Mental Health Shabbat

Dr. Oren Messeri is a board certified psychiatrist and Columbia trained psychoanalyst with a private practice in New York City. He received his medical degree from The Albert Einstein College of Medicine and completed psychiatric residency at The Payne Whitney Clinic, Weill Cornell Medical Center. After completing residency, Dr. Messeri did a clinical fellowship in emergency psychiatry in the comprehensive psychiatric emergency program at New York Presbyterian Hospital, Columbia University Medical Center. He spent several years as the assistant director of the CPEP while pursuing psychotherapy training at the William Alanson White Institute, and psychoanalytic training at the Columbia Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research. After completing training in 2017, Dr. Messeri stayed on as faculty and was the associate instructor of the psychopathology course for several years. Currently he has a private practice doing mostly psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy on the upper west side, supervises psychotherapy through the Columbia Center for Psychoanalysis and facilitates a process group for psychiatry residents at Mount Sinai Medical Center. Specific interests and areas of expertise include complex trauma and integrative modalities that address body, mind and spirit.

Dr. Jacques Jospitre, Jr. earned his medical degree from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and a master’s degree in Business Administration from the Zicklin School of Business at Baruch College. He worked as a hospital director, overseeing the clinical and administrative staff in the Department of Psychiatry at North General Hospital. He then served as the medical director of a multidisciplinary outpatient medical center in Harlem before going on to start SohoMD – a thriving telemedicine company that is based in New York and expanding nationally. Dr. Jospitre has been on a mission to combine the best of allopathic and alternative medicine to help patients achieve and maintain optimal mental health.

Dr. Jennifer Goldman-Wetzler is founder and CEO of Alignment Strategies Group, the New York-based consulting firm that helps CEOs and their executive teams optimize organizational health and growth. She is the author of “Optimal Outcomes: Free Yourself from Conflict at Work, at Home, and in Life “ (HarperBusiness), which was selected as a Financial Times Book of the Month. She is a keynote speaker and advises executives at Fortune 500 companies, public institutions and leading startups, including Google, Harvard Law School and the United Nations. A former counterterrorism fellow with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, she earned her Ph.D. in Social-Organizational Psychology from Columbia University and has taught conflict freedom at Columbia for a decade. If you’d like to read further about Dr. Goldman-Wetzler you can visit her website.

Marc Kaminsky is a poet, writer, psychotherapist, and gerontologist. He organized and conducted some of the earliest writing and reminiscing groups for elders. He has also done work on the culture of Yiddishkeit. He edited the work of Barbara Myerhoff in “Stories As Equipment for Living.” His long poem, “The Road from Hiroshima”, was produced as a play for voices for National Public Radio and was the inspiration for other works including a musical requiem. Among his most prominent works is his book “Shadow Traffic,” a collection of essays, poems and short stories that deals with the aftermath of the Holocaust as well as personal traumas. More recently, he also published “A Cleft in the Rock” (2018) and “Stones of Lifta” (2019).

Elana Klugman, LICSW received an MSW from Smith College where she was trained in contemporary psychoanalytic theory and practice. Over thirty-six years of practice as a psychotherapist, she integrated Jungian theory and Dream work, as well as the insights of Buddhism and contemplative practices, Judaism and more broadly spirituality to promote mental health and assist her clients in the construction of lives of meaning and depth. A lifelong poet, she wove into her psychotherapy work the resources of art and creativity, myth and storytelling. She is grateful to have shared the profound work with her clients of wrestling with suffering, while engaging and promoting our capacities for compassion, insight, recovery, healing and wisdom. Since retiring over a year ago and drawing from the same well that nurtured her practice as a psychotherapist, she has focused on writing midrashic poetry. She recently launched a website for her writing called At the Well which can be found at elanaklugman.com