Israeli Tour Guides Association

Context

• Industry Challenges: Israeli tour guides receive no government compensation. Both the pandemic and war devastated the tourism industry, resulting in economic insecurity and deep loss of professional identity.

Personal Journey and Identity

• Fragmented Identity: Successive crises forced her to integrate her roles—as a tour guide, mother, immigrant, and community member—into a more cohesive sense of self.
• Professional Trauma: The collapse of tourism during COVID-19 led to identity loss and mental health crises among guides. Some colleagues died by suicide.
• Community Support: Without access to formal psychological care, tour guides created informal peer networks to support each other emotionally and practically.

October 7 War: Immediate Impact

• Personal Experience: Her husband was traumatized; her children struggled with fear and anxiety.
• Dual Roles: She became both caregiver and crisis responder—coordinating efforts to track missing friends, support survivors, and connect families, especially within the party and rave communities targeted in the attacks.
• Information Networks: Participated in grassroots “situation rooms” that monitored and relayed urgent information, often filling in where official systems failed.

Coping and Adaptation

• Temporary Relocation: Briefly left Israel to recover emotionally, then returned to take on greater responsibilities in the guiding and mental health spaces.
• Guiding Through Trauma: Began leading emotionally focused tours at memorial and trauma-related sites, helping groups process grief and connect personally with recent history.
• Volunteer Projects: Collaborated on initiatives to give guides meaningful work during national emergencies—preserving dignity and avoiding dependency on aid.

New Mission: Storytelling and Healing

• Family Engagement: Now helps connect tour groups with bereaved families so they can share their loved ones’ stories as part of personal and national healing.
• Narrative Shift: Shifts the focus from event-based facts to personal narratives of those affected, building empathy, emotional literacy, and connection.
• Wilderness Therapy: Currently training in wilderness therapy as a complementary tool for healing, both for others and for herself.

Reflections on Visitors and Solidarity

• Importance of Visitors: Expresses deep appreciation to those who come to Israel during difficult times, affirming that their presence restores a sense of purpose and human connection.
• Reciprocal Support: Highlights the mutuality of solidarity—visitors feel inspired and grounded, while locals feel less alone.
• Antisemitism Concerns: Speaks to the rising antisemitism felt by Jews abroad and how it has reinforced a global Jewish sense of unity and shared experience.

Key Messages and Takeaways

• Integration of Self: Crisis demands the integration of fractured identities into a more whole, resilient self.
• Community Resilience: In the absence of institutional support, grassroots peer networks and shared storytelling provide critical relief.
• Role of Tourism: Tourism offers more than economic value—it becomes a vehicle for emotional connection, meaning-making, and healing.
• Ongoing Healing: The path forward involves sharing stories, building community, and engaging in healing practices like nature-based and narrative therapy.

Closing

Lena thanks participants for their courage and empathy, emphasizing that their presence helps Israelis feel seen, valued, and capable of enduring and growing through immense hardship.

Bio

Lena Drubachevsky is a tour guide, wife, mother of three, immigrant from the former Soviet Union, and incoming president of the Israeli Tour Guide Association, formerly focused on incoming tourism, now expanding to include internal and solidarity-focused tourism in response to ongoing crises.

Born in Odessa, Ukraine, I made aliyah with my family at age six and grew up in Haifa. I served as a boot camp commander in the IDF during the Second Intifada. Later, I studied international relations, mass communication, and Middle Eastern studies at Hebrew University. For the past 15 years, I’ve been a tour guide specializing in archaeology, history, nature, and culture, working with tourists from around the world and guiding other tour guides.

When COVID-19 shut down the tourism industry, I became a leading voice in the fight for its survival, serving as vice president of the Israel Tourist Guide Association for the past four years — a role I will soon transition from to become president. That period revealed the deep personal and professional trauma in our field, shaping my ongoing advocacy.

After October 7th, my personal and professional worlds collided. As a member of the electronic outdoor culture community, I lost friends and supported rescue and information efforts while grieving with my community. This drove me to launch projects helping both farmers and unemployed guides, and to create sensitive ways to educate visitors about the tragedy—leading diplomats, journalists, and security forces in the Western Negev.

For the past year, I’ve also volunteered on a project connecting tour groups with families of those murdered at the October 7th gatherings, helping them share the light of their loved ones as part of their healing.

Despite this daily exposure to grief and trauma, I found strength in helping others, which led me to study wilderness therapy and confront my own personal and family trauma.

I hope to offer a unique glimpse into the journey of an ordinary Israeli woman finding resilience and purpose in extraordinary times.