There is a moment, somewhere between paddling into the Mediterranean and surrendering to its rhythm, when words stop carrying the weight they usually do. The body takes over, breathing slows, attention narrows, and every wave demands complete presence. For many Israelis living with trauma, that moment has become something increasingly rare.
In the nearly three years since October 7, Israel's mental health system has been grappling with an unprecedented challenge, as thousands of soldiers, police officers, medical staff, displaced families and civilians continue to cope with acute stress and post-traumatic symptoms, and while conventional psychotherapy remains the backbone of treatment, practitioners increasingly ask whether conversation alone is enough.
This autumn, Ono Academic College and the nonprofit HaGal Sheli ("My Wave") will try to provide the answer, and launch the world's first Bachelor's degree in Behavioral Sciences with a specialization in Surf Therapy. On paper, it looks like another academic program. In practice, it represents an attempt to transform more than a decade of field experience into a recognized therapeutic profession.
For Omer Tulchinsky, HaGal Sheli's co-founder and curriculum director, the degree is less a beginning than the next chapter of a long experiment. "The organization started with ten at-risk teenagers," he recalls. "Little by little it grew, and today we've worked with over 20,000 participants. Along that journey, we accumulated insights about working with at-risk youth, and later, after the war, about working with people experiencing acute trauma, and also about parent-child therapy."
Those insights gradually evolved into something more systematic. "At first it was intuition," Tulchinsky says. "'Okay, this simply works.' But as we grew, everything became data-driven and research-based, with every program teaching us something different, and us learning what each population actually needs."
HaGal Sheli now operates 12 centers along Israel's coastline, using the sea as a therapeutic environment for at-risk youth, people with disabilities, and, increasingly, those struggling with trauma-related symptoms. At the heart of its work is the organization's SEAstem model, developed over more than a decade to strengthen emotional resilience and self-efficacy through structured encounters with the ocean.
The model has attracted growing academic attention, and was also the focus of a recent TEDxAtlanta talk delivered by HaGal Sheli's Co-Founder and CEO, Yaron Waksman, which explored how the SEAstem model, and surf therapy more broadly, can serve as a significant tool in helping people cope with their trauma.. Drawing on both clinical experience and emerging research, the talk explored how the ocean provides a unique environment in which trauma survivors can reconnect with the present moment, restore a sense of agency, rebuild confidence, and rediscover hope. The talk also highlighted research on the SEAstem model demonstrating significant reductions in PTSD symptoms among participants.
Research has begun appearing in international journals, and what once looked like an unconventional educational initiative has increasingly become the subject of serious scientific inquiry. That evolution naturally raised another question. "If there are academic disciplines around equine-assisted therapy or animal-assisted therapy," Tulchinsky says, "why shouldn't there also be an academic language for group therapy through surfing?" The answer became a partnership with Ono Academic College.
Dr. Ariel Ezra, who heads the new specialization while also serving as HaGal Sheli's research director, says the collaboration almost feels inevitable. A clinical social worker and former IDF mental health officer, Ezra first encountered HaGal Sheli almost by accident during his reserve duty in late 2023, finding himself standing on a beach with evacuees from Kibbutz Kfar Aza. "I knew how to surf, and I knew how to conduct group therapy," he says. "But I had no idea how to combine the two." It took only a handful of sessions before the connection became clear. "I understood how to use both parts together, the therapeutic session and the surf session, and how to incorporate the power of the sea for people living with trauma."
Since then, Ezra has worked with reserve soldiers, bereaved civilians, medical teams and police officers. The stories, he says, could fill several books, although one remains impossible to forget. The participant was a police commander who had lost colleagues under his command on October 7, crippled by guilt and recurring traumatic memories, he had stopped functioning at work and struggled even to be present for his young children. "He couldn't even be around his family," Ezra recalls, explaining how traditional therapy was proving difficult, as simply attending appointments required emotional resources he no longer possessed.
But he had always wanted to learn to surf, and that's when the breakthrough arrived. "After the very first session in the water, he came out and said, 'I just found my medicine.' He told us, 'For an hour and fifteen minutes, I wasn't thinking about anything else. I wasn't having flashbacks. I wasn't in Gaza. I was only here, It's a gift I haven't received in more than a year.'" The same man had become a guide at HaGal Sheli, helping other police officers and soldiers navigate their own trauma.
Stories like these explain why the new academic program is designed around experience rather than observation. Students will certainly study psychology, sociology, anthropology, and psychopathology in the classroom, but one day every week, they will leave campus and report to HaGal Sheli's center on Bat Yam's shoreline.
The progression is deliberately gradual. During their first year, students become participants themselves, experiencing the emotional dynamics of surf therapy firsthand. In the second year, they assist experienced therapists working with different populations. Only in their third year do they begin leading groups under supervision. "What we try to do," Ezra explains, "is give students an experience. We don't only hear about therapy or memorize it. You feel it. You encounter it." The distinction matters because surf therapy, he insists, is not about surfing at all. "We're not training surfing instructors," he says. "We're training professionals who know how to help people through the most complex moments of their lives by combining therapeutic knowledge, group work and the unique power of the sea."
Tulchinsky agrees that professionalization is precisely the point. "There are people who say, 'We surfed, then we talked.' But that's not enough," he says. "There is real theoretical understanding behind every stage. Why do we process experiences before entering the water? Why afterward? What do we gain? What do we lose? These aren't intuitive decisions."
As Israel's mental health needs continue to expand, he believes that precision has become a moral necessity. "Years ago you could say, 'Let's go surfing, it'll be fine.' Today that doesn't hold water. It isn't accurate enough, and it can even cause harm." The degree is therefore intended not merely to produce graduates, but to create a professional community capable of maintaining consistent standards across educational, therapeutic and rehabilitation settings.
Tulchinsky sees it as planning for a future that extends well beyond today's crisis. "We understand that what's happening in Israel isn't something that disappears after six months or even a year," he says. "People are still holding themselves together. But trauma unfolds over many years."
For Ezra, the urgency is impossible to separate from the broader national mood. "This program couldn't have come at a better time because the needs are endless." Perhaps that is why the degree feels significant beyond academia. It represents an effort to institutionalize knowledge accumulated not in laboratories but through thousands of encounters between therapists, waves and people searching for steadier ground.
The Mediterranean has never promised healing. Waves cannot erase memory, nor replace psychotherapy. But sometimes, before recovery can be spoken, it has to be felt, and that feeling begins where the land ends.