Greetings from Dnepropetrovsk -- It's Cold!

I'm writing from Dnepropetrovsk, where Beth Moskowitz (chair of our Committee for Post-Soviet Jewry) and I are having an amazing trip. It's truly amazing how much work is going on here in the context of our Dnepropetrovsk Kehillah Project, not to mention how much more is happening outside that context. We are endlessly impressed with our partners here, so I hope to post notes from the trip as I accumulate them. The only problem is that we keep on having incredible meetings, so I can't keep up with everything! It's a nice problem to have!

The main goal of this trip is the success of our intensive post-graduate course in psychiatry, titled "Issues in Geriatric Psychiatry," which is taking place at Beit Baruch, the community's assisted living facility. Led by Dr. Eran Metzger, chief of psychiatry at Hebrew Rehabilitation Center of Boston, the faculty also includes Dr. Tanya Bolbot Tarnavsky, who is a native of Dnepropetrovsk and a psychiatrist south of Boston, and Dr. Michele Baker, a psychiatrist in private practice. Reviews from today (Sunday, the first day of the conference) have been positive, but I'll offer you updates. In preparation for the conference, the psychiatrists learned about our ongoing medical partnerships with hospitals in Dnepropetrovsk as well as a few of our other projects. They then spent a day with local psychiatrists, learning about the state of psychiatric treatment in Dnepropetrovsk.

The other member of our delegation is Marsha Frankel, a social worker for Jewish Family and Children's Services, who is making her third trip to Dnperopetrovsk and has been instrumental in making mental health a priority for this community and for the DKP. Here, she works primarily at Beit Baruch on issues relating to staff burnout, but has been extremely helpful on several of our other projects.

I will be posting as often as I can over the course of our trip--feel free to follow me on twitter @RabbiJimM--there you will find links to photos from our trip.