Rita Yadid always loved dancing under a kaleidoscope of colors as the day dawned. On the morning of Oct. 7, 2023, she planned to dance with her husband and sister, watching the light illuminate their smiles, but instead awoke to a massacre, as one of the thousands in attendance at the Nova festival in southern Israel.

On Monday, Yadid shared her story at a special-U.N. event held at the world body’s New York headquarters showcasing innovative Israeli mental health NGOs. In her speech, she spoke of the trauma she experienced but also her recovery through the treatment provided to her by SafeHeart — a mental health nonprofit that sprang into action within 24 hours of the massacres, providing Nova survivors with therapy from professionals who understood mental health and the festival scene, especially the way trauma interacts with mind-altering substances. Today, Yadid dances as the sun rises once more. 

During the massacres, Yadid and her husband and sister sheltered in a ticket booth. “God is great,” she heard terrorists screaming in Arabic outside, murder echoing through the air. “Slaughter all the Jews.”

For over five hours, she waited, believing she was going to die, she told the U.N. audience. At one point, the booth was riddled with bullets – her husband enveloped her body with his to protect her, and he was hit by three gunshots. (He survived, as did Yadid’s sister.) After the army arrived and they exited the booth, all Yadid saw was lifeless bodies everywhere. That day, she returned home to Haifa where her 2-year-old son was staying with family. Before putting him to sleep, she breastfed him, like normal, but she no longer could listen to music.

“The first few months, I didn’t really have pleasure waking up in the morning, it was more of a downfall,” she told eJewishPhilanthropy. “It took a really long time to cope with the idea that this really happened, it’s not a dream.”

The day after she returned home, Yadid’s other sister, a social worker, told her of a group of therapists providing free mental health treatment to Nova survivors, and that evening, she was on a Zoom call with over a dozen others who witnessed the terror. Therapists taught survivors techniques to quell panic attacks. Survivors shared their memories of the massacres and drew pictures of their safe places. For Yadid, it was her home in Haifa, where she was Zooming in from.

“I didn’t feel clueless,” she said about going over the traumatic events with the other survivors. “I didn’t feel alone.” 

From there and in the year and a half that followed — “knowing that there is no expiration date to that support,” she said in her speech — she and her husband received free individual therapy from the organization who held the Zoom, now known as SafeHeart.

Early intervention is essential when someone suffers from trauma, lessening the likelihood of severe post-traumatic stress disorder, according to the National Institutes of Health. The therapists from SafeHeart were able to mobilize quickly because they were already a team.

In Israel, attendees who frequent the electronic dance and music festival scene are known as “the tribe.” Before they had a name, the SafeHeart community was already a crew of therapists who supported “the tribe,” setting up shop at festivals to provide safe spaces, especially to those on mind-altering substances. 

On Oct. 7, “We were so shocked,” Shiran Maor, founding member and chairman of SafeHeart told eJP. “But at the same time, we understood that this was at a music festival, probably there will be a good assumption that there will be around 70% of the people under some sort of influence, from cannabis to alcohol to psychedelics…  We realized…we have to establish as fast as we can to have an intervention on the first days in order to help people understand and integrate what they’ve been through.”

A Facebook post to their network led to over 400 clinical therapists volunteering to offer three free sessions to survivors and their families. The same day as the massacres, volunteer computer programmers created a rudimentary website, and within 48 hours, 650 survivors signed up for free therapy. 

Within the first month, 1,500 people sought services, and the cobbled-together crew realized they needed to go official, coming up with a name and reaching out to philanthropists seeking funds, so they could continue to support the community indefinitely. “We will be there for them no matter what, whether the government will be there or not,” Maor said.  

Today, all their staff are paid, and in 2024, the organization provided 29,000 hours of therapy to survivors, created 18 group therapy programs across Israel, and held 14 retreats. 

Professor Roy Salomon, head of the Lab of Consciousness and Self in the department of cognitive sciences at the University of Haifa, who also spoke at the U.N. event, studied the SafeHeart community, finding that 68% of attendees who experienced trauma at the festival were under a substance and 55% of survivors have clinical PTSD, well above the rate of combat veterans. Salomon also found that survivors who were using the psychedelic drug MDMA during the festival had less adverse outcomes than other drugs or even no drugs at all, which may be due to the calming qualities of the drug as well as its ability to allow users to feel more empathy to themselves in the moment.

In the days following the attacks, the Israeli government wasn’t prepared for the influx of survivors needing therapy, especially as Israel suffered from a mental health professional shortage, and seeking therapy through an HMO took time. In addition, “A lot of [the survivors] didn’t want to go to the official government organization, because [their therapists] had bias toward [festival attendees],” Maor said. 

SafeHeart lobbied the government to increase therapy provided to survivors, pushing the number of free sessions from 12 to 48, often provided directly through SafeHeart. 

“Our hope is to create more long-term structures inside of Israel,” Ori Schnitzer, SafeHeart’s director of partnerships and communications, told eJP. “We’re a year and a half almost afterwards, and there’s still a lot of uncertainty about how long the government is going to provide them support… Philanthropy shouldn’t be the one who is funding individual therapy for survivors.”

Every time a ceasefire in the war between Israel and Hamas is broken, every time a hostage is released, every time a body is returned — all of it can trigger survivors. Some may return to their lives after a few months of therapy, but others need long-term treatment. Still others haven’t even started to heal, only reaching out to SafeHeart recently due to not being able to sleep.

“We have very strong partners that continued with us throughout 2023-24 and now 2025, but [philanthropy] definitely has slowed down a lot for many different reasons,” Schnitzer said. Partners include HIAS, UJA-Federation of New York, Charles, Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies, Rothschild Foundation, Alan B. Slifka Foundation, Gimprich Family Foundation, Diane and Guilford Glazer Foundation and Israel’s Ministry of Health. Some foundations provided survivors with emergency funds, and now that the after-effects of Oct. 7 are no longer seen as an emergency, they have shifted back to their normal operations; other foundations have shifted focus to rebuilding northern Israel.

SafeHeart also provides support to therapists, who suffer secondary trauma, and family members, many of whom may have witnessed the attacks when loved ones called them during the massacres. Before Oct. 7, their children were thriving, but after, they watched their kids fall into depression, unable to leave their homes.

“If the parents will not have the resilience and the tools to help their children, the chances of survivors getting better reduces large amounts,” Schnitzer said. Additionally, the government does not provide services to parents at all. 

The U.N. contacted the organization, Schnitzer believes, because of its approach. “Even though we’re a new organization, what we’re doing is innovative,” he said. “We have research that is supporting our work.”

When SafeHeart asked Yadid to speak, “I felt super humbled,” she said. Her testimony brought members of the audience to tears. “Sharing my story is my therapy. That’s what God sent me to do. That’s my mission. I have to let people know that therapy works.”

Last Purim, she danced for the first time since the massacres, dressed as Captain America. “Captain America gives you powers,” she said. “You have secret powers.” Today, she wakes up grateful, dancing in the sunlight with her son. She had to seek therapy to continue to be there for him. “I was broken 13 times a day,” she said, “It was definitely not good for our child. We had to get stronger.”

She is grateful that the therapists at SafeHeart understood the festival community, especially those who used substances, “quick enough not to make mistakes,” she said. “We could have been in a worse position if we were being taken care of by the wrong therapists. You can’t go and fix your leg with a heart doctor.”