“The Project That I Started as a Student at the Mandel Institute Paved the Way to My Present Job"

Dr. Naomi Baum
Graduate of Mandel School for Educational Leadership Cohort 9
Director of the Resilience Unit and the National School Resilience Project.
The Israel Center for the Treatment of Psychotrauma

Naomi Baum, holder of a Doctorate in educational psychology, heads the Resilience Unit at the Israel Center for the Treatment of Psychotrauma in Jerusalem.
After years of work as an educational psychologist, Naomi felt that she wanted to make a major change: “The idea of the Mandel Institute’s School for Educational Leadership came up. Basically, my work today is directly related to the project that I started at the School for Educational Leadership.”

Baum’s story combines the personal dimension and the national dimension: “My years at the School for Educational Leadership were the years when the intifada broke out, and the project that grew up and developed into the Resilience Unit program was essentially my way of coping with the difficult national and regional situation. In my second year at Mandel I started volunteering at the Israel Center for the Treatment of Psychotrauma, and the transition to working there afterwards was natural.”

The model that was developed, entitled “Development of Personal and Professional Resilience,” is mainly geared toward teaching staffs in Israel and abroad. The project is already in operation throughout Israel and even abroad—in Mississippi, which was hit hard by Hurricane Katrina.

According to Naomi, “The model focuses on people’s strengths, on the fact that most of us recover after experiencing stress or trauma. We concentrate on ways of regulating the effects of the stress or trauma on the body and mind by working through and talking about emotions, through emotional communication, and by broadening the range of coping resources that each of us has. We teach people to identify sources of hope and let them talk about the meaning of the trauma in our lives and in the lives of our children.”

For more information about the Israel Center for the Treatment of Psychotrauma click here