When Esther Calek came out of synagogue “on a high” after an uplifting Yom Kippur service in Jerusalem’s Great Synagogue, the news was shocking. A devastating terror attack had hit the Jewish community of her hometown of Manchester. She says the irony struck her powerfully: “That I was feeling safe in Israel, which we’d all been regarding as the unsafe place where it’s dangerous, and my hometown was the place which was feeling very unsafe and very dangerous. It really felt from that point that the tables had been turned in a very profound way.”
Two people were killed and three badly injured before in the attack on Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation on October 2, when Syrian-born British citizen Jihad al-Shamie rammed the gates of the synagogue with his car before assaulting congregants with a knife. Miraculously, only five people had been physically impacted, in the following days and months the emotional reverberations of the attack rippled through the 30,000-strong Jewish community of the North West, as the reality of what had happened sunk in. Everybody felt affected.
A counsellor and psychotherapist, Calek was quick to notice the change of atmosphere when she got home. “That sense of danger within our DNA hasn’t left us since the Holocaust,” she says, “it doesn’t take much to bring it to the surface and reawaken.” Calek felt there was a new “hyper awareness” of risk, and that people had become constantly vigilant.
But something else was afoot. Behind the scenes, mental health professionals were gearing themselves up to respond to that sense of devastation that was impacting not just survivors, but friends, family and the wider community. Within a matter of days, a team of trauma experts from Israel, trained to deal with the emotional fallout from terrorist attacks and armed conflict, had arrived in Manchester to start rolling out workshops to share their expertise.
As a nation, Israel excels in many scientific fields, but one area of specialism has developed for the very worst of reasons. The country is a world leader in the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). For 28 years Natal – an apolitical non-profit organisation – has provided psychological support to people impacted by war and terror, regardless of faith, ethnicity or political affiliation.
The charity was founded by Jude Yovel Recanati who, like many Israelis of her generation, was deeply affected by the Yom Kippur War of 1973. She lost friends and classmates and observed many people struggling with the physical and emotional impact of war.
Ahead of her time, Yovel Recanati saw the need to expand the available options of treatment for people suffering from PTSD. In 1998 she founded Natal – an acronym for the Hebrew translation of “Israel Trauma Centre for Victims of Terror and War”. One of her first moves was to adapt her late parents’ home in Tel Aviv into the Natal national centre.
Starting with psychological first responders and a 24- hour helpline, and moving on to longer-term strategies such as group and individual therapy, Natal has developed clinical expertise and an understanding of what they call “the ecology of trauma and resilience”.
Caroline Ratner CEO of UK Friends of Natal, explains: “They do a lot of community projects, a lot of physical stuff, which is very important because trauma is something you hold in your body. There’s a running group called ‘Running with Rami’, there’s a surfing group called HaGal Sheli (‘My Wave’), there’s trauma-informed yoga.” They also offer a raft of artistic and creative therapies including theatre and resilience retreats.
“Since October 7, the demand for their services has grown exponentially. The phones started ringing at 6.30 on that morning and haven’t stopped,” Ratner says, explaining that Natal increasingly exports its expertise worldwide: “They work with people all over the world because it is very niche. Trauma from the war on terror is different. It’s very specialist. They work with a pastor in Chicago who approached them to help with the gang situation in the city, because that’s trauma from terror and war in a way, and they’re working in Australia too.”
As for their work in the UK, she explains: “There’s obviously a lot of demand for what we do in the UK, because the trauma of antisemitism is combined with what we’ve all been struggling with since October 7.” She adds that the shocking events in Israel brought professional challenges to everyone working in mental health in the UK Jewish community: “We are navigating a different reality.”
UK Friends of Natal works in partnership with UJIA (United Joint Israel Appeal), which fosters the connection between diaspora Jews and Israel. Anat Caspi Kaivanto, who runs the charity’s Manchester and North West operation, says: “We were able to fly an amazing team over within a week to lead a training session with Jahm, the Manchester Jewish mental health charity.” The Natal team provided one training for 25 therapists, including Calek, and another course for 25 key members of the community, including rabbis and leaders from Jewish and non-Jewish schools such as Cheadle Hulme and Manchester Grammar School, which have a lot of Jewish pupils.
Calek says the workshop she attended focused on running group intervention after trauma. “They were so warm. One of them put her arm around me and said: ‘l really feel for you all here in the UK,” she recalls. “It was such a profound moment.” The sense of reversal kicked in again, Calek says: “It took me a few minutes to absorb that. I thought: we’re the victims here, and they are feeling sorry for us. It was a real turning point.”
Ratner and Caspi Kaivanto have also noticed the feeling of reversal too. Until recently, they say, the UK Friends of Natal and UJIA existed primarily to support Israel and to educate people about the country – no thought had been given to how the UK could benefit from Natal’s expertise. That changed after October 7, and even more profoundly after the Heaton Park attack.
“All of a sudden, Israel picks up the phone to us and says: well, now it’s our turn to pay back and to come and support you,” says Caspi Kaivanto. “UJIA has fundraised about more than £8 million for Israel since October 7. And after the terrorist attack in Heaton Park, they said, well actually we think you need a bit of help too now.”
For Manchester, it is still early days. The trauma team returned recently to repeat the workshops, and there have been remote video-call training sessions too.
The collaboration has been so successful though, that it’s led to a conference focusing on “shared traumatic reality” – what happens clinically and personally when practitioner and patient are navigating the same crisis. The event will take place in central London in September.
For Ratner, the important message is that the after effects of trauma aren’t all negative. “One of the biggest tenets of Natal is post-traumatic growth. It’s all about building resilience,” she says. “You’re always going to have trauma, that trauma is never going away, but you learn how to deal with it, manage it, and grow from it. That’s really important. You can’t let the trauma define you.”
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