Vortrag: A Therapeutic Site? Holocaust Survivors and Israeli Psychiatry

Israel has absorbed 300,000 Holocaust survivors during the first years of its existence. Many of them were traumatized and a few thousands needed psychiatric care. How were mentally ill Holocaust survivors treated by the Israeli mental health system? What was the affinity between the attitude of the general Israeli society towards the Holocaust survivors and the way local psychiatrists understood the problems of these patients?

These and other questions are the focus of the lecture which analyzes the attitude of Israeli psychiatrists towards mentally ill Holocaust survivors from the end of the 1940s until the 1960s.