Israeli psychologists have coined a term to describe the phenomenon they see in patients these days: rolling trauma. In essence, it means that ever since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas massacre — with the overlapping wars and the ongoing hostage crisis — Israelis are reeling from blow after blow.
For a group of visiting American mental-health professionals, one observation was clear. When it comes to rolling trauma, many Israelis are not rolling with it.
Last month, the trip organizer and six professionals visited Israel to learn more about the embattled country and its residents. It all coincidentally took place amid the Israel-Iran war, giving the group an unsparingly unique experience.
The name of the trip was the 2025 Ilene Serlin Trauma Mission to Israel, in memory of the Mill Valley psychologist and dance therapist who died in November.
Serlin was organizing the mission before her death, while she battled cancer.
Her husband, Jeff Saperstein, along with others, took up the mantle after she died. The organizers teamed up with the American Jewish Medical Association (AJMA), which was formed in the wake of the Oct. 7 attack, to raise funds and plan logistics for the trip.
“I really wanted to stand with Israel,” said somatic educator Deborah Boyar, a Novato resident and 30-year veteran of working with trauma patients. “I saw this trip as a way to do some good and learn from the experts in Israeli society, who are grappling with these issues on an ongoing basis.”
The group for the June 17-24 mission was supposed to be about twice the size, but Ben Gurion Airport shut down when the 12-day war between Israel and Iran began on June 13. The participants who were already in Israel continued on a modified schedule that included multiple trips to bomb shelters.
The visitors spoke with representatives of several trauma centers, including Soroka Medical Center in Beersheva, which was badly damaged on June 19 by an Iranian ballistic missile. They met with government and military officials, hospital chaplains, first responders, volunteers with the Israeli emergency-response group Zaka, and top trauma experts such as Danny Brom of the Israel Center for the Treatment of Psycho-Trauma.
For the Americans, it was an opportunity to listen, learn and empathize.
“This is not a happy place,” Saperstein said of the Israel he experienced during and after the Iran war. “Even though they won the war in 12 days, there are no parades, only memorials. There’s no feeling of peace — maybe of a reprieve. A lot of people in Israel go through the motions of vacations, nice dinners, eating ice cream, but they don’t allow themselves a sense of fun as long as there are hostages in Gaza. People look normal but they’re not normal at all. Israel is not OK.”
Boyar, who wrote about her experiences for Times of Israel, similarly detected stress among the Israelis she met during wartime.
“I felt a sense of hyper-arousal — people talking fast and loudly — and also a sense of collapse and hypo-arousal, the extremes of the nervous system,” she told J. from Israel. “At the same time, there was a sense of open-heartedness and vulnerability, a remarkable resilience in the ways a society comes together and cares for its own.”
The signs of that resilience were all around. They visited Jerusalem’s Herzog Medical Center — with its children’s ward temporarily moved underground during the war — and met a volunteer musician serenading kids with his accordion. They visited the kitchen of Rabbi Nissimmi Naim Naor, who uses food and cooking to treat trauma patients. The rabbi led them in a challah-baking session that was itself interrupted by a trip to a bomb shelter.
Other trauma specialists in Israel shared their successes with new modalities, such as sports therapy, equine therapy and respite vacations to the U.S. for soldiers dealing with PTSD.
The Israelis they met throughout the mission “thanked us for being there,” Saperstein told J. from Israel. “Not only was it wartime, there were no tourists there. Everybody we met with was impressed by us, not because of the expertise, but because we were there standing shoulder to shoulder. We were up all night in the shelters. We were exhausted but exhilarated. The sense of being family was very palpable.”
AJMA CEO Michelle Stravitz, who took part in the mission, agreed and noted that the Israelis they met “were inspired by our tenacity in doing the mission [and] our constant cries of ‘Am Yisrael Chai.’”
Her organization was formed in the wake of Oct. 7, with a current national membership of some 2,000 doctors, nurses, therapists and other health professionals. Stravitz said the AJMA has grown in response to what she called the “volcanic eruption of antisemitism in the health care space,” including incidents of the doxxing of doctors, blacklisting of Jewish therapists, and some professionals claiming Zionism is a “mental health condition like homophobia.”
Israel missions were always meant to be part of the AJMA agenda, and now, with this first one complete, more will follow, according to Stravitz, including another focused on trauma. Saperstein noted that a videographer joined the June mission and that a followup documentary is now being edited. A website documenting the mission is already online.
Saperstein is gratified that he and his colleagues were able to organize the trip, not only as a show of solidarity with Israel, but as an homage to his late wife.
“This was not from a major Jewish organization,” he said. “There was no staff. Ilene worked tirelessly out of her own determination to do something for Israel, to counter the antisemitism she saw in the psychology community. Grassroots efforts matter. Individuals matter.”
Saperstein and two fellow members of Tiburon’s Congregation Kol Shofar, Boyar and BatSheva Feld, each stayed in Israel for nearly two weeks after both the mission and the war ended.
For Saperstein, the entire mission embodied the iconic Biblical phrase “Here I am.”
“This was a ‘Hineni’ moment,” he said.