In the months after the Oct. 7 attacks, I began hearing the same story from Israeli clients, colleagues and community members across North America: A mother refreshing the news every few minutes between school pickups. A man who cannot explain to his American colleagues why he checks his phone during a meeting. A woman who laughs at dinner and then weeps an hour later at a news alert — and cannot decide which response is the strange one.

They were not in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023; nor are they in Israel now, seeking cover from Iranian missiles. And yet, they are not OK.

Generated by Gemini.

Illustrative. An Israeli woman living in a British city looks out the window.

The Jewish communal sector has mobilized an enormous and layered Oct. 7 response: emergency funds, mental health hotlines, campus response programs, solidarity missions. Almost all of it has been organized around proximity: those who were in Israel at the time (and continue to be there), those who lost someone directly, those who served (and continue serving). Very little has been organized around the hundreds of thousands of Israelis living abroad who are experiencing something that has no name in our clinical or philanthropic literature. And with Israel now 10 days into the second war with Iran (or the third, if the April 2024 ballistic attack counts), following two years of war in Israel and war on antisemitism abroad, this is not a post-Oct. 7 story fading with time. It is an ongoing one.

The gap in our response framework

Trauma research and trauma funding share a common assumption: exposure equals impact. You were in the attack, or you weren’t. You lost someone, or you didn’t. This binary has shaped which populations we treat, which communities we fund and which pain we consider legitimate.

But the Israelis living in New Jersey, Toronto, Berlin and London who have been unable to sleep since Oct. 7, 2023, do not fit this model. They were not exposed in the conventional sense, and yet their nervous systems are not behaving as though they are safe. In a deeply meaningful way, they are not: they remain embedded — historically, emotionally and biologically — in a people under existential threat, and their bodies know this even when their zip codes say otherwise.

The result is a community carrying a real and cumulative trauma burden with no recognized framework, no dedicated services and no philanthropic attention, because we have not yet given what they are experiencing a name.

I want to offer one.

Over the past year, I have been developing what I call Exilic Israeli Trauma (EIT): a framework for understanding the distinct psychological vulnerabilities of Israelis living outside Israel during a period of sustained national crisis. EIT is not a diagnosis. It is a map. It describes five overlapping dynamics that together explain why this population is struggling, and what they need.

1.) Active security memory

Most Israelis who live abroad spent years, sometimes decades, in a country where war, sirens and reserve duty were facts of ordinary life. Those experiences are not stored as history. They are encoded in the nervous system as threat data. A news alert, a siren sound, a WhatsApp from family: any of these can reactivate embodied memories of danger within seconds. This is not anxiety disorder. It is a trained security system doing exactly what it was built to do. The challenge is that this system does not distinguish between Haifa in 2006 and New Jersey in 2024.

2.) Dual-belonging identity fragmentation

Israelis abroad live in permanent negotiation between two worlds: the country where they have built their lives, and the country where their identity was formed. Under ordinary circumstances, this tension is manageable. In a time of crisis, it becomes acute. Here feels unbearable in its normalcy; there feels unbearable in its danger. The result is a kind of dislocation that is hard to explain to neighbors, colleagues or even therapists who have not experienced it, and therefore often goes unseen.

3.) Recurrent collective activation

The events of Oct. 7, and every escalation since, function as collective trauma triggers. Intrusive imagery, sleep disruption, difficulty concentrating, emotional dysregulation: these are not the reactions of people who are overreacting. They are the predictable outputs of a nervous system that is processing real threat information, activated not by personal exposure but by deep identification with a people in danger. The trigger is collective but the impact is individual, and it recurs with every news cycle.

4.) Communal polarization

Israeli communities abroad have not simply grieved together since Oct. 7. They have also fractured, reproducing and sometimes amplifying, the political divisions inside Israel itself. These ruptures have stripped people of the one resource they most needed: each other. The community that might have provided buffering has instead become an additional stressor. This is a particularly important dynamic for the philanthropic sector to understand, as it means that generic community-building programming is insufficient. What is needed are spaces that can hold complexity rather than enforce consensus.

5.) Intergenerational identity tension

The children and young adults of Israelis abroad are absorbing what their parents cannot fully articulate or contain. Some idealize Israel; some flee from it. Some feel pressure to commit to a country they did not choose and may not fully know. Either way, they are carrying something that was never explained to them: a weight of identity, history and collective trauma that requires its own dedicated attention. Our current programming for Israeli-Diaspora youth rarely addresses this dynamic explicitly.

A necessary distinction: Israelis abroad and the broader Jewish Diaspora

Readers of this publication will immediately ask: What about the rest of the Jewish Diaspora? American Jews, French Jews, Argentine Jews — any community with no personal history of living in Israel — have also been profoundly affected since Oct. 7, 2023. 

Their pain is real. Their needs are real. And yet EIT is not their framework, and conflating the two populations would ultimately harm both.

The clearest line of distinction runs through the body. Two of EIT’s five components (active security memory and dual-belonging identity fragmentation) depend on a history of having actually lived in Israel. An Israeli who completed military service, who ran to a shelter during a missile alert, who drove past a checkpoint on the way to work, carries that experience encoded in the nervous system as current threat data. A third-generation American Jew, however deeply identified with Israel, does not. When a news alert sounds, both people may feel distress, but only one is reactivating a lived memory of physical danger; the other is processing grief and identification from a distance. These are clinically distinct experiences, and treating them as indistinguishable misses what each population actually needs.

The second distinction is the nature of the loss itself. Israelis abroad grieve a place that is specifically, personally theirs: Their streets. Their language. The shelter in their childhood apartment building. The friends who are now in uniform. Their grief has addresses. 

In contrast, Diaspora Jews who never lived in Israel grieve through solidarity and collective identification: they mourn a people, a homeland, an idea they hold sacred. That mourning is genuine and significant, but psychologically it operates through a different mechanism. 

One is homesickness under threat. The other is collective mourning. Both deserve clinical and communal attention. They are not, however, the same thing.

The third distinction is perhaps the most psychologically loaded: the question of return. Israelis abroad carry a specific guilt that has no parallel in the broader Jewish Diaspora: the guilt of someone who could, in principle, go back. Every day they remain in New Jersey or Toronto or London is, on some level, a choice. That tension (I am here while my people are there, and I could theoretically be there, too) creates a particular form of moral injury that sits alongside the other EIT dynamics and amplifies them. A Jewish American who has never lived in Israel does not carry this specific weight.

Where the populations genuinely converge is in recurrent collective activation and intergenerational identity tension. The collective trauma trigger of the Oct. 7 attacks hit all Jews, regardless of personal history with Israel. Many Diaspora Jews report the same dual-news-feed experience (refreshing alerts while carpooling, or sobbing at a headline and then walking into a meeting), and their children are absorbing an unexplained weight of history and collective anxiety. These shared dynamics suggest that some interventions could serve both populations. But the framework, the clinical language and the funding strategy should not be collapsed into one.

The broader Jewish Diaspora experience after Oct. 7 deserves its own framework, research and philanthropic investment. EIT is not that framework. It is a starting point for one specific, underserved population; naming that specificity clearly is what gives it clinical and practical force.

What this means for funders and community leaders

EIT is not a theoretical exercise. It is a description of what is happening right now in our communities: in the Israeli parent at your federation event who laughs a little too quickly; in the tech professional who has stopped attending synagogue because he cannot sit still; in the young woman who broke up with her American boyfriend because she realized he would never understand.

These people are not showing up in our crisis lines, because they do not consider themselves in crisis. They are not accessing mental health services at meaningful rates, because most available providers do not have the cultural or clinical fluency to work with them. They are not appearing in our funding conversations, because we have not yet built the language that would make them visible.

Here is what we can do:

Name it publicly: When the Jewish communal sector names EIT (in federation communications, in mental health campaigns, in communal discourse) it validates the experience of hundreds of thousands of people who have been telling themselves they should be fine. Language is a form of care.

Train providers: Mental health professionals working with Israeli and Israeli American communities need fluency in the five dynamics described here. Federation-funded therapy programs, JCC counseling services and campus mental health providers should incorporate EIT competency into their frameworks.

Fund group-based interventions: Individual therapy, while valuable, cannot address the communal dimensions of EIT, particularly Communal Polarization and Intergenerational Identity Tension. Peer support groups, structured community dialogue and family-based programming are essential and largely unfunded.

Support research: EIT is a clinical framework in development. It needs empirical study: prevalence data, intervention research, longitudinal tracking. Funders who care about mental health and about Israel-Diaspora relations should be investing in this work now, not after the crisis has deepened further.

There is a woman I know who flies from New Jersey to Israel every few months, not because she has to, she says, but because the pain is more bearable in a place where she does not have to explain why she is crying while she is laughing. She is not unusual. She is representative.

The Israelis living outside Israel since Oct. 7 are not simply sad about what happened. They are experiencing a real, structured, cumulative trauma, one that our sector is not yet equipped to see, name or serve. EIT is an attempt to change that.

We have the frameworks, the institutions and the philanthropic infrastructure to respond. What we have lacked, until now, is the map.

Ruthie Bashan is a trauma-informed clinical social worker and nonprofit leader specializing in community resilience and healing-centered philanthropy. She writes about the intersection of trauma, belonging and collective care. Bashan is the originator of the Exilic Israeli Trauma (EIT) framework and teaches in the graduate social work program at Montclair State University. She consults with organizations building trauma-informed cultures of care and giving and is affiliated with Planetherapy Global, a nonprofit providing resilience support to Israeli and Jewish communities worldwide.