Aharon Nikop was only 12 when his mother died suddenly. His struggles in the ensuing years, and the therapist who motivated him to put his life in order during his senior year in high school, made the American teenager yearn to become a mental health professional and help others.
But he put that dream on hold over the next 25 years, as life took him in different directions. He became religious and made aliyah, married in Jerusalem, moved to Safed, and received rabbinic ordination. From 1991 to 2011, he taught English-speaking post-high school students at Rabbi Rafael and Tova Weingot’s yeshivot – Shalom Rav for men, and Sharei Bina for women.
“I noticed, especially at Sharei Bina, that after classes the girls wanted to talk to me; there was a waiting list. I became a guidance counselor for the girls, and I remembered that 25 years ago I’d wanted to be a therapist,” says Nikop.
He was able to fulfill that ambition thanks to the Family Institute of Neve Yerushalayim in Har Nof, Jerusalem. It was founded in 1999 by clinical psychologist Rabbi Dr. Yisrael Levitz after he made aliyah from New York.
The Family Institute became the first intensive postgraduate training program in counseling and family therapy for National Religious and haredi therapists in Israel, initially for English-speaking women before it expanded. The institute also offers subsidized counseling for the religious community.
With Rabbi Weingot’s blessing, Nikop traveled to Jerusalem two days a week for two years to do the coursework at the Family Institute’s first class for men, started in 2005. He continued his studies and fieldwork until earning certification.
“I wanted to become an authentic therapist to save and help God’s children. I started this journey at 42, and now I’m 62,” says Nikop, who has two master’s degrees. He works in Safed’s Leumit health clinic as a mental health counselor, in addition to his private practice.
“Deep in my heart, I have so much appreciation for Dr. Levitz. He was like a father figure, offering me love and encouragement,” Nikop says.
AS THE Family Institute marks its first quarter century, Levitz acknowledges its critical role in fostering a dramatic change in mental health awareness and openness to therapy among Israel’s religious population – particularly haredi communities. He also notes the “dramatic increase in competent, well-trained religious therapists to service this population.”
Originally a pulpit rabbi, Levitz became a clinical psychologist, and then a professor and dean at New York’s Yeshiva University. He pioneered the field of rabbinic counseling at YU’s theological seminary and collaborated with Rabbi Dr. Abraham Twerski on the book A Practical Guide to Rabbinic Counseling. Levitz practiced family and couples therapy for 30 years.
Upon moving to Israel in 1998 at age 60, he was recruited by Neve Yerushalayim (which offers a range of undergraduate and graduate programs for religious Jewish women) to head a clinical sociology master’s degree program Neve had started in conjunction with the University of North Texas.
“When I came in, I realized the program was not adequately preparing its graduates to be therapists. It had a very weak clinical curriculum, and the students really needed advanced training,” he says.
Levitz also saw that the haredi community “had untrained individuals or rabbis doing faux therapy. A lot of bad stuff was going on. There were hardly any haredi therapists, simply because they didn’t go to college or graduate school, so how could they learn to become competent psychotherapists?” Levitz elaborates.
“The very few well-trained religious therapists who were here were too expensive for the haredi community. So, the need for haredi therapists was great. But there was no clear pathway for a haredi man or woman to a attain professional life. And I wanted to create that,” he explains.
Haredi rabbis welcomed the Family Institute because they understood the need for trained religious therapists, he says. They didn’t know where to refer people and were uncomfortable with secular therapists, especially those trained in Freudian psychology.
“Freud wasn’t exactly a God-fearing Jew,” Levitz says dryly, hauling out a notice from 1999 posted in haredi neighborhoods, warning people to stay away from psychologists and their belief in the subconscious.
“This was the landscape that I came into. It’s an entirely different reality today. We alone have trained 400 haredi and National Religious therapists serving communities throughout the country.”
LEVITZ BUILT the Family Institute on the American model of training family therapists.
“We are certainly not Freudian psychoanalysts, nor are we married to one school of thought. We are ‘trans-theoretical,’ which encompasses many models, all totally supported by research and congruent with religious values,” he says.
The training is intense. Student therapists must give 300 hours of supervised therapy sessions over a two-year period.
The Family Institute clinic serves mostly haredi and National Religious clients, offering specialized therapy for individuals, couples, families, children, and victims of abuse. Fees are on a sliding scale thanks to substantial subsidies from Neve Yerushalayim.
The program’s integration into Israel’s professional landscape began under the leadership of Dr. Alan Flashman, who initially secured accreditation from the Israeli Association for Marriage and Family Therapy, establishing a critical foundation for the institute’s legitimacy.
For the past four years, Dr. Micha Belzer has served as director of the Family Institute, further developing the program’s reach and impact.
“The Family Institute started with an English[-language] training program for women. Today, the institute provides therapy services to more than 400 clients every week through its team of 80 therapists, all supervised by 20 supervisors,” says Belzer. “Additionally, the institute runs two training programs for couple and family therapists – one in English and one in Hebrew.”
For haredi men, it can be a long process to get into the program. The current prerequisite is a master’s degree in a mental health-related field (there’s no longer a path toward a University of North Texas master’s degree), and most of these men lack even a bachelor’s degree. But those who are determined and talented enough can do it with the help of dedicated undergraduate and graduate opportunities for haredim in Israel.
“The male therapists are already packed with clients as soon as they complete our training because there is so much need, and we are well known in the haredi community,” says Belzer. “Many haredi people go to therapy [sessions] now; it’s much more the norm.”
While women ordinarily dominate the mental health field, the Family Institute currently has 20 male therapists, mainly from the haredi community.
Belzer notes that one of the institute’s graduates, a male hassid, has a podcast in Yiddish with 3,000 followers.
He adds, however, that while some haredim “want a haredi therapist who understands their head space and doesn’t have an agenda, quite a few haredim intentionally do not go to haredi therapists because they don’t want to meet them at shul or at their cousin’s wedding.” And they prefer to speak to the therapist without the limitations of accepted haredi terminology.
“Some also assume that haredi therapists might be less professionally trained or qualified than their non-haredi counterparts. That’s why it is crucial for us to train our therapists to meet the highest professional standards,” Belzer continues, noting that “having a knack with people and wanting to do hessed [acts of kindness] is not enough.
“We want clients to feel completely safe and uninhibited during their sessions, particularly in couples therapy where sensitive topics like sexuality – often considered taboo within their community – need to be addressed openly. Beyond creating this safe space, we’re also committed to elevating the professional caliber of haredi therapists to enhance their reputation within the broader therapeutic community. This dual approach benefits the clients seeking help and the professionals serving them.”
Founding dean Levitz, who maintains his psychotherapy practice while still training and supervising therapists at the institute, says that in years past, haredi couples experiencing marital problems would hesitate for years before seeking help. They felt ashamed and feared that admitting their difficulties would negatively affect their children’s shidduch (matchmaking) prospects.
“So, couples simply developed a strategy for living together, but they suffered as their marriage remained unsatisfactory for years,” he says. “Today, if there’s any kind of distress, haredi couples tend to go for therapy early, even within the first year of marriage. They recognize the need to learn how to repair their relationship. That’s a big change.”
‘Shidduch anxiety’
Levitz has written on the topic of “shidduch anxiety” affecting haredi singles and their families. Though more progress still needs to be made, he says, the extreme shame regarding any kind of mental health issue has lessened, and haredim have become more sophisticated about diagnoses.
“People were so terrified of any kind of diagnosis. Years ago, a haredi patient called me to say he’d just gotten a terrible diagnosis. He started to cry, and he said, ‘I have ADD [attention deficit disorder].’
“I said, ‘What is so distressing about that?’ He said, ‘What kind of girl would marry a guy with ADD?’ and I said, ‘My wife!’
“Well, now that man is a grandfather. And today we find people coming in and giving us their diagnosis: ‘Hi, my name is so-and-so and I’m borderline.’
“When they are dating, they can now say to their potential spouse, ‘I really went through a tough time. I was depressed and I was on medication. But I’m okay now. If you want, you can speak to my psychiatrist.’ And they do. The wedding goes through. I’ve had a number of cases like that, and I would not have had that in the past.”
Levitz also notes that haredi rabbis and yeshiva heads now keep lists of recommended therapists whom they trust. “Many are quite sophisticated about the different types of therapy and what would help most for whom. They are also less hesitant to report instances of physical or sexual abuse, and are more likely to recognize and deal with deviant behavior.
“In the past, if a yeshiva student stood and davened [prayed] a full hour for what is normally a six-minute davening, he might have been admired for his piety. Today, there would be concern that he is suffering from OCD [obsessive compulsive disorder], a mental illness related to self-doubt,” Levitz says.
DEENA MENDLOWITZ, MSW, is the clinical director and clinical supervisor at the Family Institute. She has been there since the beginning and has seen big attitude shifts since 1999.
“Over the last 25 years, the idea of going for counseling has gained greater acceptance within families and within the leadership of the communities. People are being encouraged to seek help,” she says.
“There’s greater recognition of the struggles that people have, and it has less shame and more understanding that this is not a haredi problem; this is a people problem. People are just people, and their struggles are universal,” she explains.
“The greatest mission of family therapy is connecting people and creating space for that connection within a family while accepting, tolerating, and respecting that there are differences within the family unit. That’s one of our guiding principles.”
Just as clients must learn to tolerate and respect differences within their families, student therapists also learn to tolerate and respect different cultural perspectives and value systems of their clients, says Mendlowitz.
“At the Family Institute,” she continues, “clients know this is a culturally sensitive environment where none of our therapists will question or judge their perspective or their lifestyle.”
And although “there has been a real explosion of online training opportunities since [the] corona[virus], there’s still nothing like coming in for in-person classes and conversations, sitting with clients, having hundreds of hours of individual supervision and group supervision. I think that remains invaluable,” Mendlowitz asserts.
“One key measure of our success is that after 25 years, therapists who train here very much feel that this is their professional home. This is the place they can come back to, or look back on, in terms of the foundational learning that they received here.”
THIS IS certainly true for couples therapist Chana Levitan, a Family Institute graduate and author of three popular books on marriage: That’s Why I Married You; I Only Want to Get Married Once; and the newly released Are We There Yet? The Road Trip to a Great Marriage.
Levitan instructs and supervises therapists at the Family Institute in addition to her private practice in Jerusalem and speaking engagements across the world about dating, relationships, and marriage.
Before attending the Family Institute in its early years, she had only a bachelor’s degree in humanities, yet she was working as a relationship coach and Imago marriage therapist. After writing her first book, Levitan felt she’d hit a ceiling and decided to earn a master’s degree in clinical sociology through the Family Institute’s arrangement at that time with the University of North Texas.
“That opened so many doors,” she says. “I’d been working with couples and as a matchmaker, but I was piecing stuff together. Now I had full, solid training as a proper therapist. From there, I did further trainings with major couples counseling experts and did trauma training as well; often couples aren’t communicating because there is trauma getting in the way.”
Levitan says her clients come from the National Religious, haredi, and secular worlds in Israel and abroad.
“When Dr. Levitz started out, he was really swimming upstream. Now, largely thanks to him, there is so much more awareness and willingness to seek therapy – not enough, but night and day from what it was.”
Nikop, too, works with a diverse group of clients, though he personally identifies as haredi.
“It’s kind of refreshing to meet with people who have a different worldview. Empathy is my strong suit, so sometimes within a few minutes,clients’ defenses about working with [a haredi therapist] dissipate – even extremely secular clients or those who had bad experiences with haredim. You have to know the culture of the client, but you don’t have to identify with or agree with it. You have to ‘get’ the person,” says Nikop.
“Dr. Levitz says that when you choose to be a therapist, it’s a huge responsibility. The lives and welfare of adults and children are in your hands.”
Belzer points out that the Family Institute has offered several intervention programs since the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, 2023. “One offered five free sessions of trauma therapy to the public provided by staff and alumni. We had six or seven workshops for therapists, educators, and the public to learn about trauma. We brought in the most professional people in the field to teach us how to intervene in various trauma situations,” he says.
“We want to be a voice in the mental health world, to bring a competent, professional voice for society.”