The word resilience is very front-and-center, even a bit buzzy, in our times. In the protracted post-October 7 uncertainty, Israelis and Jewish people everywhere need to up their resilience coefficient, to take the long view of Jewish and world history in a particularly fraught period. In the summer of 2024, we had a chance to chat at length with three leaders at ANU about three new major projects begun in the aftermath of October 7. One of them, the Jewish Resilience Project (JRP), is a workshop—and training program—designed to promote healing by increasing individual and collective resilience. Naama Klar has served as the director of the Koret International School for Jewish Peoplehood at ANU since 2021. Tracy Frydberg, director of the Tisch Center at ANU, is the JRP’s lead implementer. Tal Gottstein is the executive director of the Koret Center for Jewish Civilization (Koret Center), which is a partnership between ANU and Tel Aviv University.

After October 7, ANU, like many institutions in Israel, was ordered to close temporarily. The team worked remotely to develop a program that would “empower the Jewish world to lead through this period and into the ‘Day After.’” Klar oversees development of new educational initiatives like this. First called The Hope Kit, ANU quickly broadened the program’s scope, renaming it the Jewish Resilience Project (JRP). She elaborates, “We renamed the program to reflect its intent to build global Jewish identity—a sense of belonging rather than isolation, hope in the now, and resilience in the long term.” 

Frydberg is passionate about the JRP’s foundational approach. “Our premise is that every Jew has a story from October 7 and its aftermath. All of us are going to be talking about this period for the rest of our lives. We each have our own specific story, a personal way of contextualizing the period that started on October 7. We each need an intentional opportunity to organize our own story for ourselves, and then for others—to articulate it to someone else, and then to be open to receiving their version in return.”

The JRP’s workshop curriculum is portable and adaptable, guiding participants in placing their personal stories into a broader context, which Frydberg describes as the “oscillating narrative,” the perspective that sometimes we, the Jewish people, are in a good place, and sometimes we are not. Frydberg adds, “Knowing your history builds resilience. We are applying the methodology of Marshall Duke at Emory University, a renowned expert on resilience. After September 11, 2001, he researched the creation of narratives that build resilience in children. He has been advising us since shortly after October 7.”

Over 4,000 people—including many Jewish students and volunteers from North America, as well as professional educators— had already gone through the JRP by the end of August 2024, over three-quarters of them from outside of Israel. For non-Israeli young adults who found themselves in post-October 7 Israel, the JRP has proven especially cathartic. The director of the Young Judea Gap Year Program enthused, “It’s a great way to bring [young people] into talking about 10/7 and give them permission to tell their own story of its effect. I’m so grateful they had this experience…. I think it’s a brilliant program, and such a powerful way to teach resilience.” The JRP launched for Israeli audiences mid-summer and continues to be well received. About 1,000 Israelis, including representatives from the IDF, have now been trained to lead sessions for their teams.

The ANU team enthuses about the JRP’s training-the-trainers value for educators, both within Israel and across the Diaspora. Audiences include classroom teachers, academics, community leaders, social workers, and other professionals who have a forum or network in which to help people process trauma—and promote resilience. Klar comments, “The JRP also lays the groundwork for a long-term systemic shift in the Jewish world’s mindset towards peoplehood. We felt that ANU was uniquely positioned to offer a program like this, given the richness of our visual assets, the diversity of our partnerships and contacts, and our decades of experience in training and content development through the Koret School.”