Mother/Child
Healing Hostel Program The children's mothers, new immigrants
to Israel from the former Soviet Union, were all battered
women whose husbands abused both them and their children.
After their daughters were accepted into our Loving Children's
Home, the mothers disappeared to cope with the holocaust of
their own lives. Several had begun the process of divorce.
Their daughters, who had suffered feelings of abandonment,
desperately needed to have their mothers re-enter their lives.
Realizing the power of the mother/child bond, we developed
the Mother/Child Healing Hostel program to help mothers and
daughters learn to appreciate each other, to communicate,
to understand, and to fulfill each other's needs.
For a period of three years, mothers
came to stay with us bi-monthly for three-day workshops including
intensive individual and family therapy sessions. Here, the
mothers bonded with their children through art, music, and
movement techniques, learned parenting and communication skills
and developed self-esteem and problem solving techniques.
The Mother/Child Healing Hostel program
was among our programs that were selected as model programs
and funded by the Jewish Agency for Israel.
Our joy was complete when both The Loving
Children’s Home and The Mother/Child Healing Hostel culminated
simultaneously in 1998 with daughters rejoining their other
siblings and their mothers, who had divorced the abusive fathers,
as they moved back to their now single-parent homes.
