For BGU students affected by the war, some of the hardest things to carry are the ones that are the hardest to say out loud. Thanks to the Levine Family Fund of Montreal, students have a space to say them through writing.

The Expressive Writing Workshop project offers a safe, structured space for students to process difficult experiences. With the Levine Family Fund’s support, the project ran its fourth and fifth workshops this year despite the ongoing conflict forcing repeated postponements. Still, both sessions went ahead, giving participants dedicated time to write, reflect, and be heard by others who understood.

The funding covered facilitation, materials, and a space where students could do this work together. As the project team put it, “This support enabled us to preserve and extend a space in which students affected by the war could write, reflect, and share experiences that are often difficult to articulate elsewhere.”

The project is now entering a new phase turning five workshops worth of experience into a replicable protocol, with academic publications in English and Hebrew, and a booklet of student writing and poetry, so this model can one day support students at other institutions too.

This project was made possible by the Levine Family Fund of Montreal in partnerhsip with the project team and Ben-Gurion University of the Negev: Roni Meisels, Dr. Ron Ben-Tovim, Prof. Efrat Huss, and Prof. Ayelet Harel.