10/10/2026
In Ofakim there is a building that opens its doors every day. The Mishor Hagefen Community Resilience Center is a permanent place now, but it did not start out as one.
In the weeks after October 7, 2023, NATAN Worldwide Disaster Relief was working in two kinds of places at once. One was the three humanitarian clinics it opened for people who had been displaced, in Shefayim, the Dead Sea and Eilat. The other was inside communities that had been attacked, Ofakim among them. The approach was the same in both: initial psychological care given alongside the medical treatment, in the same place, instead of a referral somewhere else.
A clinic built for an emergency is temporary by nature, and those three closed when the emergency phase ended. In Ofakim the work kept going. By 2025 it had grown into a city-wide resilience partnership with the Municipality of Ofakim and JDC: therapeutic gardening, mobile municipal services, community gathering spaces, senior service-year volunteers, and remembrance and cultural events across the city.
The resilience center is the anchor of all of it. It operates daily and has become a trusted community hub focused on mental health and recovery from trauma, combining psychosocial support, youth programming and outreach.
One of the projects that came out of the center is a children's book. Children from the affected neighborhood wrote and illustrated it in guided workshops with educator and artist Dr. Adir Leiba, using writing, drawing and imagination as safe tools for processing what they had lived through.
On World Mental Health Day, the part worth naming is the continuity: care that began in an emergency and is still available, in a building people know how to reach.
