There are not many good things to say about Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder — the severe anxiety disorder many people suffer after undergoing horrible and terrifying experiences, from sexual abuse to warfare.
Yet PTSD — learning about it and about effective ways to help people who suffer from it — recently helped create a powerful and positive bond between five local helping professionals and Israel.
Four social workers — Gina Botshtein and Amy Biller Daniels of Jewish Family Services, Carolyn Schuman of Chai Point, Andrea Smith of the Jewish Home and Care Center — and clinical psychologist Noam Wittlin of the Captain James A. Lovell Federal Health Care Center in North Chicago formed a group that spent March 14-20 in Israel.
They participated in a professional exchange coordinated by Partnership2Gether. This program of the Jewish Agency for Israel and local Jewish federations pairs Jewish communities in North America with communities in Israel — in this case, the communities of Milwaukee; St. Paul, Minn.; and Tulsa, Okla., with Israel’s Sovev Kinneret (Around Lake Kinneret) region.
Most of the activities of this trip took place in the partnership region, which includes the city of Tiberias. The presentations focused mostly on learning about how Israeli helping professionals and institutions handle PTSD in soldiers, Holocaust survivors, sexual abuse and terrorism victims, and others. It also included presentations on working with older adults generally.
All five U.S. participants said in telephone interviews with The Chronicle that they found this to be a wonderful professional and personal experience.
“It was phenomenal. I feel a deep gratitude to all involved,” said Wittlin, who heard about this project while working at his previous job at the Clement J. Zablocki Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Milwaukee. “I feel extremely fortunate to have been part of this.”
As one would expect in a diverse group, each participant had her or his own highlights of the trip.
The first experience Botshtein recalled in the conversation was a visit to a medium security prison. The group met with a prisoner convicted of sexual assault who was also a Ph.D. psychologist. “It was an exciting thing” to hear about what being in prison was like from that perspective, Botshtein said.
Daniels especially recalled visiting a support group of Holocaust survivors that meets weekly. “They were incredible” and “our interaction with them was magical and spiritual,” she said. “It was hearing their stories, how they survived, [and] their concerns for the American Jewish community.”
A visit to an army base was particularly meaningful to Schuman. “I have an 18-year-old in college. If he were in Israel, he would be going into the army now,” she said.
And she found it “really interesting” to see how the Israel Defense Force deals with these young people, some of them being away from home for the first time in their lives, to say nothing of what they may confront in stressful situations from basic training to the battlefield.
The participants also differed in what they feel they learned from this program.
“I think the interesting part is that a lot of things were very similar” in Israel to what is done in the U.S., said Smith. “People are people. In a lot of the social service stuff, there are a lot of little differences,” but “for the most part it is the same as what we do here.”
Wittlin agreed with Smith’s observation, but added that he was interested in “some nuances” in the Israeli approach, particularly a “focus on post-traumatic growth … growing from the trauma, not just getting by.”
“We have that here, too” in the United States, he said, “but maybe it is less focused on” in this country than in Israel.
But beyond the sheer acquiring of information, the participants also reported building relationships with Israel and each other was just as important to them.
“I enjoyed meeting other social service professionals,” said Daniels. “Our partnership professionals and volunteers really were great and couldn’t have done more for us.”
“I’ve been to Israel before, but this was a behind-the-scenes look at Israel,” said Schuman. Moreover, every participant stayed with an Israeli family one night over Shabbat, and Schuman particularly enjoyed that experience.
In fact, Schuman said, one of the daughters of that family, Shir Eitan, will be coming to Milwaukee as a Shin Shin volunteer this coming August, and “I’m hoping to take her under my wing,” Schuman said.
And for Wittlin, “The opportunity to connect with other mental health professionals, to interchange ideas and views, was particularly important to me. Learning from each other and connecting and hopefully bringing that back to America to help in strengthening my community — that was a strong motivating factor for me.”
This project grew from earlier events. According to Elsie Crawford, the P2G Cluster Coordinator for the Milwaukee Jewish Federation, a group of four Israeli social workers from the region came to Milwaukee in November 2011. (See December 2011 Chronicle.)
They gave several presentations in Milwaukee that proved very successful — and all five of the participants in the March trip saw the Israelis during the visit. That inspired many questions and expressions of interest in learning more.
“This is the first time that a need was discovered for further professional exploration because of an exchange program other than school twinning,” Crawford wrote in an email. “Therefore it was decided to send the U.S. social workers for a week of professional enrichment to Israel.”
The business of this project isn’t finished yet. Crawford said that in June, the participants will give presentations about their experiences and what they learned to a group of health care professionals and to the general public.
And future such exchanges are being planned, Crawford said.
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