Chavie Brumer, LCSW-R
Article: Never Forget-Never Enough | The Indestructible Jewish Soul
Ms. Brumer holds a Masters in Social Work from Yeshiva University and has over 17 years of clinical experience working with individuals and families, including trauma survivors. She works at the Claims Conference overseeing several programs, including this Kavod journal.
Continue reading →Yael Danieli, PhD
Dr. Yael Danieli is a clinical psychologist in private practice, a victimologist, traumatologist, and the Director of the Group Project for Holocaust Survivors and their Children, which she co-founded in 1975 in the New York City area – the first such program in the world. She has done extensive psychotherapeutic work with survivors and children of survivors on individual, family, group and community bases. She has studied in depth post-war responses and attitudes toward them, and the impact these and the Holocaust had on their lives. Most recently, she has created the Danieli Inventory for Multigenerational Legacies of Trauma that would allow international study of the phenomena. She has lectured and published worldwide in numerous books and journals, translated into at least 17 languages on optimal care and training for this and other victim/survivor populations, and received several awards for her work, the most recent of which are the Lifetime Achievement Award of the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies (ISTSS) in 2002 and the Award for Lifetime Achievement in Trauma Psychology of the American Psychological Association Division 56-Trauma Psychology in 2012. In 2008 she was appointed Advisor on Victims of Terrorism for the office of the Secretary-General of the United Nations, and helped organize the first Symposium on Supporting Victims of Terrorism at the UN. As well, she was appointed Distinguished Professor of International Psychology at the Chicago School of Professional Psychology, helping to build the first Ph.D. program in international psychology. She has served as consultant to the ICTY and the International Criminal Court on issues related to victims and staff care, consultant to South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the Rwanda government on reparations for victims, and has led ongoing Projects in Bosnia and Herzegovina (Promoting a Dialogue: “Democracy Cannot Be Built with the Hands of Broken Souls”), and lectured/taught/trained in Northern Ireland.
Her books are International responses to traumatic stress…; The Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Fifty years and beyond; Sharing the front line and the back hills (Baywood) – all published for and on behalf of the United Nations; International handbook of multigenerational legacies of trauma (Kluwer/ Plenum); and The trauma of terrorism: An international Handbook of sharing knowledge and shared care and On the Ground After September 11 [a finalist of Best Books 2005 Award of USA BookNews.com](Haworth Press).
Dr. Danieli is also Founding Co-President of the International network of Holocaust and Genocide Survivors and their Friends. A Founding Director of The International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies, Dr. Danieli was its (1988-1989) President. The Report of her commissioned Presidential Task Force on Curriculum, Education, and Training for professionals working with victim/survivors was adopted by the United Nations (E/AC.57/1990/NGO.3). She also co-chaired the ISTSS Task Force on International Trauma Training.
Dr. Danieli has been the Senior Representative to the United Nations of the World Federation for Mental Health, the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies, ad the International Organization for Victims Assistance, serving also as Vice Chair of the Executive Committee of Non-Governmental Organizations Associated with the UN Department of Public Information and Chair of its Publications Committee. A Founding Member of WFMH’s Scientific Committee on the Mental Health Needs of Victims, and its Chair, she has been active in developing, promoting, adapting and implementing the United Nations Declaration of Basic Principles of Justice for Victims of Crime and Abuse of Power (A/RES/40/34) and all subsequent UN victims-related work, including their right to reparation (E/CN.4/Sub.2/1996/17) and the Statute and Rules regarding the victims’ central role in the International Criminal Court and as related to terrorism. As well, she has elaborated and promoted reparative justice as a unifying framework for victims’ rights’ and optimal care, from both the outcome and the process points of view.
She has served as Consultant to the UN Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice Branch, on the Board of its International Scientific and Professional Advisory Council and is currently the Chair of the Executive Board of the Alliance of NGOs on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice; also, consultant to the World Health Organization, UNICEF, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and various governments on trauma and victim/survivor’s rights and optimal care. In the US, she has consulted for the National Institute of Mental Health, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and, among other news organizations, Associated Press, BBC, Reuters and CNN.
She has served as Director of Psychological Services for the Center for Rehabilitation of Torture Victims, and Adjunct Associate Professor of Medicine at Seton Hall University School of Graduate Medical Education in New Jersey. Concurrent with a variety of clinical training and work, during 1970-1977 she taught Psychology at Brooklyn College and John Jay College for Criminal Justice of the City University of New York, and was faculty member and supervisor at the (U.S.) National Institute for the Psychotherapies.
Before arriving in the United States (for a Doctorate in Psychology at New York University earned in 1981), she served as a Sergeant in the Israeli Defense Forces, taught and wrote in music, philosophy and psychology in Israel.
Continue reading →Irit Felsen, Ph.D.
Articles: Holocaust Survivors as Participant Educators: Giving Space to Lived Experience of Social Trauma in Collective Memory ; Encounters with Chronic Psychiatric Holocaust Survivors: Trauma, Psychosis and Functionality
Irit Felsen, PhD is a clinical psychologist specializing in trauma and traumatic loss, with a special focus on Holocaust survivors and their families. Dr. Felsen received her Ph.D from the University of Hamburg, Germany and completed her post-doctoral training at Yale University. She is an Adjunct Professor at Yeshiva University in NY, and is in private practice in Mountain Lakes, NJ, and in Englewood, NJ. She also serves on a national emergency response team for the delivery of services following critical incidents. Dr. Felsen is a researcher with the Yale University Trauma Study Group, and her research on the effects of trauma and intergenerational transmission of trauma was published in the American Journal of Psychiatry, the American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, the Journal of Psychotherapy Research, the Journal of Psychoanalysis, Self and Context, the journal of Psychoanalytic Psychology, and in book chapters in the “International Handbook of Multigenerational Legacies of Trauma” and the recently published book “Psychoanalysis and Holocaust Testimonies: Unwanted Memories”. Dr. Felsen served as the Clinical Coordinator of services for Holocaust survivors at the Jewish Family Services of Metrowest in NJ and as a NJ State Emergency Psychiatric Services Screener. She is the daughter of Holocaust survivor parents.
Continue reading →Dr. George Halasz
Article: Reflections from Son of Saul to Son of Alice
Beshert-It Was Meant to Be
Trauma in a Residential Setting
Manifestations of Generational TraumaDr. Halasz is a child and adolescent psychiatrist, consultant and adjunct senior lecturer at the School of Psychology and Psychiatry, Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences at Monash University. He also has a private psychiatry practice.
From 1992-2005, Dr. Halasz was a member of the editorial boards of the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, as well as the Australasian Psychiatry journal, where he continues to maintain his membership. He has co-edited three books and a number of chapters and journal articles on a range of developmental and psychiatric conditions. He contributed to “The Power of Witnessing: Reflections, Reverberations, and Traces of the Holocaust,” (eds. N. R. Goodman & M. B. Meyers, Routledge, 2012), based on his mother’s VHF Holocaust testimony. Dr. Halasz has appeared on television and radio, including ABC TV documentaries “Compass and Catalyst,” “All in the Mind” and “Encounter”. Finally, he is a regular panellist on the Triple ‘R’s ‘Radiotherapy’ since the 1990s.
Continue reading →Adeena Horowitz, LMSW
Administrative Director, Nazi Victim Services Program
Selfhelp Community Services, Inc.Adeena Horowitz is the Administrative Director of Nazi Victim Services at Selfhelp Community Services, Inc. She has worked in the field of aging for over 20 years and at Selfhelp since 2000, both in her current position and as the Program Director of the Nazi Victim Service Program in Washington Heights and Penn South Program for Seniors. Ms. Horowitz currently provides administrative oversight for the Washington Heights and Queens Nazi Victim Services Programs and coordinates special projects in the Nazi Victim Services Program.
Prior to her employment at Selfhelp, Ms. Horowitz worked at the New York City Chapter of the Alzheimer’s Association and at the Jewish Home and Hospital. Ms. Horowitz is a licensed social worker and earned her graduate degree from the Hunter College School of Social Work.
Selected accomplishments:
- Project Manager for Witness Theater in New York, overseeing its expansion to four sites in 2015-16.
- Organized Selfhelp’s International Conference for Professionals Working with Holocaust Survivors. This two-day conference in honor of Selfhelp’s 75th anniversary attracted 300 participants.
- Coordinator of Selfhelp’s Memoirs Project that matches young professional volunteers with Selfhelp Nazi victim clients to record their histories.
- Founding member of Selfhelp’s Continuous Quality Improvement Leadership Committee.
- Graduate of Selfhelp’s Advanced Leadership Program.
Presentations:
Unique Intergenerational Programs for Holocaust Survivors
June 19, 2013
New York University, Silver School of Social Work
“Global Health and Well Being: The Social Work Response”
Panel participant of collaborating organizations
Hunter College, Lois V. and Samuel J. Silberman School of Social Work
December 2, 2009
“Holocaust Survivors: Stories of Resilience”
Continue reading →Fran H. Norris, PhD
Fran H. Norris, PhD retired from academia in 2014. She was most recently a research professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth (Hanover, NH, USA), where she was also affiliated with the Department of Veterans Affairs National Center for PTSD. Before that she was a professor of Psychology and Director of Graduate Studies in Psychology at Georgia State University (Atlanta, GA, USA) for many years. Her primary areas of expertise are disaster recovery, community resilience, and trauma/PTSD. She served as the Deputy Editor of the Journal of Traumatic Stress and Scientific Editor for the PTSD Research Quarterly.
Continue reading →Charles Silow, PhD
Article: Witness Theater at the Berman Center for the Performing Arts in West Bloomfield, Michigan
Dr. Charles Silow is a psychologist and the Director of the Program for Holocaust Survivors and Families of Jewish Senior Life of metropolitan Detroit.
Since 1993, the Program has conducted psychosocial programming for the Holocaust survivor community, which includes support groups and counseling sessions for survivors and second generation survivors, Café Europa which is a monthly program where survivors come together for socialization, Mishpoch-Chai, a program that matches survivors with young families, a friendly visitor program together with Jewish Family Service, a Jewish Video series, and Portraits of Honor: Our Michigan Holocaust Survivors, an interactive photographic/historical oral project in which 544 survivors have been photographed and interviewed. Portraits of Honor is housed at the Holocaust Memorial Center in Farmington Hills, Michigan and is available online at www.portraitsofhonor.org.
Dr. Silow is the founder and current president of C.H.A.I.M.-Children of Holocaust Survivors Association in Michigan, Detroit’s second generation organization which began in 1979.
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KavodA Claims Conference Publication
