Sheikh Brak was founded in 1920 when several dozen families of Armenian refugees came to
Mandatory Palestine fleeing the
Ottoman Empire after the
Armenian genocide and leased land from a local
Arab Christian landowner. When the landowner fled to
Lebanon during the
1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight, village lands were distributed to nearby
kibbutzim, but the Armenian residents continued living in their formally unrecognized settlement with no connection to the electricity grid and other facilities. Young people were gradually leaving the village to marry outside the community and look for work in bigger cities such as
Haifa and
Tel Aviv. In 1981, some of the local Armenian families left the village after neighboring settlements started blocking the roads to the village and the authorities supplying the town with salty water. The last family to leave were the Lafajians who did so in 1980s, leaving the village uninhabited. Today, only a small Armenian cemetery and several abandoned buildings remain at the site of Sheikh Brak. ==See also==