This is how medical clowns are helping treat post-Oct. 7 trauma

Clowns, with their prominent red noses, painted-on smiles, and funny costumes, are expected to make people laugh. But medical clowns – trained professional performers who use music, improvisation, puppetry, and physical comedy to bring physical and mental well-being and hope to patients – are just as likely to elicit tears. These tears, however, are of relief and consolation, especially when their audiences are adults and soldiers or civilians who have gone through hell.

Menahem Ben Halifa, a 23-year-old paratrooper, severely wounded in an arm and a lung on October 7 as he watched six of his fellow IDF soldiers killed on Kibbutz Kissufim, will be the first wounded soldier in the world to become a medical clown. 

Hospital clowning was pioneered by Hunter “Patch Adams” Doherty, who is now 79 years old. The mustachioed American physician, social activist, comedian, and author began his career as a hospital clown in the 1970s. He was famously depicted in the 1998 film Patch Adams starring Robin Williams, which brought public attention to hospital clowning.

Clown doctor programs now operate in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, South Africa, Taiwan, Belarus, and Hong Kong as well as many European countries, in addition to Israel. In most countries, usage of medical clowns focuses on assuaging the fears of children related to painful medical procedures, calming their anxiety, and relieving the boredom of spending many hours alone in medical centers. Medical clowns are also able to ease the tension that can be felt by the parents of the young patients and promote positive interaction between them and their children.

In Israel, medical clowning was launched 22 years ago with the Dream Doctors Project that first trained men and women to work as integral partners with doctors and nurses. 

Since then, the nonprofit organization has provided over 100 medical clowns to 30 hospitals around the country where dozens of different procedures are performed on patients of all ages, from children to IDF veterans, the elderly, and even Holocaust survivors.

The benefits of medical clowning

Medical clowning benefits anyone who has undergone psychological trauma – especially the kind that has caused havoc among the survivors of October 7 and those wounded on the northern and southern borders during the ongoing Operation Swords of Iron.

BEN HALIFA told The Jerusalem Post that on Simchat Torah last year, when Hamas terrorists attacked communities close to the Gaza and revelers at the Supernova dance festival, he had been participating in a course for platoon leaders. 

Fighting the bloodthirsty terrorists for hours, Ben Halifa was shot in the arm and that same bullet penetrated his lung, but somehow he remained conscious. 

“I saw terrible things and lost six IDF comrades – Lavie Buchnik, Matan Malka, Regev Amar, Bar Yankelov, Omri Peretz, and Adam Agmon. I started dragging Lavie back from where he had been wounded, and then I was shot and lost a lot of blood; he died right next to me; the others were killed on the other side of the road.”

After about an hour and a half, in the midst of the chaos, Ben Halifa applied a tourniquet to himself and lay there, wounded, while the fierce battle raged around him. 

He was eventually evacuated by the driver of a private ambulance that had been stationed at the Nova festival since October 6. The driver rushed Ben Halifa to Beersheba’s Soroka University Medical Center, but it was overflowing with others who were wounded. He was transferred to the Hadassah University Medical Center in Jerusalem’s Ein Kerem in an effort to0 save both his life and his arm.

For weeks, Ben Halifa was treated in the Jerusalem hospital’s vascular surgery department by department head Prof. Ron Carmeli, head nurse Sharon Steinetz, and the entire team, who cared for his complex injury and enveloped him with warmth. Known for his smile, Ben Halifa quickly won over the hearts of the staff at Hadassah-Ein Kerem.

There, he underwent complicated surgery that involved taking an artery from his leg and grafting it into his arm. The hole in his lung was fixed, although pieces of shrapnel were left inside, he explained, to avoid causing further damage. 

About his recovery, Ben Halifa said: “At first, it was hard to grab objects. A year later, I still have pains in my arm, but I’m undergoing rehabilitation at Hadassah Mount Scopus, the hospital where I was born. One learns to live with it. I try to do a lot of sports activities.”

IT WAS at Hadassah-Ein Kerem that Ben Halifa met chief medical clown David Barashi who changed his life. Nicknamed “Dush” (Kurdish for “honey”) a name that also appears on his identify card, Barashi first visited Ben Halifa in the hospital a few days after his surgery.

“I met Dush during my first hospitalization, soon after I arrived at Hadassah,” Ben Halifa recalled. 

“Between treatments and operations, suddenly, out of nowhere, a clown appeared, and at first, I didn’t understand. 

“‘What does a clown have to do with this? What is this? A pediatric ward?’ I thought to myself. But all of a sudden, he enters your life and your soul. I found myself laughing despite the pain, telling him about what happened in Gaza and slowly realizing that this clown was actually an angel – an angel with a red nose.”

The connection that developed between then was “so fast that I didn’t even notice it,” Ben Halifa  said. “You’re in a different mood when he enters the room. On the one hand, there’s laughter and the silliness he brings, but on the other, there’s that look in his eyes that says, ‘Forget the jokes. I see you, your difficulty, your fear in these crazy times.’ For us soldiers, he was a caregiving figure who made things possible.” 

“Although I had wanted was to return to army service; but I had also been thinking about contributing in another way after my recovery. I didn’t know much about medical clowning, so I looked it up on the Internet. I thought about it, and one day, it became clear to me: I wanted to do what Dush does. I knew I could, that I had it in me and – from my vantage point of understanding what hospitalization and a long treatment process is like – I can help others.”

THE ENCOUNTERS with Dush touched Ben Halifa’s heart and left their mark. “Amazing staff members surrounded me. I underwent surgeries that could only be performed here at Hadassah. They saved my arm and my life. Along with all this care, Dush’s contribution was significant. There was something about communicating with Dush that was immediate and easy.”

Dush took a personal interest in Ben Halifa, spending many hours with him, inviting him to his home, and giving him constant emotional support. 

“Now, I want to be a medical clown at Hadassah, working especially with wounded soldiers because I understand what they have gone through,” Ben Halifa said he also wants to work with children. “Dush decided to create a special course for me, and I am due, by next year, to be the first wounded soldier in ever to become a recognized medical clown.”

Ben Halifa’S OFFICIAL clowning name is “Plati,” from the word platina – which means an alloy of platinum and several other metals, including palladium, osmium, and iridium – in reference to the piece of metal that is holding his arm together. Plati the medical clown has several sets of costumes that include a white shirt, a vest, a red hat with a butterfly on it and of course, the obligatory red nose. With his own natural joy in life and the experiences he has lived through at such a young age, he is now in exactly the right place at the right time.

Ben Halifa’s training includes familiarizing himself with the world of medical clowns in the hospital and acquiring skills and techniques for working with children, both those hospitalized and those receiving outpatient care, and developing his clown character – in addition to participating in hospital clowning workshops. 

He is constantly accompanied by a Hadassah clown as well as additional Dream Doctors clowns; he also meets with medical clowns who treat children who have congenital disabilities or severe deformities.

Ben Halifa’s parents and five siblings have been very supportive of his choices, he said, although, with most of his family working in hi-tech, “I could be regarded as the black sheep,” he said. 

He lives in Jerusalem, and plans to work at Hadassah, he said.

“I will work where my life was saved.” 

Ben Halifa recently returned from Tanzania, where he was a member of a delegation sent to represent Israel that even reached Mount Kilimanjaro – the fourth most topographically prominent peak on Earth.

DUSH EXPLAINED in an interview that he has been involved with Dream Doctors and with medical clowning for over two decades, leading him to become head of the Dream Doctors team at Hadassah. He had even gone to New York to learn how medical clowning was done there, but, he said, “Our technique is different because here our clowns are an integral part of the medical teams, not guests who provide entertainment at the hospitals. There was a lot of skepticism at first, and there is still some, even today. We have expanded from working with children to working with adults.”

Eight years ago Dush – married and the father of a 12- and a five-year-old – decided to work with IDF veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). 

“My father had been wounded in the IDF reserves, and I was very familiar with Beit Halohem [where wounded veterans are involved in special rehabilitative activities].” Dush worked with victims of post-trauma and was also exposed to those suffering from shell shock. He began volunteering at the IDF Rehabilitation Facility in Rehovot and every week and does so to the present day. 

Dush explained that since women, “have more emotional strength than men,” post-trauma was once thought “to be a male condition, but it is now understood it also applies to women soldiers and policewomen. There have been many women involved in this war.”

At the beginning of the war, Dush quickly realized that he would be called upon to do his duty and would also need more medical clowns – both men and women. 

“Many patients, both soldiers and civilians, were brought to Hadassah. It was insane. I especially wanted to be with the soldiers, to calm them. And not only the wounded soldiers who arrived in emotional shock but also their families. I also went to hotels in Eilat, the Dead Sea, Tiberias, and elsewhere to work with those who had been evacuated.”

WHENEVER HE returned to the hotels that hosted these evacuees, he said, people he had counseled always remembered him. 

“We didn’t go to entertain them,” he explained, “but to show empathy, to sit next to and hug those who were in mourning, to help them cope with their fear and pain. I have worked with people whose family members are or were hostages. I was with them when the bodies of their loved ones were found. I played with children when they were told that their fathers had been killed.”

Dush has worked with medical clinical psychologist Yoram Ben-Yehuda, an expert in PTSD and a former commander of the IDF’s combat response unit. 

Ben-Yehuda began to work with Dush in 2016, during their joint efforts to rehabilitate the mental health of IDF soldiers and victims of trauma and bereavement over the years at the Rehabilitation Center where they established an innovative field – rehabilitative clowning. 

It was Ben-Yehuda who recruited Dush for reserve duty in the IDF’s Emergency Trauma Center.  The reserve duty, which lasted over seven months, included working closely with regular and reserve soldiers who had experienced emotional turmoil and difficulty returning to life outside the center.

BEN-YEHUDA ALSO suffered firsthand from the trauma and bereavement of war. 

“When the war broke out,” Dush said, “Yoram told me he was looking for one of his sons, Staff-Sgt. Itamar Ben-Yehuda, a 21-year-old Golani medic from Rehovot who had been in combat. He was one of the first to fight the terrorists face-to-face and was killed on the first day of the war. Itamar had been spending his last weekend on base before his release from service. It wasn’t until a week later that he was identified and his family was informed that he had been killed.”

Dush continued, “After two decades of being involved in trauma, you aren’t easily broken, but there were sleepless nights. One has to keep going. I’ve been in places hit by earthquakes and tsunamis in Nepal, Haiti, and the Ukraine. There, it’s very different from being in pediatric wards.”

He made costumes for “Plati” and taught him privately, at no charge, to save him the NIS 5,000 cost of a regular medical clowning course. “I felt I had adopted him,” he said

The official Af Al Atzmi (“Nose Always Knows”) medical clowning program for soldiers is set to be inaugurated in April, next year, Dush explained.

“The goal is to integrate soldiers into the ranks of medical clowns, giving them the professional training they need to help others during their hospitalization. In September 2025, there will be graduates. I expect Menahem will then get a salary from Hadassah.”

Later, when Ben Halifa’s condition improved, he returned to Hadassah as a companion for a friend, a soldier who had been injured in the South and was being treated at the IDF’s Emergency Trauma Center, which focuses on soldiers who have experienced severe psychological trauma and provides targeted and tailored assistance in a military setting. 

It was at this center, where the team helped many soldiers return to health, that Ben Halifa was privileged to re-encounter Dush.

“I wasn’t really surprised to see Dush there, where they treat soldiers’ mental health. It seemed natural that he would be called up as part of a large team of psychiatrists, psychologists, and emotional therapists. I saw him working with my friends; it was very special and different. 

“There, I was even more exposed to his power because these soldiers had faced complex emotional challenges and were barely willing to talk or share what they were going through.”

Ben Halifa said that Dush brought “many of his abilities to every meeting with the soldiers – not just in making them laugh but in breaking down barriers, encouraging them to open up, bringing them closer.” 

It was then, he said, that he “became even more aware of Dush’s abilities and his profession.”

The goal of the Af Al Atzmi program is to restore injured soldiers to a state of functionality and vitality, giving them a real sense that they are contributing to others,” concluded Barashi aka Dush, who plans to expand the program and establish an entire system of rehabilitative clowns. 

“I want to show Menahem that he has a great ability to help, uplift, and bring joy to those who need it, and in doing so, to heal himself and help promote recovery in others.”