The events of the murderous trauma of Black Sabbath 7.10.23 and the subsequent "Iron Swords" war created cycles of trauma, bereavement, kidnapping, evacuation, and existential stress on a scale, intensity, and level of complexity that we had not yet known.

The Israeli mental health community quickly mobilized, without reservation, in a variety of treatment settings to provide a response to the cycles of mental harm on an immediate and ongoing level.

The intensity of the horrific events, the trauma, and the horrific losses that followed them created a need to refresh and strengthen treatment models for dealing with catastrophic stress, to deal with communities in crisis, abductees and missing persons on an unprecedented scale, a vast population evacuated from their homes for an extended period of time, with all that implies, to implement and adapt therapeutic tools adapted to the situation, to empower the professional community, and to strengthen situation-appropriate skills as much as possible.

Activities of the Sailboat Institute

Immediately after the "Black Sabbath", the Interpreters Institute launched the "Interpreters of Souls" campaign and established a free open learning space for the professional community to strengthen professional tools, teach models of working with trauma, loss and bereavement on a personal and collective level, while addressing the stages of coping, a variety of approaches and populations. We worked to give a voice to the teams operating in the field, to the unique experience accumulated in the world of care in Israel regarding coping with trauma and loss, to a variety of models for treating trauma, loss, stress and uncertainty, to the adaptation of familiar models to this difficult time, to a comparative discussion between approaches with an emphasis on their advantages and disadvantages, to models of increasing resilience, meaning and resources, to the characteristics of group work at this time, issues of working with children and parents under trauma and unique aspects of dealing with Black Sabbath events in old age, and more.

Since October 7, we have held over 30 lectures, trainings and meetings for the professional audience free of charge, in which over 10,000 professionals participated, and many more watched the recordings found in the link on the Interpreters Institute website.

In the coming weeks, additional events are planned as detailed below, free of charge, for the benefit of professional learning, the dissemination of important knowledge at this time, and its accessibility.