When Jewish mental health charity Noa Girls was founded in 2010, Naomi Lerer did not anticipate the impact it would have.
“At the time there was really no support for girls struggling with their mental health, particularly those from complex backgrounds,” Naomi, 50, says.
“In the Jewish community, we’re so good at supporting vulnerable people in so many ways. We have amazing charities for people with disabilities, for families with financial hardship or those with physical illness. But when it came to young people struggling with their mental health, there was a real gap.”
Thanks to the efforts of Naomi, who is both the charity’s founder and CEO, Noa Girls now offers tailored, culturally sensitive mental health services to over 300 Jewish girls annually, a feat recognised by Barnet Council’s InspirationAll award last week.
Today, it provides ten different therapy types and runs educational programmes in 16 schools. It advises the NHS on cultural sensitivities to consider when caring for patients and has also highlighted the anxiety among some of its clients about seeking help from the NHS, due to concerns about discrimination.
According to the charity, 98 per cent of the girls it works with have said that Noa Girls has had a positive impact on their lives.
Above all, Noa protects its clients’ confidentiality – a prevalent concern not only within a tight-knit community, but to self-conscious adolescents in general.
Before founding the charity, Naomi, who is married to Central Synagogue’s Rabbi Barry Lerer, never considered herself a feminist. But reflecting on growing up in an Orthodox community, she says it was her parents’ encouragement towards her and her four sisters that instilled a “belief in the innate strength of young women”.
It was this that stood out to her as a youth director at Hampstead Garden Suburb Synagogue, after a placement year at Jewish charity Aish inspired her to seek communal work.
“I was doing a project where teenage girls organised charity projects to build their self-esteem [and] came across so many girls who were really struggling with their mental health.”
We’ve seen a huge increase in the number of girls coming from the most loving, stable, supportive homes, where the complexity is not so much in the circumstances but within the girl herself
“So many of the girls face barriers to accessing NHS support or any statutory services. Like Ghandi said, you measure a society by how it looks after its most vulnerable. These girls were incredibly vulnerable and there was nowhere for them to turn.”
It was at this point that she decided to launch the charity, which initially supported just eight girls. “I genuinely thought that if we could support 30 girls a year, we’d be supporting all the girls in the community who needed it.”
But, come the pandemic, an “explosion” of mental health issues created an unexpected demand for the charity’s services. “We were so fortunate because we started 16 years ago, so we had a strong foundation. Over a year or two, we literally doubled in size. We have a waiting list. It demonstrates both the massive need [for the charity] but also how far we’ve come.”
Noa’s solid infrastructure – specialised programmes, consultations, and an 82-strong staff and volunteer body – has since been vital to the charity.
While she is determined to meet the growing demand, Naomi stresses the importance of doing this safely. “It's easy to just take girls in and not have the right structure and staffing. We have to keep becoming more specialised. That is our duty.”
Naomi has witnessed an exponential growth in mental health issues – something she says still come with a stigma, especially in the Orthodox world, but one which is starting to shift. Perhaps this is because the community, along with the rest of society, is seeing how prevalent they are.
“When we started Noa, all the girls we were supporting had complex backgrounds. They had experienced abuse, neglect, trauma.
“But what we've seen over the last, maybe seven, eight years, is this huge increase in the number of girls coming from the most loving, stable, supportive homes, where the complexity is not so much in the circumstances but within the girl herself.”
Naomi says that they are contacted by girls “whose parents put me to shame as a parent. And yet their daughters have severe eating disorders, are severely suicidal and self-harm. I didn’t believe this initially, but I do now: absolutely no one is immune.”
In addition, Jewish youth are also now faced with the difficulties of the post-October 7 world.
“We’re seeing increased anxiety,” says Naomi, adding that in her field of work, “we’re seeing a huge rise in anti-Israel feeling”. She recalls leaving an institution’s Zoom meeting on the Israel-Hamas conflict as therapists’ and psychiatrists’ speech about Israel “actually felt dangerous”.
Every girl we support reminds me why this matters – to show them they’re stronger than they realise
Simultaneously, Jewish students in non-Jewish schools veil their identity at the risk of receiving “huge hate” for expressing pride in it. “To be a young person in a school now can be very challenging.”
This atop social media usage and the number of both girls and boys suffering from eating disorders cast a dark picture of youth mental health.
Nonetheless, Naomi retains an unwavering sense of hope. “If you can help young people to understand how their brains work, and if you can give them the tools and the strategies to manage their emotions and build their resilience, then you can change that trajectory.”
At the end of the day, the InspirationAll award represents to Naomi the courage of the girls Noa has supported.
“Every girl we support reminds me why this matters – to show them they’re stronger than they realise, to help every girl know that she’s not alone and that she can overcome even the toughest challenges,” she says. “It really is about every girl.”
noagirls.com
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