By the time most Israelis are still asleep, Yaron Waksman is already awake, scanning the horizon for waves. “Five-thirty,” he says with a laugh when asked what time his mornings begin. “That’s the surfing standard.” At nearly 40, Waksman – married, father of two boys, co-founder and CEO of the therapeutic surfing nonprofit “HaGal Sheli” (“My Wave”) – speaks with the restless energy of someone who still can’t quite believe what his life has become.
Fourteen years ago, he and his best friend were two idealistic 26-year-olds dragging surfboards across the beaches of central Israel, begging restaurants and hotels for somewhere to store equipment. Today, their organization operates 12 centers from Zikim to Kiryat Yam, employs roughly 550 staff members, and has become, as they describe, the largest therapeutic surfing organization in the world.
But if Yaron sounds evangelical about surfing, that is because it saved his life. “I grew up around some very complicated situations,” he recalls, “one of the guys I grew up with, who sat next to me my whole childhood, is in prison today for murder”. At 16, he discovered the sea. “... and somehow I found myself drawn to different people, good people, and that changed everything.”
But what makes Waksman so compelling is the way he explains surfing, less as a sport than as a philosophy of survival. “It's the most unique sport out there,” he says. “The arena itself is always changing. A basketball court will still be the same court in 200 years, and while the snow might change on a ski slope, the mountain is still the same mountain. But the ocean? Every second it’s different. There are no boundaries. No control.” And for Waksman, that instability is precisely the point. “You fall. You fail. You panic. You try again. You get frustrated. Then suddenly you succeed,” he says. “It confronts you with every emotion possible, but at high speed.”
“Think about waves as opportunities,” he adds. “Another opportunity, and another one. Sometimes the sea is calm. Sometimes it’s terrifying. And you don’t control any of it. That’s life.” It is this philosophy that now sits at the center of HaGal Sheli’s therapeutic model – one that has expanded to include amputees, bereaved families, Nova and other music festival survivors, former hostages, evacuees from Gaza-border communities, and soldiers suffering from PTSD.
Roy Reshef, a resident of the Gaza border region and a reserve combat soldier, joined HaGal Sheli in October 2025, exactly two years after October 7. He was part of the first cohort to open the organization’s surf therapy center at Zikim Beach following the massacre. “I arrived skeptical, without expectations, after two years in which I had distanced myself from any kind of treatment,” he recalls. “I found it difficult to connect to words and methods, and above all I was a closed-off and disconnected person.” By the end of the program, Reshef decided to stay on as an instructor. “I understood that there are more people like me,” he says, “and if I can be for them the supportive hand that I needed, then that is my greatest privilege.”
Prior to that, however, the organization's starting point was quite modest: Ten teenagers and a handful of borrowed surfboards. Waksman met his future partner, Omer Tulchinsky, on the first day of university. Between lectures and surf sessions, the two began to wonder whether the emotional intensity they experienced in the ocean could serve as a therapeutic framework.
“We said, okay, let’s try to get ten kids back into school,” Waksman recalls. They approached surf clubs asking for donated equipment. Most refused. “The first said no. The second said no. The third said yes.” Once a week, they took ten at-risk teenagers, many already entangled in violence, crime, or severe instability, into the water, and in his words, "It worked like magic."
Sorcery aside, Waksman is careful to stress that the work is evidence-based, clinically researched, and highly structured. Evidently, by the end of the first year, most participants had returned to school. Some completed matriculation exams, some enlisted in the army, and several eventually became volunteers and staff within the organization.
Then came the moment that changed everything. “At the final session,” Waksman recalls, “one of the girls asked me, ‘So… there’s no more HaGal Sheli now?’ And suddenly we realized that for kids who’ve experienced abandonment, violence, instability, we can’t just disappear. We can’t give them trust and then walk away.”
The next day, he and Tulchinsky took out personal loans. “We bought boards, wetsuits, insurance, whatever we needed. Everybody thought we were crazy.” The two spent months waking before dawn, walking along the coastline, knocking on doors, and were greeted mostly with mockery until eventually Bat Yam agreed to host them.
Within a year, they were working with more than a hundred teenagers from Bat Yam, Jaffa, Lod, and Ramle, and from there the organization expanded at a startling pace. “We never fully understood how fast it grew,” Yaron admits. “People just kept coming.” Soon they were working not only with at-risk youth, but also with children with muscular dystrophy, special-needs students, amputees, and combat veterans.
Over time, Hagal Sheli became an official provider for the Defense Ministry’s rehabilitation division, working extensively with soldiers experiencing post-traumatic stress. Tulchinsky, Yaron says, is “the brain behind the whole thing.” “He’s the genius,” he says. “Clinical social worker, trauma specialist, researcher, educator – everything,” and the sessions themselves bear his signature.
Participants begin in conversation circles before entering the water, focusing on a specific emotional theme. Balance becomes a lesson about emotional equilibrium, ocean currents become metaphors for destructive patterns or losing control, and rescue techniques become conversations about asking for help. “Everything in the sea mirrors life,” Waksman asserts. “Everything.”
Then came October 7. “We still haven’t fully processed what happened,” he says quietly; however, by Saturday night, the organization had already obtained maps showing where evacuees from Gaza-border communities would be relocated. “We already had a trauma program,” Waksman says, remarking that their experience helped them understand they needed to move immediately.
Within days, staff members arrived at evacuation hotels, including the Shfayim complex, where survivors from Kibbutz Kfar Aza were beginning to arrive, parking one of their surf trucks near the beach and inviting survivors into the water. “At first people screamed at us,” he recalls. “People were crying. It was total chaos.” And yet, slowly, people began joining them. Twenty people became fifty, fifty became eighty, until the entire community had begun to take part.
In addition to them was Gaza Envelope resident Roni Adar. whose brother Tamir was kidnapped from Nir Oz and later murdered. “After Tamir was kidnapped, they suggested I come surf,” she says. “I didn’t believe I’d be able to connect to it, but very quickly I became addicted to the waves. I found myself enjoying every moment.”
Beyond the surfing itself, she says the experience created a lasting community of navigating trauma together. “Every time I ride a wave, I relearn so much about life,” she reflects, “and about the way to continue carrying the pain, even during days that repeatedly bring me back to the trauma.”
Waksman believes surfing works particularly well for acute trauma because it forcibly interrupts the psychological loop survivors become trapped inside. “One of the strongest symptoms of trauma is getting stuck in the event,” he explains. “The smells, the images, the triggers – you’re trapped, but surfing demands absolute presence. If your mind drifts back into the trauma for even a second – boom, you fall,” he says. “The ocean forces you into the here and now.”
That grounding, he believes, creates the first opening toward imagining a future again. “You catch one wave,” he says. “Then suddenly you want another one. You’re looking toward the horizon again instead of only backward.” Since October 7, HaG al Sheli has worked with thousands of evacuees and survivors. The organization established a center in Zikim, within a closed military zone, and dramatically expanded its operations nationwide. In the next five years the Zikim center is expected to serve more than 7,500 participants, representing one of the most significant long-term rehabilitation efforts in the Gaza border region.
Whether surfing itself is uniquely therapeutic, or whether the real mechanism lies in community, movement, nature, and structured emotional support, remains an open question researchers continue to explore. But the emotional conviction behind HaGal Sheli is not to be dismissed. “The ocean saved my life,” Waksman says simply.
This might explain the almost spiritual urgency in his description of the work. “We no longer care about whether someone is religious, secular, Jewish, Arab, rich, or poor,” he states. “A kid is a kid. Trauma is trauma.” As Israel undergoes a prolonged national crisis, organizations like HaGal Sheli have quietly become parallel emotional supports – systems of healing that operate at the intersection of therapy, education, community, and survival.
Yaron realizes the scale of the need now far surpasses their capacity. "Every person in Israel is carrying something,” he says. Nonetheless, each morning, before meetings, fundraising calls, and therapy sessions, he goes back to the sea. Despite all the academic models and clinical jargon, he believes the core truth remains simple. “The sea,” he explains, "shows you that you can fall apart, and still paddle back out.”