about himself, even to his many visitors, and I feared that would be my lot, too — until I spotted the stacks of sifrei kodesh on every surface, and my curiosity got the better of me. I began engaging him in a conversation about his religious life, and that was one subject he was happy to discuss, especially with someone who was obviously on the same side of the fence.

“I did teshuvah 29 years ago, and it all started in this cave of mine,” he tells me. “At the time, I’d been living here for about ten years already and had created what became a popular beachfront café in this complex. I was doing well, making a lot of money. I had 3 million shekels saved up. One day, the police came in, told me I was under arrest for larceny, and hauled me off to jail. Believe me, I never stole anything from anyone! I was released after five days, but when I went back and looked for the money, it was gone. They left me dry. It was like a punch in the gut. But you know what? Instead of complaining, I said to myself, ‘Nissim, HaKadosh Baruch Hu is righteous! He took money from you instead of taking your neshamah! You need to do teshuvah!’ And so I did. Every time I think about it, I feel like I want to cry.”

Nissim asks me to pass him his cane, which he uses to get around, but don’t be fooled: He’s still strong as an ox and still spends his days chiseling away, making more extensions and improvements in this house, which has essentially been under construction for close to five decades. He gets up and goes to the small stove to stir his supper — chicken and potatoes — so that it doesn’t burn. It will be his Shabbos seudah as well (our meeting is on Thursday afternoon).

“I’m makpid about everything — Shacharit, Minchah, Arvit, neirot Shabbat,” he says. “I never pass up an opportunity. Every mitzvah to me is a diamond.”

Every night at midnight he recites Tikkun Chatzos and studies the daily portion of Chok L’Yisrael. I notice that there are several seforim of Rebbe Nachman of Breslov.

“There were years when I studied Rebbe Nachman a lot. I traveled to Uman four times,” he relates.

One room feeds into another, a labyrinth of chiseled-out sandstone finished with scrap tiles and other discarded debris that became Nissim’s treasure

AS Nissim tells me his story, I can’t help but look down at the floor and up at the ceiling. The floor is an intricate mosaic of clay shards placed one at a time, while the ceiling is a collection of thousands of embedded shells.

Stepping out to the balcony, you feel that the next wave is going to crash into the house. I couldn’t help considering the irony — across the way people spend millions for a beachfront view, and Nissim is closer than all of them.

Nissim’s house is today a massive labyrinth of sand, cement, clay, and wood, with one room leading to another. There are half-finished caves, a small private apartment that he rents overnight to anyone who wants an off-the-beaten-path experience, balconies suspended by cement-lined plastic pipes (the best material for corrosion-free construction on the beach), and an esplanade of at least 50 square meters that used to house his café. Once a visitor asked him how many rooms he had, to which Nissim replied: “I don’t know. If you want, count them and then tell me.” It’s hard to believe that this dwelling, which has amazed architects and engineers alike, began almost by chance, starting with a summer tent.

“I grew up in Even Yehudah, a moshav a few kilometers from here, but I left home when I was around 20, right after my IDF service, because my parents were pressuring me to get married,” says Nissim, who is the second of 12 siblings with whom he still maintains close relationships.

Nissim took whatever work was available — in construction, food service, and even working on a chicken farm. Two years later, he was called up to fight in the Six-Day War. “Two of my closest friends were killed fighting for the liberation of Yerushalayim, and I was almost killed in a clash in Armon Hanetziv,” he says. At that point, he says he felt the Shechinah was with him, but it would still be many years before he’d decide to lead a life of Torah and mitzvos. “Anyway, emunah I always had… emunah for a Jew is like gasoline for a car. If there’s none, it doesn’t start.”

Shortly after the war, he rented a small house in Herzliya, and one summer, when he was 29, he decided to go camping for a few days on the beach. After a few days on the beach, the police instructed him to move, and that’s when he discovered the cliff.

“I went up here, and I couldn’t stop looking at the sea, until I said to myself, ‘Nissim! Stop looking! You have to start working!’ ”

Within two months, he had already chiseled out a part of the hill, but soon he received a police eviction notice warning him that the structure would be demolished. “At first I thought I’d fight them, but then I realized that I could make a ‘spare’ dwelling just in case I’d get thrown out of the first one,” he remembers. “So a few meters away, I began to dig into the sandstone cliffs until it transformed into a cave with a space for a bed, a table, two candles, and a bottle of water. And then, one day, a fleet of 18 cars showed up — the city police, the border police, people from the Interior Ministry. But I decided I wasn’t going to fight them and just let them look around. Half an hour later an agent comes up to me and asks, ‘How did you get all this up here?’ I told him that I hadn’t dragged anything up, that I had built it all right there. They couldn’t believe it! A few minutes later they left and didn’t bother me anymore. ‘Yishtabach Shemo!’ I said to myself. ‘Now I have the original structure plus the second cave!’ ”

Free of municipal pressure (at least for a few decades), Nissim continued to improve the house. But his adventurous spirit got the better of him, and he decided to take a jaunt to America, to spend a month in Chicago, leaving a friend in charge of the house. That month turned into eight years. During that time, he married a Jewish woman, had a son, David (he would eventually have another two children, Moshe and Sarah, after he returned to Israel), worked in construction, and bought a house.

But the desire to return to live by the sea was stronger. “One day I told my wife I needed to go back to the sea, and she let me go,” he says.

When Nissim returned from Chicago, he was in for a shock. The friend he had left in charge had not been careful with the property, and the wooden structures in the cave had become infested with termites. “I was pretty upset,” Nissim remembers. “I warned him that it could happen and that all he had to do was peel the outer wood every so often.”

Nissim took the matter into his own hands and devised a fumigation method for smoking them out: He lit some bonfires inside the cave and for four days slept in a tent outdoors. When he returned, the smoke had done the job of ending the termite plague.

Nissim understood that, if he wanted to settle into the structure, he’d have to make it more secure. First, he tried iron as a reinforcement, but found that the sea would rust and weaken it. He discovered that the best way to build on the seashore is with plastic and cement.

He would find plastic nets lying on the beach, go to the ceramic factories of Tel Aviv, and collect the discards.

Nissim was offended when I asked him if he’d ever studied construction. “If you hammer your finger, do you need someone to tell you that you did something wrong?” he asks rhetorically. “It’s the same here. You try. If it works, great, otherwise, you have to try something else.” As much as he’s self-taught, Nissim assures me that nothing ever collapsed.

With skill, desire, and enormous willpower, Nissim made the construction of the house the engine of his life. “Eight years I lived without electricity and four years without drinking water,” he admits. But how could he survive without available drinking water?

“To get water I had to go quite a distance. But one day I got tired of it and told myself, ‘I’m going to dig a well, and I’m not going to stop until I find fresh water.’ I killed myself digging and digging, but ten meters deep was the well — fresh spring water, the freshest water I had ever tasted! To this day they come from Bnei Brak to take water from my well for baking matzah.”

I’m not an expert water taster, but I couldn’t resist my host’s pressure, or enthusiasm. And he was right.

“One of the big problems with my new home was that in summer it was very hot and in winter it was very cold,” Kachlon says. He needed to find a way to insulate it but was stumped — until he had an idea: “I covered the entire roof with plastic bottles and until now it’s cool in the summer and warm in the winter — just like in a thermos,” he says.

But his biggest problem was basic sustenance. “At first I looked for interesting stones to carve and sell as trinkets, but then I thought, ‘Nissim, you’re by the sea — go get a net and fish.’ And that’s what I did. I made a net and took out around 50 kilos of fish! At that time, I didn’t have a refrigerator, so I made some deep wells in the sand and covered them with a stone — a homemade fridge. I took the rest of the fish into town, and as soon as I put them down, chik-chak, I sold everything. I took the money, bought a bottle of wine, nuts, and chocolate, because it happened to be my birthday, and I wanted to celebrate… it was the best birthday of my life!”

Soon it occurred to him to make parnassah from the property, and that’s when he decided to open the seashore café. “To this day people tell me they remember the hummus, the coffee… we had good prices and great quality. We took out tables, cooked good food, and had great music. What could be better?”

Nissim used plastic and cement, which he knew would withstand the elements, to forge out the cave that would become a sanctuary for his teshuvah. He even has a guest room for vacationers to rent

The café lasted for a few prosperous years, and then came the police bust. But in the end, that’s what brought him to the place he is today.

The structure, beyond being his house, has become the center of Nissim’s life. “One day, a teacher came with 30 teenage students and asked me if they could visit the house. At first I told them ‘ten shekels per person,’ but then I thought about it for a second and said to myself, ‘Nissim, are you really going to do it for the money?’ I told them I’d allow them in, but since I know that kids today have no respect and feel entitled about everything, I made it a condition for them to behave and speak accordingly. They came in, and they couldn’t believe it,” Nissim says. “These kids are spoiled. No one works hard. They couldn’t understand that I had built all this with my own hands. I told them ‘Guys, work hard, speak well, think positive, and don’t insult people.’ By the time they left, the teacher was shocked by how they’d turned around.”

Nissim told me that, thanks to his proximity to the sea, he’s saved the lives of more than 50 people. “One day I was in a beit knesset and someone came up to me. ‘Don’t you know me?’ he asked. ‘No,’ I said. ‘Fourteen years ago, I was drowning in the sea, and you saved me!’”

After all the adventures he lived through in life, Nissim might have hoped for a quiet old age, doing what he likes undisturbed. But so far, that’s not to be. In a few weeks, he has to appear in court to try to prevent his eviction.

“The mayor hasn’t even bothered to come and see the house. They spent millions of shekels for a national park just a few meters away, but no one goes there because it’s not interesting. But here,” he says, tapping one of the beams, “this is real. People come here from all over the world, and they can’t believe what they’re seeing. They should be giving me a national prize, and instead they want to tear my life apart.”

While Nissim has lots of family all over Israel — his son David has visited on occasion, his daughter Sarah lives in Eilat, and his son Moshe, after a medical crisis, lives in a room Nissim built for him within his complex — Nissim prefers the silence and solitude of his home. And he continues to build: He’s now creating a kind of gallery adjacent to where the kitchen is, where he has space to work and exhibit some of his creations.

He told me that people often ask if they can use the house to organize parties and events, but those things are no longer part of his life. “But if anyone wants to use it to teach Torah classes, I would gladly make room. There was a time when a rabbi taught here and several people told me that they did teshuvah thanks to those shiurim. I’d be happy to have that back here.”

As I take my leave, climbing out of this oceanfront cocoon toward the urbanized “real” world, I remember a sentence Nissim shared: “When I came here, everyone told me I was crazy. But just compare what’s out there to what you see here, and tell me who’s really the crazy person.”

I’m still not sure what the right answer is.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 931)