Aug. 7, 2024: Dark Money Is Turning Doctors Into Political Operatives
How Kamala chose Walz; Iranian agent arrested in Trump assassination plot; Russia gains in Donetsk
The Big Story
In our July 30 Big Story (“Project 2025 and the NGO Borg”), we discussed the medical nonprofit Vot-ER, which deputizes doctors to register their patients to vote. While IRS rules technically require voter registration groups to act in a nonpartisan manner, Vot-ER has all the trappings of a Democratic get-out-the-vote effort. It was founded in February 2021 with seed funding from the progressive dark money behemoths Tides and Arabella Advisors. Its founder is Alister Martin, a Harvard Medical School physician who, at the time, was serving as a “White House fellow” in Vice President Kamala Harris’ office and now sits on a Department of Health and Human Services advisory panel responsible for outreach to “minority and underserved communities.” Martin himself has spoken openly of wanting to first deliver federal funds “directly into the pockets of low-income patients,” including by paying their rent and bills, before registering them to vote. And Vot-ER’s parent nonprofit, A Healthier Democracy, of which Martin is the CEO, has referred to DEI as “the bedrock of fair healthcare.”
Vot-ER has also helped to craft Biden administration policies that it has directly financially benefited from. According to reporting from the Washington Examiner’s Gabe Kaminsky, two top Vot-ER staffers participated in a 2021 meeting with representatives from Biden’s office, the Department of Justice, and other left-wing NGOs to “plan implementing” a 2021 Biden executive order requiring all federal agencies to promote access to voting and authorizing them to partner with “nonpartisan third-party” groups—like Vot-ER—in order to do so. Earlier this year, the Biden-Harris White House approved $4.4 billion in new funding for federally qualified health centers—including several located in swing states such as Arizona and Georgia that partner with Vot-ER.
But it gets worse, as Aaron Sibarium revealed in a blockbuster Tuesday report in The Washington Free Beacon. In addition to using federal money to operate what is in effect a vote-buying scheme—deputizing progressive doctors to link low-income patients’ continued receipt of cash and in-kind benefits to their voting intentions—Vot-ER is helping to register psychiatric patients at the Pennsylvania Psychiatric Institute (PPI), including those suffering from schizophrenia and suicidal depression, on the grounds that voting is a “therapeutic tool” that can help “empower patients and make them feel good,” according to PPI’s website. Vot-ER has also provided its voter registration toolkit to help register patients in “cancer hospitals, emergency rooms, substance abuse clinics, palliative care departments,” and in “neonatal intensive care units,” Sibarium reports. “I can’t even begin to tell you how inappropriate this is,” one Yale Medical School lecturer tells the Free Beacon, noting that patients often look up to doctors and want to please them.
Vot-ER’s vetting procedures, moreover, seem specially designed to target Democratic-leaning constituencies while screening out those that lean GOP. According to Sibarium:
Applications for the group’s resources ask whether the “majority of your patients” are “24 years old or younger,” “Black/African-American,” or “LGBTQIA+.” Vot-ER’s data indicate that 64 percent of the clinics that use its badges “predominantly serve” African Americans and Hispanics, who lean 83 and 61 percent Democrat respectively, according to the Pew Research Center, while 29 percent of the clinics serve patients primarily under the age of 24, a cohort where Democrats outnumber Republicans two to one.
The group even has scripts doctors can use to encourage “undocumented patients” to register their “friends and family members who are citizens” to vote.
Martin himself has given an example of the sort of conversation he expects physicians to have with vulnerable patients, including those who may have a tenuous grip on reality or view their doctor as an authority figure with literal life-and-death power over them. In a 2022 interview, he told The Boston Globe that he had once told an asthmatic patient to vote, because that was the “only way” to “take the smog out of the air.” Martin’s A Healthier Democracy, meanwhile, promises on its website to “leverage trusted messengers” and “political organizing tactics” to drive “positive social change” and address the “political determinants of health.” What are those political determinants of health? Well, in a 2021 letter to the editors of Nature, explaining that doctors have a “professional responsibility” to promote “health-based civic engagement,” White House fellow Martin and his co-authors wrote:
Since the 2020 US presidential election, there has been a nationwide assault on voting rights, with 18 states enacting 30 new laws that restrict voting access, and hundreds of similar bills marching through state legislatures. Recent restrictions draw comparisons with the literacy tests and poll taxes of the Jim Crow era. Indeed, much of this voter suppression is targeted toward Black people and Indigenous Americans and people of color, all of whom have long borne the violent burden of institutionalized racism and are survivors of extensive, punitive disparities in all areas of life. Health professionals must champion patients’ right to vote to protect health and deracinate inequitable medical practices, building on the efforts of organizations such as VotER and VoteHealth 2020.
You get the picture. Now, some of you might look at this literally state-backed and state-funded effort to subordinate the doctor-patient relationship to the electoral imperatives of the Democratic Party and be vaguely reminded of 20th-century totalitarian regimes, which sought to abolish the division between state and civil society. And indeed, what we’re seeing with Vot-ER is an aspect of the “whole of society” approach to governance recently described by Jacob Siegel in Tablet. Under the whole of society model, Siegel wrote:
The government enacts policies and then “enlists” corporations, NGOs and even individual citizens to enforce them—creating a 360-degree police force made up of the companies you do business with, the civic organizations that you think make up your communal safety net, even your neighbors. What this looks like in practice is a small group of powerful people using public-private partnerships to silence the Constitution, censor ideas they don’t like, deny their opponents access to banking, credit, the internet, and other public accommodations in a process of continuous surveillance, constantly threatened cancellation, and social control.
If party-connected NGOs lobbying tech companies to censor and demonetize troublesome sources of information is the stick, then Vot-ER and other groups like it represent a carrot—de facto party functionaries embedding themselves within basic, formerly nonpolitical services such as health care. The message seems fairly clear: The party can hurt you, but it also takes care of you. So do your part to help the party out.
IN THE BACK PAGES: Many victims of the Nova Festival experienced the horrors of Oct. 7 while under the influence of mind-altering substances. Today’s Tablet feature goes in depth into “The Worst Trip Ever”
The Rest
→NBC has the “inside story” on how Kamala Harris settled on Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. Here are some highlights:
On the timing of the search:
With a looming deadline that Democrats concluded they had to meet to finalize their nominee, people close to Harris and outside allies began a few days before his announcement to start thinking about what her campaign might look like and started batting around names of potential running mates at daily meetings.
On how Democratic operatives think of the voters Walz is supposed to appeal to:
It’s not “rocket science,” said a person familiar with the Harris campaign’s thinking. “Let’s just face it. There’s a lot of sexist, racist white dudes out there in America who don’t like Trump but just need a little extra validation.”
These people are stupid bigots, but maybe if we run out a white guy, they’ll vote for us!
On Kamala’s marriage:
Ultimately, people close to Harris say, it came down to trusting her “gut,” with an aide comparing it to finding a husband. No one was perfect, but Walz was seen as the best.
Sorry Doug!
On the electoral calculations of Shapiro vs. Walz:
But her team was not convinced that he or any of the other candidates could really deliver their home states.
“Polling showed Shapiro wouldn’t help that much more than the others,” said a Democratic strategist familiar with the polling the party rushed to complete before Harris had to decide. “And bringing Gaza back into the foreground would just be awful all the way around. Nobody wanted to return to that.”
The Gaza comment is the headliner, but we’re just as interested in the revelation that the Harris campaign’s internal polling showed that not even Shapiro would put them over the edge in Pennsylvania. The sources added that Harris’ camp feared Shapiro had presidential ambitions of his own, while Walz was seen as an “affable team player.”
→A Pakistani man acting as an “Iranian agent” has been charged in an assassination plot targeting Donald Trump and other top U.S. officials, according to court documents unsealed on Tuesday. The office of the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York has charged Asif Merchant, 46, with “planning political assassinations in New York City in August or early September,” per a report on the charges in The New York Post. As part of the plot, Merchant, who lives in Pakistan, flew to the United States in April and trolled “seedy hangouts like strip clubs and bars” in a search for criminals. He ultimately paid $5,000 in advances to men he believed were hitmen, but were in fact undercover federal agents. Merchant’s plot appears to be unrelated to Thomas Matthew Crooks’ failed assassination attempt on Trump on July 13.
→While groups like Vot-ER are innovating legally ambiguous ways to insert themselves into the voting process, there’s also old-fashioned fraud. Earlier this week, Project Veritas released a video containing hidden-camera interviews with several former local politicians in Hamtramck, Michigan, all of them Democrats. Former Hamtramck City Clerk August Gitschlag explained, of how voting for local elections is conducted in the Bangladeshi and Yemeni communities in Hamtramck:
These guys [ballot harvesters] go door to door and they take people’s ballots … They bully them and they give ’em their ballots over. They go around the neighborhood with their absentee ballot applications and they have people sign the application. Then they put some candidate to drop them all off at city hall. Then they know when they go out they go back to the person’s house and say “Give it up, sign the envelope, give me that ballot.” They’re harvesters, I admit it.
Former Hamtramck Mayor Karen Majewski concurred, saying that “The absentee ballots are being filled out in people’s dining rooms by the candidates.” Lynn Blasey, a Hamtramck City Council candidate in 2021 and 2023, added, of her opponents: “They hire Bangladeshi people to go to Bangladeshi houses. The black people, they pay them for their ballots. They strategically cheat … they target families that don’t care or don’t know the voting process.”
Earlier this year, Shakir Khan, a city councilman in Lodi, California, pleaded guilty to 77 felony and misdemeanor charges related to his registering 70 people to vote from his home address, including several who were not U.S. citizens, and either filling out their ballots for them or pressuring them to vote “one for me and one for Biden.” The scheme was only discovered because police were pursuing Khan for running an illegal gambling ring in an unrelated investigation.
A December 2023 survey from Rasmussen found that more 20% of respondents who voted by absentee or mail-in ballot in 2020 admitted they participated in at least one form of voter fraud, including 19% who said that someone else had filled out their ballot for them and 17% who said they voted in a state they no longer resided in, both of which are illegal. Fifteen percent of Black voters and 29% of Hispanic voters in the survey said that someone else had offered to pay them to vote, while 31% of voters under 40 who voted by mail said they voted in a state in which they were no longer a permanent resident.
→In its renewed offensive in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine, Russia has captured nearly twice the amount of territory as was seized by Ukraine during its summer offensive last year, according to an assessment by Finnish researcher Pasi Paroinen cited in the Financial Times. One senior Ukrainian official told the FT that “our defense is showing cracks” and that the Russians had achieved a “tactical success” in Donetsk and would likely keep going “unless the situation turns around.” Earlier this week, however, Russian sources reported a Ukrainian armored offensive near Kursk, inside the Russian border, in what Russian sources described as an attempt to pull Russian troops away from an offensive that appears to be gaining momentum.
→On X, Eitan Fischberger has compiled a thread of all the Al Jazeera journalists with confirmed ties to Palestinian terrorist organizations or who have expressed their support for them. Here are the highlights:
Ismail al-Ghoul — A reporter in Gaza, Ghoul was first detained by the IDF in March, during its raid on Shifa Hospital, and was killed in an airstrike last week. According to seized Hamas documents published by the IDF, Ghoul was, as of 2021, an engineer in Hamas’ Nukhba Forces.
Hind Khoudary — A Gaza-based reporter for Al Jazeera English who also produces content for the United Nations World Food Program, Khoudary is the Gaza media officer for Euro Med Monitor, a “human rights” nonprofit that acts as a Hamas front, though Khoudary denies she is a member of Hamas. In 2019, Khoudary publicly denounced Gazan peace activists on Facebook for meeting with the Israeli “enemy” via a Zoom call, tagging several senior Hamas officials in the post to ensure it caught their attention. The activists were later arrested on suspicion of treason.
Bisan Owda — Owda was recently nominated for an Emmy for her AJ+ video series, “It’s Bisan From Gaza and I’m Still Alive.” According to the Israeli nonprofit CCFP, Owda has regularly spoken at rallies for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), and was identified by the PFLP in a social media post as a member of the Progressive Youth Union, the terror group’s youth wing.
Esmaeel Omer — Omer, a journalist for Al Jazeera Arabic, entered Israel on Oct. 7, posting video of himself crying tears of joy. After Omer was wounded in an airstrike in February, the IDF said that Omer had a second job: as the deputy commander of Hamas’ Khan Yunis battalion.
Read the rest of the thread here.
→On Monday, Bangladesh’s prime minister for 15 years, Sheikh Hasina, resigned and fled the country in the face of widespread protests. The protests started as a student movement against the country’s peculiar affirmative action system, which reserves 30% of government jobs for descendants of “freedom fighters”—those who fought in the 1971 war of independence with Pakistan, and an important constituency of Hasina’s Awami League—and smaller percentages for women and other “backward” groups. The government abolished the freedom fighter quota in 2018 in response to a previous wave of protests, but it was reinstated by the country’s High Court in June. Though the court later revised the quota downward to 5%, the demonstrations continued, and on Sunday, nearly 100 protesters were killed by Bengali security forces. At that point, according to a Tuesday report in The New York Times, Hasina’s security chiefs convinced her family members that she could not hold onto power absent further bloodshed. The military is now expected to form an interim government, but is struggling to contain a situation that has effectively devolved into anarchy, with widespread rioting, arson, looting, and pogroms against members of the country’s Hindu minority.
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The Worst Trip Ever
Nova Festival attendees were subjected to horrific mass violence while under the influence of mind-altering substances that distorted their perceptions and delayed their responses. Here's how the psychedelic community has coped with an unprecedented mass trauma.
By Adriana Kertzer, Pincha ‘Pinni’ Baumol, Hadas Alterman, and Madison Margolin
In an unprecedented ground invasion that began on the morning of Oct. 7, 2023, during the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah, Hamas terrorists entered Israel and murdered over 1,200 civilians and kidnapped 240 more to Gaza. This massacre—and the glee with which Hamas committed and publicized the murder, torture, and rape of civilians including women, children, and the elderly—is unprecedented in modern-day warfare. It also represents the single deadliest day for Jews in modern history since the Holocaust. At the time of this writing, 120 civilians remain in captivity. Gaza’s Ministry of Health, overseen by Hamas, has reported the deaths of over 39,000 Palestinians.
The massacre that unfolded was a devastating disruption of the euphoria synonymous with rave culture. Terrorists killed, raped, tortured, injured, and traumatized rave attendees at the Nova Festival in in the south of Israel. It is important to recognize that a significant majority of more than 3,000 attendees who were subjected to horrific mass violence were also under the influence of substances that distorted their perceptions, delayed their responses, and made them disproportionately emotionally sensitive. This fact adds an important dimension to how we consider the needs of the survivors and the place this attack now holds in psychedelic history as the worst “trip” ever recorded.
An important dimension of the Oct. 7 attacks that has received little news coverage is the fact that the massacre at the Supernova Sukkot Gathering (now more commonly known as the Nova Festival) was not only the largest terror attack in Israel’s history, and the worst Israeli civilian massacre ever, it was also the largest psychedelics-related act of violence in history.
The Nova Festival was an open-air psytrance music festival near kibbutz Re’im organized by the Tribe of Nova (A Little for the Soul Ltd.) together with the Brazilian psytrance festival group Universo Paralello. Billed as a celebration of “friends, love and infinite freedom,” it was scheduled to coincide with the final day of the Jewish holiday of Sukkot and Simchat Torah. As the sun rose on Oct. 7, amid the pulsing beats and vibrant atmosphere of the open air rave, Hamas invaded.
Sunrise was also the moment at which many rave participants had just begun to experience the full psychoactive effects of the psychedelic substances they had taken. At the same moment, Hamas invaded the festival premises and began shooting at participants, chasing them down the surrounding fields, raping them, and kidnapping them, festivalgoers were under the acute effects of drugs like 3,4-Methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA) and lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), while running for their lives in an attempt to escape the terrorists.
The attack on the Nova Festival resulted in 364 civilians killed, at least 40 hostages taken, and many more assaulted and injured. It also led to a significant number of festivalgoers arriving at the emergency room who were still under the influence of psychedelics and therefore presenting medical teams with additional mental health needs. In the American psychedelic community’s only published account of the Nova massacre, author Mary-Elizabeth Gifford described the reaction of Dr. Roy Salomon who was among the first to be notified about the hundreds of patients who were arriving “tripping and distraught”:
“When I saw that request for two helpers I said, well there were over 3,000 kids at this festival, we don’t just need two people to get over to an emergency room—we’re going to need hundreds of people to help,” said Salomon, who has received training by MAPS (Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies) to provide MDMA-assisted psychotherapy during clinical trials. He said he reached out to the leaders of SafeZone and SafeShore, organizations that provide psychedelic harm reduction services. “I called two of my friends who are leaders of the harm reduction groups here who actually go to festivals.” It was immediately clear that clinicians and mental health practitioners were needed, and that it was essential “they understand psychedelics and trauma.”
***
It quickly became clear to those tending to or preparing to care for survivors of the attack that care had to reflect the reality that participants had consumed psychedelics and that their trauma might be exacerbated by this fact.
The projects summarized herein extend beyond conventional harm reduction—a term that refers to a range of intentional practices to lessen the negative consequences associated with drug use—and therapeutic practices. These projects encompass broader types of psychological aid, resource dissemination, opportunities for expressive integration, and physical places that foster a sense of healing and solidarity.
The rapid and sophisticated response to the needs of the Nova Festival victims was possible due to a confluence of factors which, when viewed collectively, are unique to Israel. First, there is psychedelic assisted therapy in Israel using ketamine, esketamine, and cannabis; and Israel was one of the clinical trial sites for psilocybin and MDMA. This means that the country has a significant number of mental health professionals trained in psychedelic assisted therapy. Second, the Israeli rave scene dates back to the 1980s and is now considered a mainstream aspect of the country’s contemporary society. Furthermore, the psytrance “tribes” are community oriented and have developed a robust harm reduction infrastructure. In turn, these harm reductionists understand substance use patterns among the psytrance community. Third, for the past decade, Israeli harm reduction volunteers have paved the path in addressing issues of substance use, rave culture, and mental health, from the dance floor to the parliament and academic circles. Progressive attitudes toward harm reduction in the Israeli mental health community and a track record of advocacy means there was expertise to draw on in a time of crisis. Lastly, virtual communities that predated the Oct. 7 attacks and technology allowed Israelis to rapidly mobilize in response to the rave attacks.
While the terrorist attack on the Nova Festival—the only terrorist attack in recorded history to have taken place at a psychedelic event—cast a profound shadow over the Israeli psytrance community, the initiatives described below were driven by a collective sense of resilience and may in the future inform how the larger psychedelic industry discusses the risks of psychedelic use, the role of harm reduction, and psychedelic culture at large.
To meet the needs of the survivors of the Nova Festival attack, the Israeli psytrance community instantly sprang into action to mobilize resources. Various harm reduction volunteers from within the rave community became instrumental in providing support. Their roles extended beyond conventional harm reduction practices, encompassing psychological aid, resource dissemination, and fostering a sense of solidarity. Harm reduction initiatives, driven by a collective sense of resilience, emerged as beacons of hope in response to the tragedy of Oct. 7.
The harm reduction community is guided by the principles of the global rave culture—Peace, Love, Unity, and Respect (PLUR)—and rallied to support survivors, hostages, and the families of victims. Volunteers embodying these values have played a pivotal role in the treatment of survivors, offering solace and creating memorials to honor the lives lost. Their efforts extend beyond conventional harm reduction practices, encompassing psychological aid, resource dissemination, and fostering a sense of solidarity.
Anashim Tovim (“Good People”) served as the harm reduction team at the Nova Festival, and their trauma from the Oct. 7 attack made it harder for them to mobilize in the aftermath of the attack as quickly as other organizations. Anashim Tovim was initiated by ELEM/Youth in Distress in Israel, a leading nonprofit organization that helps at-risk youth. Their volunteers identify young people in crisis due to psychoactive substances at popular events like raves and then stay with the individual to provide psychological aid and support. Anashim Tovim’s safe space at the Nova Festival and two vans provided by ELEM were destroyed and three out of the nine-person team members were killed during the Oct. 7 attack, representing the first harm reductionists killed doing their job. But now, after a six-month break, Anashim Tovim has returned to work led by Moshe Elad, both in the field (conducting training courses and running on average two safe zones at parties each month since March 2024) and through advocacy work with the Knesset’s drug committee.
Within hours of the attack, SafeHeart was established by eight therapists to support Nova survivors in need of mental and emotional assistance. After posting a request for psychedelic-informed therapists on Facebook on Oct. 7 and launching a website on Oct. 8, SafeHeart mobilized a nationwide network of clinical providers within days of the attack. During the project’s first week, therapists, “safe space” leaders, and harm reduction specialists addressed over 1,200 inquiries, bringing together expertise in psychedelic harm reduction, trauma work, and clinical practice on an emergency scale.
For the following month, SafeHeart coordinated with the Israeli Ministry of Health to ensure expanded mental health coverage for survivors. As SafeHeart’s head of psychedelic education, Nir Tadmor, M.Sc., a certified transpersonal psychotherapist, described it in an interview with the authors in early 2024, “I had to translate the need for a mass psychedelic-informed trauma response by trained practitioners to the government-run healthcare system.” The effort was successful, and SafeHeart is recognized by the Israeli Ministry of Health and the National Social Security Service (Bituach Leumi) as an official mental health services provider for the survivors of the Re’im Rave Massacre and as a National Resilience Center, officially a member of the Israeli Trauma Coalition. Because of SafeHeart’s official recognition by the Ministry of Health, it is able to offer therapy to survivors free of charge, with therapists compensated at the rate of $100 per session.
By Oct. 14, SafeHeart had established a network of over 260 clinicians, all volunteers with advanced degrees and clinical licenses to provide therapy in Israel. (They also have a team of psychiatrists providing consultations and pharmacological treatments as needed.) According to Tadmor, not all therapists have formal psychedelic-assisted training. SafeHeart also partnered with the organization Brothers in Yoga which transformed glamping tents in Kfar Maccabiah (the sports facility of the Maccabi World Union) into an emergency retreat site for survivors.
Early reports of therapeutic support for Nova responders have credited MAPS, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, a drug development company that is currently operating clinical trials in Israel, with training a critical mass of therapists and bringing psychedelic care into Israeli culture. According to Tadmor, the causation moves in the opposite direction: MAPS has been successful in establishing clinical trials in Israel because of Israel’s pre-existing psychedelic culture. The majority of the therapists mobilized by SafeHeart and other initiatives were familiar with psychedelic and rave culture—which includes organized harm reduction—because of its long-standing ubiquity in Israel since the 1990s.
The initiative had, as of May 6, 2024, provided 5,200 hours of psychotherapy and psychiatric consultation for more than 2,500 survivors. They’ve placed 750 survivors in long-term psychotherapy, coordinated seven group therapy retreats for more than 250 survivors, and recruited 820 survivors to join their in-depth research project in the University of Haifa. The research is being done with the University, under the supervision of Professor Roy Salomon, Head of the Lab of Consciousness and Self in the Department of Cognitive Sciences, and Professor Roee Admon of the Stress & Psychopathology Research Laboratory.
In collaboration with SafeHeart, Dr. Salomon and Dr. Admon began a large-scale study examining the impact of acute trauma under the influence of psychedelics in the peritraumatic and long-term periods. The project used behavioral, cognitive, physiological, and neural (fMRI) measurements of the participants—all of whom are Nova survivors—to better understand clinical trajectories and mechanisms of trauma experienced while under psychedelics.
***
Immediately after Oct. 7, physical spaces were created specifically designed to give Nova survivors a place to come together to grieve, connect, and receive support in a trauma-informed setting. These “safe spaces,” such as Adama Tova and Kfar Izun, served as centers for survivors to meet, connect, integrate their personal stories, and receive various treatments such as psychotherapy, massage, breathwork, and music therapy. Many musicians, artists, members of the Nova production crew, and therapists volunteered at these initiatives, which remained available for survivors for months after the attacks.
Merhav Marpe is an emergency mental health complex established in Rishpon by Dr. Lia Naor to provide immediate care for the thousands traumatized by the attacks at the Nova Festival. The initiative mobilized dozens of therapists—psychologists, psychiatrists, clinical social workers, psychotherapists and certified clinical instructors—to create a “healing space” within days of the attack. Dr. Naor stressed that the efforts were not meant as a full course of treatment, but rather to offer an “immediate and integrative response to trauma.” Merhav Marpe provides a holistic, integrative, community approach to trauma treatment that ranges from psychotherapy to yoga.
IsraAID is an international non-governmental humanitarian aid organization based in Israel founded in 2001 that traditionally works in emergency and long-term development settings in more than 60 countries around the world.However, after the Oct. 7 attacks it applied its expertise to Israel. One of its activities became the training of local mental health specialists on emergency-specific psychosocial support, so they can best meet the urgent needs of affected people from Israel’s south.
IsraAid also funded 20 retreats at Secret Forest near Paphos in Cyprus for survivors of the Nova attack. Secret Forest is a kosher farm-to-table retreat facility at the site of an old village owned by Israeli citizen Yoni Kahana, who offered IsraAid the location for free to help survivors heal. Two thousand individuals signed up to attend the retreats eventually participated, ending each day with a party in which they were the DJs. IsraAid staffed the retreats with therapists that had experience with trauma (experts in different modalities) and emphasized the creation of a support network for the survivors.
Among the notable groups responding to the Oct. 7 tragedy was Anashim Tovim, the Harm Reduction Safe Zone Crew that was started by Shaun Lacob and Eviatar Cohen 12 years ago. It is currently run by Maayan Shenker and Moshe Elad, both of whom survived the Nova Festival attack. Their on-the-ground experience offers a poignant insight into the challenges people face, and the compassion they display, in such dire moments.
Operating in the midst of chaos, Anashim Tovim navigated the intersection of harm reduction principles and immediate crisis response. The crew’s efforts extended beyond traditional harm reduction protocols, engaging with survivors, providing emotional support, and facilitating access to essential resources. Tragically, during the Nova Festival, three volunteers from Anashim Tovim lost their lives in the line of duty. Their sacrifice underscores the gravity of their commitment to harm reduction principles and the safety of the community.
In the face of tragedy, Anashim Tovim and similar initiatives exemplify the power of harm reduction principles to serve as pillars of support, fostering resilience and communal healing. The experience of these volunteers underscores the transformative potential of harm reduction when applied with empathy, understanding, and a commitment to the well-being of the community.
***
Israel’s creative community members, ranging from artists, gallerists, DJs, and musicians acted swiftly to create or adapt initiatives to honor the events of Oct. 7 and support survivors. Different healing activities brought individuals together with the goal of building safe spaces and solidarity. The efforts range from grassroots community events with the intention of healing and prayer with music, to organizational initiatives meant to treat trauma. Some examples follow.
Established in 2015, the Schecter Gallery in Tel Aviv serves as a vital bridge between the profound realm of Judaism’s knowledge and the transformative power of artistic expression.The exhibit Mycelium by Sharon Glazberg opened coincidentally the same week as the attacks, and explored the relationship between art and its audience by using mycelia, the network of fungal hyphae usually found underground. This installation bridged the concepts of art and medicine, fostering relationships between humans and fungi that are akin to the patient-therapist or provider-nourishment connections. Mycelium transformed the gallery into a nurturing environment, with edible and medicinal mushrooms growing from wooden structures designed to resemble treatment beds. Glazberg conducted sessions focused on therapy, healing, art, and ritual in the gallery alongside a carefully assembled group of professionals spanning various fields such as therapy, creativity, mind-body-spirit connections, philosophy, art, and music. During the first weeks of the war, the gallery provided the public free access to a team of therapists ready to treat primary and secondary trauma.
The Nova Music Festival founders—Omri Sassi, Yoni Feingold, Ofir Amir, and Yagil Rimoni—organized a memorial exhibit curated by Reut Feingold that premiered in Tel Aviv and has since begun to tour internationally. Nova 6.29 opened to the public at the Expo Tel Aviv-International Convention Center on Dec. 7, 2023 and was named for the exact hour on Oct. 7 that Hamas’ attacks began. Its goal was to memorialize the nearly 364 people who lost their lives during the attack by showcasing items salvaged from the festival. The display includes video footage of people dancing in their last moments, WhatsApp exchanges capturing the fear and terror of the attendees, portraits of those who never made it home, and many items such as shoes and burnt out cars. All proceeds from the exhibit go toward assistance for Nova Festival survivors coordinated by the Nova Foundation. The Nova founders and Reut Feingold, together with Scooter Braun, Joe Teplow, and Josh Kadden, then brought this large-scale installation to New York and Los Angeles “with the objective to create a powerful, educational, and emotional exhibit that allows others to bear witness to the horrors of what occurred on that day at The Nova Music Festival.”
Read the rest of this feature here.
Clearly, the Democrats are harvesting voters as they did in 2020.