Benny Erez

Benny Erez, beloved husband, father, grandfather, brother, and passionate pioneer of the local composting movement in the United States and beyond, died on May 24, 2026, surrounded by family at his home in Mebane, North Carolina, after a courageous battle with metastatic pancreatic cancer.

Benny was born to loving parents, Hedva and Ze’ev Yogev, on Kibbutz Ma’abarot in Israel on May 5, 1949. His parents had met on the kibbutz after escaping the Holocaust -- Hedva from Munkacs, Czechoslovakia and Ze’ev from Bad Homburg, Germany.

Ze’ev’s sudden death, when Benny was only five and his mother was nine months pregnant with twins, was traumatic for Benny and Hedva. Hedva later remarried an American named Manny Erez, who adopted Benny and his sister and brother Hagar and Yariv and who loved them as his own. When Benny was a young teen, he and Manny were able to set up a ham radio station on the Kibbutz, since Manny had used radio communications during his US Navy service. They enjoyed using it together to speak with and send messages by Morse code to people all over the world. 

During his years on the Kibbutz, Benny developed many other hobbies, including working in the Kibbutz machine shop with friends of the family as mentors, singing as a tenor in the choir and raising and riding horses.

When Benny was sixteen, his family spent two years in Queens, New York. That summer he met his future wife, Jackie Fischer, at a Jewish sleepover camp in the Catskill Mountains, where she was a new camper. Benny, who had already participated in numerous activities with fellow campers during the preceding months, befriended her to make her feel welcome at camp. For Benny, taking newcomers and outsiders under his wing was a lifelong characteristic. Benny and Jackie shared interests of photography, water coloring, wood sculpture, and folk guitar playing during these early years.

After returning to Israel to finish high school, Benny served three years in the Israeli Defense Forces as a tank commander during the War of Attrition along the Suez Canal. Just two years after completing his service, including a year of community service mentoring troubled youth in Tel Aviv, he was called back as a reservist during the 1973 Yom Kippur War.

Following the war, he and Jackie – who had recently earned her bachelor’s degree in Physics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem – moved to the United States to further their respective educations. They married, and Benny began working with horses, and then studying and teaching three-day eventing on Long Island, while Jackie pursued a PhD in Astrophysics at SUNY Stony Brook.

Benny later earned an Associate Degree in Agriculture from SUNY Farmingdale and a BS in Animal Science from the University of Maryland. In 1982 he joined the Central Maryland Research and Education Center, where he served as Swine Research Manager and later Dairy Research Coordinator. There he participated in research on swine behavior and farrowing management and on lameness detection in cows and horses. His work on composting dairy manure sparked a lifelong passion for composting of food waste.

His sons Yogev and Aaron were born in 1982 and 1986. The family had many adventures and unconventional hobbies, including raising an orphaned American kestrel, as well as a goose named Bruce, restoring and sailing a 37-foot motorsailor, and crabbing and fishing on the Chesapeake Bay. They visited Benny’s family in Israel often and Jackie’s parents visited from Queens regularly.

In late 2009, Benny retired from the University of Maryland to join Jackie on a year-long sabbatical in Germany, where he collaborated on compost and biochar research at the Technical University of Munich.

Upon returning from Germany in 2011, Benny joined the non-profit Eco City Farms in Maryland, where he taught urban agriculture and composting to students and young farmers for twelve years. His passion was contagious, inspiring many mentees who went on to work in soil science and agriculture. He also taught families about composting in the West Bank and helped mentees in Ghana and Zambia carry out community projects. Those he trained were inspired by his personal warmth, sparkling smile, and can-do spirit. In 2024 he received a lifetime achievement award from the Institute for Local Self Reliance for his work teaching small-scale composting in Maryland and at conferences around the US.

In late 2023, Benny retired from Eco City Farms and he and Jackie moved to North Carolina to be near their son Yogev and granddaughter Maya. In retirement, Benny made one final trip to teach composting to local farmers, this time in a small village in Peru.

Because the trauma of his father Ze’ev’s early death never left him, Benny took advantage of the power of the internet during the period 2009-2025 to search for traces of Ze’ev’s long-lost family and friends. His tenacity led him to discover and befriend Ze’ev’s brother Julius’s daughter and son, as well as the son of Ze’ev’s childhood friend, all of whom lived in California. It also connected Benny and his family to a group of German grassroots organizers who research victims of Nazi persecution and organize Stolpersteine (brass stumbling stones) installation ceremonies in front of victims’ former homes. As a result, the family participated in ceremonies in front of Ze’ev’s and his friend’s family’s former homes in Bad Homburg, Germany, made presentations to Bad Homburg students about the fate of the family, and generated long-lasting friendships with the German volunteers.

In September 2025, shortly after returning from a Stolpersteine ceremony in Bad Homburg, Benny was diagnosed with metastatic pancreatic cancer. Despite the effects of grueling treatments, he was able to celebrate Aaron and Michelle’s wedding in early May 2026, just days before his 77th birthday.

On the morning of May 24, 2026, Benny passed peacefully at home, surrounded by Jackie, Yogev, and Aaron. A funeral was held in Chapel Hill on May 28th, attended by family, friends, colleagues, and many mentees. A memorial in Maryland will be held in October 2026.

Benny is survived by his wife Jackie, sons Yogev and Aaron, granddaughter Maya, sister Hagar, and brother Yariv.

Memorial contributions in Benny’s honor may be made to Eco City Farms, the Institute for Local Self Reliance, or the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network.