Wuste Tzega – Center for Culturally Adapted Psychotherapy

Wuste Tzega is the name of a spring in Ethiopia where members of the Jewish community would go for healing. It can be roughly translated as “grace from within”. 

Mental health is highly culturally sensitive and thus psychotherapy must be culturally adapted in order to be effective. This is a particularly critical issue for Ethiopians immigrants in Israel, who are disproportionately committed to mental health institutions and detention centers. In these times of crisis, 88% of the Ethiopian community prefers traditional healers over conventional medical institutions, due to the latter’s inability to understand cultural context. At the same time, young Ethiopians are part and parcel of modern Israeli society and have need of the tools available to western psychiatry and psychotherapy.

Wuste Tzega offers:

• Therapeutic approaches that connect people to themselves, their families, their communities and nature, addressing people with various levels of trauma, mental and emotional distress.
• Individual and group therapy at three clinics in Haifa, Hadera and Lod.
• Courses to train multicultural therapists and healers under academic supervision.
• Quality research on culturally adapted psychotherapy in the Israeli Ethiopian context, with the goal of publishing its findings for the benefit of the international community.

Wuste Tzega will offer in the future:

• Ethiopian arts and crafts in a therapeutic framework; music; traditional ceremonies and more.
• Expansion of our services and adaptation of our methods for additional ethnicities

Wuste Tzega was founded in January 2017 by Yeshitu Shmuel, who immigrated to Israel in 1983 from Ethiopia when she was 11 after having walked on foot through the Sudanese desert. Yeshitu received her MA from Tel Aviv University in clinical social work, specializing in trauma and stress. She has practiced throughout Israel and is in high demand as a lecturer on traditional Ethiopian approaches to mental health. She is assisted in this effort by Avraham Leader, an internationally acclaimed teacher of Jewish mysticism.

Click here to make a donation in support of Wuste Tzega.        

Avraham Leader

Mobile: 972-8-4444679

Email: aleader@netvision.net.il (wustetsega@gmail.com for Hebrew)

Address: 8 Rivka Street Jerusalem Israel