7:00 p.m.  HIAS Refugee Shabbat services, led by Rabbi Rachlis and Cantor Braier, with University Synagogue member and world-renown trauma coping expert, Dr. Roxane Cohen Silver, and Fulbright Scholar from Ukraine, Dr. Natasha Frolova, who is currently working at UCI with Dr. Cohen Silver.

Roxane Cohen Silver, Ph.D. is Vice Provost for Academic Planning and Institutional Research, and Distinguished Professor in the Department of Psychological Science, in the Department of Medicine, and in the Program in Public Health at the University of California, Irvine, where she has been actively involved in research, teaching, and administration since 1989. An international expert in the field of stress and coping, Dr. Silver has spent over four decades studying acute and long-term psychological and physical reactions to stressful life experiences, including personal losses and larger collective traumas such as terror attacks, war, infectious disease outbreaks, and natural disasters across the world. Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Mental Health, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and the U.S. Public Health Service.

Dr. Silver has guided governments in the U.S. and abroad in the aftermath of natural disasters and terrorist attacks and served for a decade on numerous senior advisory committees and task forces for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, providing advice to the Department and its component agencies on the psychological impact of disasters and terrorism. She has twice testified to the U.S. House of Representatives’ Committee on Science, Space and Technology and she is Past-President of the Federation of Associations in Behavioral & Brain Sciences (FABBS) (serving on their board for 6 years) and she served in 2016 as President of the Society of Experimental Social Psychology. She was also a founding Director and Chair of the Board of Directors of Psychology Beyond Borders and she is a member of University Synagogue.

Natalia Frolova, PhD is Associate Professor at Dnipro National University, Faculty of Psychology and Social Work, in the Department of Age and Pedagogical Psychology, graduating with honors in 1994.  She is currently a Fulbright Scholar at the University of California, Irvine, working under the mentorship of Dr. Roxane Cohen Silver in the Department of Psychological Science.

In 1998, she defended her dissertation at Kyiv National University with her dissertation topic on the "Transformation of the System of Personality Values, Induced by the Crisis in the Society (Psychological Aspect)." Nearly everyone in her country, Ukraine, is suffering from some form of trauma from the war. People have been displaced, have seen their loved ones killed and their homes bombed, leaving them shocked and panicked. Dr. Frolova is at UCI to study this collective traumatizing process so that she can build a system to help people to be strong and resilient after the war ends. She has studied and worked in Israel, as well.

Our Oneg Shabbat will be sponsored by the Feinberg Family in honor of Emma Feinberg becoming a Bat Mitzvah.

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