There is no other arts programme in the world that does what The Garage does.
It transforms the lives of young Israelis battling serious mental health challenges, and offers them the chance of a fulfilling career instead of a life of deep isolation.
They may be suffering from PTSD, acute depression, bipolar disorder, or schizophrenia but The Garage doesn’t offer them therapy for their conditions. It provides self-belief, it gives them what they need to have their work published or performed, to establish rewarding and creative careers, to live happy and stable lives.
To qualify for a place they must show promise as an artist and meet the criteria for sal shikum, the government support package for mental health rehabilitation.
“Many people come here after years of not leaving their rooms, living in their parents’ house, not earning money, not having anything to get up for,” says artist Dalit Sharon, who founded The Garage, in south Tel Aviv, in 2012, and who serves as CEO.
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Dalit Sharon[Missing Credit]
“Some were just going from one psychiatric hospitalisation to another, two or three in a year, and they felt that they had no future. There’s something about psychiatric diagnosis that people feel just blocks their lives.”
Zoe Rechter is 29 and a music producer. She plays saxophone and guitar, and is part-owner of a studio in Tel Aviv.
“I came here and I was empty, I couldn’t create anything “ she says. She dropped out of school at 15, always loved music but never believed it could be her life.
“On my first day I was in the yard and somebody gave me a guitar and told me to write 30 seconds of a song. And I just cried. I just sat there with the guitar and I cried.”
She was 24 at the time and going through a crisis. “The teachers here really made me believe in myself,” she says. “I always thought I was a phoney, that was I hiding the truth from them, that I’m not talented and there’s nothing creative about me.”
The Garage changed that. “They don’t look at you as somebody who’s going through a crisis,” she says. “They just look at you as an artist. They really, really pushed me towards learning and having courage and confidence in myself.”
Zoe has come full circle. Today she’s back at The Garage, no longer as a student, but as a substitute teacher, sharing what she has learnt about music production and about life.
Students are accepted for a full-time course in one of four artistic disciplines: visual arts, music, writing and media, and performance and movement. After they have completed the course, around two-thirds go on to win places at Israel’s most prestigious arts academies.
But even if their studies don’t lead to a career in their chosen discipline, they can provide the stability they need to take another path.
Patches is 37 and prefers not to use her real name. She started studying writing and media last November after a period in rehab.
“I have borderline personality disorder as well as bipolar type 1 – a tendency for manic episodes – and I’m a recovering addict, almost five years clean,” she says.
The Garage has changed her in ways she never could have expected. She says she now has the self-discipline to juggle a full day’s learning with her job as a peer support counsellor for addicts with mental health struggles.
Plus, learn a language. As an olah (new immigrant) from the US she’s gone from barely reading Hebrew last November to finishing her first novel. And to have the self-belief that she’s grounded enough to return to working in the tech sector.
“With the various struggles I’ve had over the years, it’s been a real challenge. But being here has allowed me to see that I can stick with the commitment, the schedule and the intensity,” she says.
“I’m stable for the first time in years, so I’ve decided to throw my hat back into the free market and try to get back into high tech, which was something I didn’t think I would do.
“I guess you could say that this place has given me more faith in myself so that I can try. I might not succeed. I might end up going back to the world of rehabilitation and recovery. But now I want to try.”
Aiat Batshahar is 29 and comes from what she describes as a “religious extremist family”. Not that it was much of a family she says, putting quote marks around the word.
“I experienced unimaginable violence, most of it physical,” she says. “And I also suffered violence during my school years.”
She spent two years at The Garage, studying visual arts, then music.
Now she is on a course at Bar Ilan University, making up for some of the gaps from her time at school – she’s studying Bible, maths and English – after which she hopes to study jazz at the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance.
Where would she be today without The Garage? “Honestly, I think I’d be dead,” she says. And she’s not joking.
“I come from a very difficult background. I never really had a home or a loving family and I didn’t have any love or compassion from anywhere else either. There was no one in my social circles with whom I could share my art, my thoughts. I had nobody, nothing.
“I came to the conclusion that I really don’t have any purpose here and my life is just full of suffering and bad memories and my entire life is just bleak and hurtful. But when I came to The Garage it all changed.”
At first she barely spoke to anyone. “For the first year I was barely verbal. It was a challenge for the teachers because you know if I’m not communicating properly how can they teach me?”
“I’ve been in therapy for many years now and there’s a fundamental difference between the staff here and therapists.
“When I came here, I was absolutely in awe at the compassion and understanding I received. Because of my social anxiety I didn’t really interact much with other students but the staff were just amazing.”
For her part, Dalit thinks it a desperate shame that The Garage is not replicated. There is, she says, desperate need for programmes like hers, that shift people from welfare dependency to economic productivity and from social isolation to cultural contribution. And it’s a model that shouldn’t be confined to the arts but to every discipline and across the world.
She chose its name to suggest a modest, informal space where new creative ideas and initiatives can begin to take shape, a place to stimulate ambition and desire.
“They change their identity from someone who has schizophrenia to an art student, to someone who has a will and a capacity to do something,” she says.
Her team of teachers – all practising artists – hold students to standards that often exceed what they believe they can achieve. And while she believes art therapy has a place, it will never be at The Garage.
“As a student here you have to be really aware of who you are and the fact that you’re willing to really proceed in your life, and not just to continue to be a victim.”
October 7 survivors said they want art and no therapy
The Garage is actively involved in helping victims of the October 7 massacre – both survivors pursuing a career, and former hostages who want to express themselves through art, without therapy.
Among the students is one young woman who was living on a kibbutz near the Gaza border and whose parents were both murdered, and another who survived the Nova massacre.
Supporting them is something of a mission for The Garage founder Dalit Sharon (pictured below), who comes from Kibbutz Re’im, next to the site of the Nova festival where 378 people were slaughtered and 44 abducted.
“We feel that it is a bit early for those who survived Nova and from the Negev to be able to come and rehabilitate themselves or to ask for such a structure so that they can continue with their lives,” she says.
“But we’re lucky to have one person who lost her family, who lost her parents. She was living in one of the kibbutzim and she was there when her parents were killed.
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Dalit Sharon[Missing Credit]
“She’s studying music at our school and she is amazing. You always see a smile on her face, and she grabs everything she can.”
Another woman fled the Nova festival, and resolved, while hiding from the terrorists, that if she survived, she would pursue her love of singing.
“She made a promise to herself while she was waiting for the IDF to rescue her that if she got out alive she was going to spend the rest of her life doing what she wanted, not what anyone else expected of her.”
She is now studying music at The Garage.
Sharon says that what she finds most touching of all is that the small class of former hostages who returned from Gaza and who are now taking lessons in creative writing and painting are not studying them with a view to a career, but because it helps.
“This is incredible because what they have asked for is exactly what I believe in,” she says. “They said we want to do art but no therapy.
“Not so many people are willing now to accept what we’re offering. Some just run from one therapy to another, some others don’t leave home at all.
“But for those who do come we have created gentle programmes for people who might not be especially artistically talented, but who just feel that they want to make art without therapy.”
The Garage was established with funding from the Tel Aviv Municipality and the UK-based Wohl Legacy, and is supported by UK-based MyIsrael (myisraelcharity.org/the-garage/), which connects the donor with causes in Israel
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