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Unique therapy program offers troubled Jewish youth a distinctly Israeli alternative

KIBBUTZ HAZOREA, Israel — Throughout high school, Ben rarely did his homework, struggled to complete school assignments and used marijuana on a daily basis.

Frustrated with his situation, Ben, 18, decided in early September to leave his U.S. home and enroll in Free Spirit Experience — an in-residence therapy program in Israel’s Carmel Mountains. Three months on, it has ended up changing his approach to life.

“I went there to work on my studies, but I ended up figuring out who I was independent of my parents and learning how to prioritize,” said Ben, whose last name is being withheld to preserve his privacy. “Just being able to separate myself from my family was really important.”

The program at Free Spirit caters to Jews from the Diaspora in their teens and early 20s struggling with emotional, social or family issues including anxiety, social isolation or depression. Some lack motivation or the executive function skills necessary to succeed in college.

What they have in common is a need for a different kind of help, and they’ve all turned to the program at Kibbutz Hazorea — not far from Haifa — that takes advantage of Israel’s unique location, environment and culture.

“Nobody else is doing what we’re doing,” said educator Tzahi Billet, who ran a boarding school for delinquent Israeli teens near Akko before founding Free Spirit with psychologist Dr. Tamir Rotman. “There are yeshivot for Orthodox kids, and they have the Torah, but they don’t have therapy, and they usually don’t work through deeper issues. For us, the fact that we’re Israelis is very important. The participants here realize we’re very straightforward with what we have to say.”

Some of the teens who come to Free Spirit are experiencing personal or interpersonal challenges, such as isolation or low self-image. Others are in emotional turmoil or crises of various kinds, including relationship issues, failure to launch and other mental health challenges.

Billet and Rotman founded Free Spirit in 2015 to meet the urgent needs of youth from abroad in crisis or serious emotional turmoil. The organization’s programs — which include gap-year offerings, summer sessions and rolling admissions for youth in crisis — combine treatment and emotional and social coaching with outdoor education and therapy. The goal is to instill in Jewish youths greater stability, self-regulation, confidence, sense of purpose, self-reliance and independence.

The location, in the bucolic Jezreel Valley on a kibbutz founded in 1936 by German immigrants, is meant to be an ideal setting to help young people from any kind of Jewish background tackle the underlying conditions that lead to anxiety, depression, anti-social behavior and other issues troubling so many teenagers today.

The organization’s mission is “to bring people from all over the world for a meaningful empowering experience based on a challenge by choice.”

“For a lot of these kids, this is the first time they’re being seen by mental health professionals on a 24/7 basis, so we have a much better understanding of their issues,” said Rotman, the psychologist. “In the U.S., you have programs like ours that force participants to attend. Here, the kids have to want to come. We don’t accept anyone if they don’t want to be here.”

Fundamental to Free Spirit’s philosophy, said program therapist Yuval Gofer, is using social and emotional coaching to give young people the inner strength and flexibility to make their own decisions, rather than merely respond to the promise of reward or threat of punishment.

“In many other programs, you learn to live inside the system and not do things because you’ll get punished, but when you leave that place, there’s no reason to continue that specific behavior,” Gofer said. “We don’t work with punishments. We want this growth to be sustainable after they leave us.”

Keren Shema, Yuval Goffer and Tzahi Billet, left to right, form part of the 12-member staff at Free Spirit, a program for at-risk youth at Kibbutz Hazorea in northern Israel. (Larry Luxner)

The gap-year program Free Spirit runs is tailored to Jewish youths ages 18 to 23 from overseas. Some already have struggled through a semester or more in college; others are graduating from residential programs and need help managing the transition from a structured environment into independent life. During the year, participants experience community life on the kibbutz, spend four weeks traveling in Italy, sail to Cyprus on a yacht and do a semester-long internship in Israel.

The summer program — which is designed for teens ages 14-18 who are experiencing challenges but who get by during the school year — includes kibbutz living, excursions, and therapeutic programming designed to encourage social engagement, boost self-confidence and help teens navigate the transition into adulthood.

The rolling programs for youths in crisis usually last eight to 10 weeks and are also for teens and young adults.

So far, over 150 youths have attended Free Spirit programs, about 85% from the United States and Canada and the rest from Europe. The cost is roughly $2,000 per week; partial subsidies are available to those who can’t afford the cost. Aside from tuition fees, Free Spirit is funded by an American Friends of Free Spirit organization largely supported by families of alumni.

A typical day at Free Spirit starts at 7:30 a.m. with breakfast and a group meeting to discuss the day’s plan. Participants then work on projects from building tables and decks for the kibbutz to creating their own art. After that is lunch, rest time and a variety of afternoon and evening activities like forest hikes and campfires. There are weekly field trips to points of interest throughout Israel.

Interest in the program is increasing as a consequence of what managing director Rami Bader described as the post-Covid “mental health crisis” sweeping North America.

“You name it, we see it: anxiety, depression, lack of social skills,” Bader said. “A lot of this has to do with the Internet and lack of face-to-face meetings, and Covid only made things worse.”

Some of the youths who come to Free Spirit are grappling with gender dysphoria.

“Part of the natural process of adolescence is figuring out who you are, but in recent years, things that were obvious are no longer so obvious,” Rotman said. “Your gender is not something you assume anymore.”

The unique value proposition in an Israel-based therapy program isn’t just the location and Jewish environment, but the benefits of Israel’s culture of structure and responsibility as well as in-your-face directness, according to Bader.

“We are not a rehab program, but we do accept people after they complete rehab,” he said. “Although we don’t allow drugs or alcohol, we don’t have a zero-tolerance policy, which allows us to work through some of these issues if possible.”

Ben said that when he started the Free Spirit program in September, he felt he no longer needed the marijuana he had relied upon for so long. “At Free Spirit, we spent a lot of time outdoors, hiking and also sailing to Cyprus,” he said. “I was able to take time to reflect and think without a phone or other distractions.”

Now in the United States for a brief visit, Ben plans to return to Free Spirit for another four months and then attend American University in Washington, D.C., to study communications, economics and government.

Josh arrived at Free Spirit from London in 2015 as a troubled 16-year-old having been kicked out of two previous therapeutic programs.

“Growing up, I had a difficult childhood and I always struggled to fit in,” said Josh, whose last name is being withheld to preserve his privacy. “I had a toxic relationship with my father, with screaming matches on a daily basis.”

He spent three weeks at Free Spirit. But when he returned to England, so did all his emotional problems. Realizing he had left too soon, Josh convinced his parents to send him back to Hazorea, where he ended up staying for eight months.

Josh eventually joined the Israel Defense Forces, spending two and a half years in an elite paratroopers’ brigade — an experience he says “helped me grow into a man.” Now 23, he works at a high-tech firm in suburban Tel Aviv and visits his friends at Hazorea whenever he has time.

“Free Spirit embraces people’s personality traits. They help you find the correct path in life in a way that society will be more accepting of you,” said Josh. These days, he added, he has an “infinitely better relationship” with his father. “We’ve put the past behind us.”


The post Unique therapy program offers troubled Jewish youth a distinctly Israeli alternative appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

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Who needs a Reichstag fire when you can just pretend Portland’s burning?

Here in Portland, this supposed city of darkness, happy kids splash around in a fountain next to the sparkling Willamette River, senior citizens practice tai chi in a park, bald eagles and ospreys soar past office building windows, chefs and bakers win national awards, world-class jazz musicians draw locals into clubs, and hiking trails course through the largest urban forest in the country, with glacier-draped Mount Hood as a backdrop.

It’s hardly the hellscape depicted by Donald Trump. What the city is, however, is a primary target in Trump’s scheming to militarize American cities — at least progressive ones like Portland, my home for the past 25 years.

Demonstrations have continued outside an ICE facility in Portland since the summer. The protests have been small, overall peaceful, occasionally tense, but often cheery — such as the time when a group of elderly Portlanders sang “This Land Is Your Land.” But Trump is using the protests as an excuse to launch what local officials and residents fear could be a major military intervention in the city, turning Portland, in essence, into a domestic battleground.

Trump is employing a playbook that’s eerily similar to ones that have been used by despots, including Adolf Hitler, who consolidated his control over Germany by deploying Sturmabteilung shock troops to spread fear across the populace.

Trump has effectively weaponized ICE as his own personal police force, and is using it to bait protestors into clashes and create a pretext for exerting military-style control over cities led by Democrats. From the very beginning of Trump’s second term, federal agents’ pursuit of undocumented immigrants has been marked by the spread of fear and terror. Trump says ICE’s heavy-handed tactics are necessary to fulfill his promise that undocumented immigrants “will not be tolerated.” But the scale and spectacle of ICE actions suggest another motive: to manufacture war-like images that justify crackdowns on leftists, whom Trump routinely portrays as domestic terrorists.

So far, no ICE raid has been more chilling than its assault last week on a five-story apartment building in Chicago. In the dead of night, armed federal agents rappelled from Black Hawk helicopters onto the roof. Others stormed the building from the ground, kicking down doors, throwing flash-bang grenades, and zip-tying screaming children and elderly residents. The target of the raid was a Venezuelan gang. But Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker said many of those who were arrested were U.S. citizens with no criminal record — which has been disputed by the Trump administration.

Two weeks earlier, a pastor praying outside a Chicago ICE processing center was struck in the head by a pepper ball fired from a roof and then sprayed with tear gas as he lay on the ground. He has since sued ICE, alleging violations of religious freedom and free speech.

After weeks of threats, Trump has federalized 300 Illinois National Guard troops and ordered hundreds more to deploy from Texas — using protests against immigrant detention as a pretext for putting soldiers on the streets. The move defies the spirit of the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, which bars the use of federal military forces to enforce civilian law without explicit congressional authorization.

At a press conference, Pritzker voiced angry defiance toward what he called “Trump’s invasion.”

“The state of Illinois is going to use every lever at our disposal to resist this power grab and get (Homeland Security Secretary Kristi) Noem’s thugs the hell out of Chicago,” Pritzker said.

Portland might well be next.

Over the weekend, a federal judge in Oregon, appointed by Trump in 2019, issued two rulings temporarily blocking his attempts to deploy National Guard troops to Portland. In a blistering decision Saturday, U.S. District Judge Karin Immergut wrote that Trump’s claims of a “war zone” were “simply untethered to the facts.” She added: “This is a nation of Constitutional law, not martial law.”

When Trump tried to circumvent her ruling by ordering California National Guard troops into Oregon, Immergut blocked that maneuver too, writing: “The executive cannot invoke emergency powers based on manufactured chaos.”

Trump responded by claiming that “Portland is on fire,” and threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act, which legal experts note would effectively amount to imposing martial law.

Trump’s description of the situation in Portland is grossly exaggerated, and intentionally so. The protests have occurred in a very small area around the ICE detention center. There have been clashes involving pepper spray, but no ongoing battles. The scene is actually more like an episode of the TV show Portlandia. During Kristi Noem’s visit to the facility on Tuesday she was mocked by activists wearing inflatable animal costumes, including a dinosaur, a raccoon and a chicken. An activist in a giant toad costume has become a social media sensation, especially after an ICE agent shot pepper spray into the air vent on the costume’s back side. Another image making the social media rounds shows protestors using donuts dangling from fishing poles to taunt ICE agents — “ICE fishing,” as they call it.

Portland wears its progressivism on its sleeve, which does not always work in the city’s favor. During the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests downtown, city officials faced accusations of being too lenient on leftist agitators. Riots during those protests, coupled with COVID, led to the closure of numerous downtown stores. Leftists who relish confrontation with right-wing counter-protesters have posed another challenge. During one protest in late August 2020, Trump supporters rode their pickup trucks into downtown Portland and picked a fight with leftist demonstrators. That night, a right-wing counter-protester was shot and killed by a self-described anti-fascist activist, who was later tracked down and fatally shot by federal agents in neighboring Washington state. Before fleeing, the shooter said he was defending himself.

Even before Trump, Portland has had a rocky relationship with federal authority. The city was the site of massive protests against President George W. Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq. In 2019, Portland became the second U.S. city — after San Francisco — to withdraw its police officers from the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force, citing concerns over civil liberties and lack of transparency. In the 1990s, staffers for the first President Bush dubbed Portland “Little Beirut” in response to raucous anti-war protests that greeted his visits.

During his visit to Quantico Marine Base, Trump told top military commanders, “We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military.” He singled out Chicago, Portland, Seattle, and Washington, D.C.  For now, Portland’s resistance may resemble a surreal episode of protest theater—complete with inflatable dinosaurs and the viral “anti-fascist” frog. But there will be no cause for chuckling if the city becomes a proving ground for martial law, with federal troops rehearsing the suppression of dissent.

The post Who needs a Reichstag fire when you can just pretend Portland’s burning? appeared first on The Forward.

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Jewish women struggling with early menopause due to cancer treatment find new help

Beverly was 41, had two children and was contemplating a third when her first mammogram revealed a lump. Diagnosed with breast cancer, Beverly, who lives in Portland, Oregon, opted for chemotherapy, immunotherapy and a double mastectomy.

She knew the chemo would affect her fertility. What she didn’t know was that the type of cancer she had would necessitate hormone suppression drugs that would lead to severe menopausal symptoms.

For Beverly, now 46, that meant hot flashes, vaginal atrophy, zero libido, thick curly hair that turned straight, sparse and wispy, and what she describes as “old lady bones.” 

“If I’m lucky enough to live to 95, am I just going to crumble into a pile of chalk?” she said.

Beverly, who asked that her last name be withheld for privacy reasons, is not alone in experiencing severe menopausal symptoms following breast cancer or ovarian cancer treatment or prophylactic surgery, which entails breast and/or ovary removal, sometimes along with removal of the uterine and fallopian tubes.

Risk-reducing surgery is often recommended for women who carry a BRCA1 or BRCA2 gene mutation, which significantly increases the risk of breast and ovarian cancer. These mutations are found in Ashkenazi Jews — in both women and men — at rates about 10 times higher than in the general population.

For women who test positive, surgery can reduce the risk of developing ovarian cancer by over 75%. There may also be reduced risk of breast cancer, though research findings are mixed.

While hormones gradually decline as older women approach menopause, younger women who undergo surgery-induced menopause may experience a sudden and dramatic hormonal crash.

“Natural menopause is gradual; surgical or medically induced menopause is intense,” said Elana Silber, CEO of Sharsheret, a Jewish nonprofit organization that provides support, counseling, patient navigation, financial assistance and education in the United States and Israel for those facing breast cancer and ovarian cancer.

“Doctors focus on immediate cancer treatment plans; Sharsheret helps support and educate women about what comes next,” Silber said. “We highlight these critical issues so that women know to raise them with their healthcare providers, and we make sure they don’t face those questions alone.”

As public discussions about menopause have become more common, Sharsheret has fielded a growing number of inquiries from young women seeking information on the subject and ways to connect with peers. Many are navigating an abrupt and frightening transition for which they never prepared, and they sometimes describe it as even more traumatic than their breast surgeries.

“Menopause brought on by breast cancer surgery or treatment doesn’t follow a normal, natural progression,” said Adina Fleischmann, Sharsheret’s chief services officer.

Sharsheret has responded by connecting women with social workers and genetic counselors to help them understand both the medical and emotional impact of treatment-induced menopause.

Through peer-to-peer connections, survivors are matched with others who have gone through the same surgeries and drug regimens. They get real-world perspectives that many women say they don’t receive from their physicians.

The organization also provides survivorship kits, medical webinars, and tailored educational materials on sexual health, bone strength, fertility preservation, and non-hormonal strategies for coping with hot flashes, sleep disruption, and vaginal dryness.

Beyond the physical symptoms, it’s not uncommon for women undergoing early menopause to experience depression, according to Dr. Gila Leiter, an Ob/Gyn affiliated with New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital and a member of Sharsheret’s medical advisory board.

“Knowing what symptoms to expect — and expect pretty suddenly — is very important,” Leiter said.

Liora Tannenbaum, Sharsheret’s Israel regional director, underwent risk reducing surgeries as a result of being a BRCA carrier. She said she was less fearful of the physical recovery from having her ovaries and uterus removed than when she did her double mastectomy, but she was terrified of the emotional and mental recovery.

“As much as I looked for people to talk to for support who had been through this, I found that so many women were suffering in silence,” Tannenbaum said. “The lowered tones and discomfort around the entire conversation caught me by surprise.”

One woman, M., 44, recalled symptoms “hitting like pile of rocks” after surgery five years ago to remove her ovaries, fallopian tubes and uterus. (She asked to use only an initial to preserve her privacy.)

Just 23 when she lost her mother to ovarian cancer, M. was 28 when she learned she carried the BRCA1 mutation. She spent several years considering her options before ultimately choosing to remove her ovaries and uterus.

“It took me a long time,” M. said. “The biggest concern is you want to have kids, and when you have these surgeries you can’t have kids.”

Most doctors, including M.’s, recommend such surgery by age 40. By 39, after two children, a third miscarriage, and ongoing exams, a suspicious finding — which proved to be nothing — made her doctor insist on risk-reducing surgery if she wanted to live to see her kids’ bar mitzvahs. 

“I was already considering surgery, and that scare pushed me to do it,” M. said. “I’m glad I did.’”

But the sudden loss of hormones – not just estrogen, but also progesterone and testosterone – left her with vaginal dryness, loss of muscle mass, dry skin, diminished libido and a return of asthma. M., now a nurse who volunteers for Sharsheret’s peer network, noted that she wasn’t told during her medical appointments what to expect.

“The message was: ‘Don’t worry about it. We’ll give you a low-dose hormonal patch and everything will be fine,’” she recalled.

Menopausal symptoms aren’t severe for all women, and sometime they’re only temporary.

Farrah Zweig was 31 when she was diagnosed with hormone-positive, HER2-negative breast cancer. She had a lumpectomy, radiation and chemotherapy. She also took Lupron, a hormone suppression drug, which put her in menopause.

“My medical team did not discuss menopause with me,” said Zweig, now 42. “My only source of information was from people who had gone through it due to age, not as a result of a medical treatment like mine.”

She experienced the hot flashes and difficulty sleeping, which she expected, and also had a tough time losing weight she’d gained during chemo.

Leiter said physicians often don’t inform patients about treatments that might help their symptoms — even those that don’t involve hormones. She noted that antidepressants can reduce hot flashes and mitigate some of the irritability or emotional fluctuations. Meditation, cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, and laser treatments for vaginal dryness also can be effective.

“Knowing what you may feel and how you’re going to handle it, what medications are available, what support systems you’re going to have and maybe lining up your therapist or acupuncturist in advance makes all the difference,” Leiter said.

To speak with a social worker or someone at Sharsheret, visit www.sharsheret.org or call 866.474.2774.


The post Jewish women struggling with early menopause due to cancer treatment find new help appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

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László Krasznahorkai, grim Hungarian author with hidden Jewish roots, wins literature Nobel

This year’s Nobel Prize for literature was awarded to a Hungarian writer whose work offers bleak visions of existence, and whose father hid his Jewish ancestry from him for much of his childhood.

László Krasznahorkai, the 71-year-old novelist and screenwriter, achieved international acclaim for formally daring books like “Satantango” and “The Melancholy of Resistance,” as well as a series of collaborations with the filmmaker Bela Tarr. He is often compared to master Russian novelists like Dostoyevsky and Gogol. 

The Swedish Nobel jury called him “a great epic writer in the Central European tradition that extends through Kafka to Thomas Bernhard, and is characterized by absurdism and grotesque excess.” Another prominent champion of Krasznahorkai’s: the Jewish culture critic Susan Sontag, who praised the infamous 7.5-hour film adaptation of “Satantango” and deemed him a “master of the apocalypse.” 

Krasznahorkai was born in 1954 in the small town of Gyula, near the Romanian border. As a child, he has said in interviews, he had no idea his father hailed from a Hungarian Jewish family. In 1931, as antisemitism was on the rise in Hungary but before the passage of formal anti-Jewish laws in the country, the author’s grandfather had changed their family name from Korin to the more native Hungarian-sounding Krasznahorkai. 

“Our original name was Korin, a Jewish name. With this name, he would never have survived,” Krasznahorkai told a Greek interviewer in 2018. “My grandfather was very wise.”

When the author turned 11, he learned about his Jewish heritage for the first time. “In the socialist era, it was forbidden to mention it,” Krasznahorkai has said about his Jewish ancestry. “Korin” would later serve as the name of the protagonist, a suicidal Hungarian archivist, in Krasznahorkai’s acclaimed 1999 novel “War and War.”

Many of the author’s books, written in challenging postmodern style, are concerned with the effects of political turmoil and national upheaval on everyday citizens, from provincial farm workers to intellectuals. Some of his novels, including “Hersch 07769” and “Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming,” have plots that deal directly with neo-Nazis.

In that 2018 interview, the author, an outspoken opponent of Hungary’s authoritarian prime minister Viktor Orban, also addressed his relationship to Judaism in characteristically pessimistic fashion.

“I am half Jewish,” he said, “but if things carry on in Hungary as they seem likely to do, I’ll soon be entirely Jewish.”


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