When words fail

In her psychotherapy practice, Sara Jacobovici utilizes multiple creative therapies to help people recover from trauma.

By GLORIA DEUTSCH
Sara Jacobovici (photo credit: GLORIA DEUTSCH)
Sara Jacobovici
(photo credit: GLORIA DEUTSCH)
Sara Jacobovici is a psychotherapist with an unconventional approach to helping the people who come to her with their problems.
“I’m a creative arts therapist,” says the immigrant from Montreal, who made aliya in 2009. “I offer the opportunity for the individual to reconnect with their original creative identity and to begin to express themselves in what is the human’s first language – non-verbal communication.”
Instead of letting her subjects talk, she sits them down and gets them to paint, build and create in order to resolve their conflicts. With over 25 years’ experience in Canada, and the last six working in Israel, she has developed a method of helping people that has proven itself over and over again.
“Whether it’s going through a grieving process, loss of confidence or even people who have made aliya and are dealing with another form of loss – home, culture, job for instance – I have found that sometimes words are just not enough.”
While Jacobovici began her career as a music therapist, she found that she could not isolate the auditory part of the process from visual imagery and movement.
“Music evokes images, and I wanted to know more about body sensations and movement,” she explains of her switch to art as opposed to music therapy.
Although she was actually born in Israel to Holocaust survivor parents, the family left Israel in the early 1950s as the medical help they needed for their mother was not yet available here.
Jacobovici grew up in Montreal and obtained a bachelor of music degree at McGill University in her hometown; her master’s was in creative art therapy from the mental health science department of Hahnemann University Hospital in Philadelphia.
“When we were growing up, my mother never talked about her life in the Holocaust,” she recounts. “But I used to go to a group especially created for children of survivors, and I heard many stories. It was then I realized that it was strange she didn’t tell us anything of that part of her life.”
Music was the first love of her life.
“I played piano and guitar, but I never wanted to perform,” Jacobovici explains.
“I worked as a music teacher until I got into therapy.”
When her older brother Simcha Jacobovici, a prolific movie-maker and writer, decided he wanted to make aliya with his family and in fact return to his roots, she decided to follow suit with their 90-year-old mother.
“My brother had settled in Ra’anana with his wife and five children, and were well-established when we arrived,” recalls Jacobovici. “We stayed with them for a year and a half, so you could say we had a soft landing. Eventually we found our own apartment nearby.”
She quickly realized she would have to adapt her way of working, as things were not the same in Israel as they had been in Canada.
“Over 25 years I had built up my career, working in community management,” she says. “I realized that in my new life, I would have to downsize and work as a private psychotherapist.”
In the six years Jacobovici has been here, she has specialized in problems involved in the grieving process, in which she includes specific problems of new immigrants.
“Aliya is very difficult for some people – you have to let go of a country, a culture and a language,” she asserts. “And you can’t have change without grieving of some sort.”
To get started in her new career choice, Jacobovici realized she would have to get herself known in the mental health community; with commendable zeal, she threw herself into the business of getting her name out there.
Nowadays, six years later, she is very connected through social media; but in the beginning, she felt she had to make human contact with the already existing mental health agencies. “I hit the streets,” she says, looking back on what was a hard but inevitable part of her later success. “I went and knocked on doors and introduced myself and my ideas.”
She met with other psychotherapists and art therapists to discover what was already being done here in the field, visiting Beit Issie Shapiro, Yad Sarah, Beit Loewenstein and other rehabilitation groups.
“In the end, everyone finds their niche,” she maintains.
Living in Israel, Jacobovici has found fulfillment she had not anticipated.
“Just as my creative art is the only way for me to live, so this is the only place for me to be in terms of my Jewish and Zionist identity,” she says. “I strongly believe in timing, and where I am now in my life is the right thing at the right time for the right reason.”
Jacobovici is a wonderful and concerned daughter, taking care of her mother’s every need. But she hasn’t ruled out the thought that one day, she might marry.
“I’m still looking,” she says with a grin.