Our Mission

The Wuste Tzega Center – the first center in Israel for psychotherapy that is adapted to culture and life context – was founded in 2018 to combine ancient and modern wisdom in the field of integrated therapy, from a deep understanding of traditional and conservative cultures, mainly for Israel’s Ethiopian community.
Israel’s Ethiopian community exists as a unique ethnic group with tribal-cultural characteristics. Current policy in the State of Israel is to provide mental-health services that use mainly a Western scientific approach that does not meet the needs of the Ethiopian community. Due to these circumstances, the community has faced many communication, cultural, and therapeutic
challenges. This causes mistakes to be made in diagnosis, and the treatment that is provided is completely unsuitable for community members, particularly in the field of mental health. At the same time, many community members turn to traditional healers in order to receive treatment that uses the methods and tools that are familiar to them, or do not seek help at all. The Wuste Tzega Center was created to make culturally-adapted therapy available to the members of the tribal and traditional populations living among us. The Center’s therapeutic staff offers a network of clinics scattered throughout Israel, with a variety of professional therapists who have undergone unique training and guidance, that promote an innovative therapeutic approach that takes into account all of clients’ social, political, cultural, perceptual, gender, and
personality contexts. This approach has proven itself in the field by preventing unnecessary hospitalizations, and the Center is continuing to expand to Israel’s southern and central regions. The Wuste Tzega Center is named for a spring in the Simien Mountains that Ethiopian Jews would visit in order to seek healing from serious diseases, including mental illness. The spring is known as a place of pilgrimage. The Center, which was recognized as a public-benefit company in June 2018, operates in collaboration with Nevet, the Greenhouse of Context-Informed Research and Training at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.