ELEM/Youth in Distress in Israel doesn’t have the high profile or glitzy promotional campaigns of many other Israel-driven missions. But as an organization devoted to Israeli distressed youth, it has found itself in even greater need in the seemingly unending aftermath of Oct. 7, 2023.
Founded in 1982, ELEM is Israel’s leading non-profit serving at-risk youth, handling some 13,000 young people across the country’s vast demographic spectrum.
“I have centers all over Israel dealing with sexual abuse, young and adult prostitution, homelessness, drugs,” Maya Baron, ELEM’s trauma department head, told JNS.
Those suffering from domestic violence, neglect and bullying are sought out on the streets and in other trouble spots by ELEM, which takes problems identified by the national and municipal governments and, often without public awareness, works to solve them.
The organization’s Anashim Tovim (Good People) project was well known in Israeli rave and festival circles prior to Oct. 7, serving as a presence to help any partygoer in crisis, including those affected by drugs.
With nine volunteers on site at the Nova Festival on Oct. 7 in order to provide safe spaces for attendees, ELEM lost three of its own to Hamas’s massacre. Another off-duty volunteer was murdered along with her entire family in Kibbutz Be’eri that day.
Ever resilient, ELEM, with its 380 employees and more than 1,200 volunteers, has established new programs since Oct. 7, including some specifically for Nova survivors and one in northern Israel for families moving back to the region after extending time away due to destruction from the war.
That’s in addition to the 24/7, year-round shelters ELEM runs, working with secular and religious Jews, Christian and Muslim Arabs, including Bedouins, along with immigrants, including those from the former Soviet Union and Ethiopia, and the LGBT community.
Liora Attias-Hadar, CEO of American Friends of ELEM, told JNS that most of those benefiting from ELEM’s services “live on the streets and will not seek help from traditional social service groups. ELEM’s hundreds of professionals and thousands of volunteers don’t wait for referrals to treat these youths, but seek them out on their turf—on the streets, in schools, on the internet and at bars and nightclubs.”
That also meant hitting the road after Oct. 7, following troubled evacuees to hotels to observe.
“What we saw was chaos,” said Attias-Hadar. “There were children who were just running around in the hotels, parents who couldn’t parent because they were going through their own trauma. So we knew that we had to be there.”
That led to the creation of the Breathing Spaces program, geared especially for children and teenagers, to allow them an opportunity for a safe space—whether for a nap, a snack, or as Attias-Hadar told JNS, “just to be for a minute.”
Participants don’t need to express their troubles to ELEM professionals right away, she explained.
“Gradually they were coming in, they were getting individual therapy, then group therapy, and eventually it led to trauma therapy,” she said. And when those families made their way back to their own communities, Breathing Spaces “followed them, because our goal is always long-term solution, not just short-term solution. So we made sure that we were there for them. Even to this day, we are there for them.”
As for all Israelis, it is still Oct. 7 for ELEM. Baron told JNS that most of the teenagers and young adults in their centers are suffering from complex post-traumatic stress disorder.
That includes flashbacks, which manifest whenever rocket alerts sound and they need to head for bomb shelters.
“We were hearing things like, ‘I don’t mind getting a bomb here. I don’t mind dying’” said Baron. “They are talking about very major loneliness after alarms.”
She told JNS that phenomena like prostitution, which intuitively one might think would lessen during a crisis, actually doesn’t.
“It keeps happening, not only through websites, but also in the apartments and in hotels” where evacuees are staying, she said.
The crisis, in essence, is omnipresent, and Baron noted the added dynamic of Arab-Jewish tension in its centers during times of military conflict.
While “it’s very hard to come by an Israeli who may not know of us,” ELEM is not as familiar in the United States, even though it was founded in Manhattan, she said.
Ann Bialkin and her late husband Kenneth, an attorney prominently working on Jewish issues, founded the Bialkin Family Foundation in 1968. Ann was a social worker managing a program to support troubled youth by pairing them with volunteers in New York City family courts. That activity provided the impetus for ELEM, for which Bialkin holds the chair.
But while like many programs ELEM is dependent on diaspora largesse, its mission doesn’t always lend itself to a natural connection with Americans.
“Throughout my years I’ve heard comments like ‘What do you mean Israel has prostitution or trafficking or homelessness?’” Attias-Hadar told JNS, relaying the surprise of Americans being introduced to the program. “‘I never saw that. I go to the Kotel, I go to Jerusalem, and it’s nice and it’s a land of milk and honey.’”
She said she tells them that “you may not be walking over those teenagers, but they are there. And our job is to build awareness around the issues that exist among children, teens and young adults in Israel that American audiences are not aware of.”
A major priority of ELEM, in fact, is “to build communities here in the United States that are advocating for our work and understand that there is a major issue among youth in Israel,” she said.
That includes events with partner programs like Covenant House and the American branch of the Israeli scouts, called Tzofim.
Attias-Hadar credits Covenant House for helping her rebuild her own life after moving from Israel to the United States and finding herself homeless and pregnant at 17 years of age.
There is also a yearly Manhattan gala which serves as a prime ELEM fundraising vehicle.
ELEM has added a chapter in Florida and has begun hosting smaller events and parlor meetings, including in California, to introduce Americans to the organization.
During the Israel-Iran conflict this summer, an American Friends for ELEM event in New Jersey resulted in the collection and delivery of some 45 pounds of food and goods for women in a 24/7 shelter in Jerusalem.
Baron noted that a center in the religious community of Beit Shemesh, west of Jerusalem, is populated with English-speaking Haredi girls, most of whom, she says, have American parents or have immigrated to Israel themselves from the United States.
ELEM’s efforts to guide at-risk youth have also produced notable Israelis, like Russian immigrant Diana Golbi, who went on to win the eighth season of Kokhav Nolad, Israeli TV’s “Rising Star” program, and has followed with a theater and voice acting career.
Still, following traumatic events such as Oct. 7 and the Israel-Iran conflict, many Israel supporters give reflexively to organizations like Friends of the Israel Defense Forces and Magen David Adom, but not organizations such as ELEM, she said.
“Mental health tends to be secondary and it’s on the back burner, which is so problematic,” Attias-Hadar told JNS. “It’s to me dangerous in a sense because we’re not putting a priority on the mental health of the next generation. We’re expecting this next generation to then go back when they turn 18, protect the country and then become productive citizens and work and build the country.”
But, Attias-Hadar asks, “How can they do that when they suffer from trauma and PTSD? There’s no way for a child or a teenager or even a young adult to really heal without that support or without the therapy that they desperately need. And that’s where ELEM comes in.”
