The Center for

Compassionate Mindful Education

Cultivating a vigorous, caring and pluralistic society in Israel

At CCME we specialize in developing mindfulness & compassion based

Social-Emotional Learning programs for the education system and society at large.

We believe that the path towards a caring society, begins with cultivating the potential of the change agents and model figures for the next generation:

parents, educators and therapists.

Our programs are based on empirical studies and are focused on improving the well-being, awareness and social-emotional skills of educators, caregivers

and the children whom they raise.

CCME is a non-profit institution dedicated to making mindful compassionate education accessible to all populations in Israel.

Since 2014 we've trained over 500 educators and thousands of students in the Israeli education system.

Mindfulness and compassion practice cultivates:

Awareness of oneself & others
Emotional and behavioral regulation
Concentration, co-ordination and motor skills
Care for oneself & others

Resulting in:

Reduced stress and anxiety
Increased levels of well-being
Ethical behavior
Academic success

Needless to say these skills are essential and highly effective for leading a humanistic values-based life, even in times of radical social and global change as we are experiencing in the 21st century.

"My staff and students are more aware of themselves and their surroundings. You can see it in their approach to friends at recess, in the classroom climate and in the presence of the teachers, who arrive each morning lighthearted."

Shir Kedar, Tamir school principal

Co-founders and Advisory Board

Co-founders

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Dr. Rony Berger

Dr. Rony Berger

Director of Pedagogy

Clinical psychologist, senior lecturer and faculty member at the International Stress and Trauma program at Tel Aviv University. World renowned expert at coping with stress and trauma, and one of the founders of the international association Psychology Beyond Borders, which works with war, terrorism and natural disaster survivors. Dr. Berger has developed resilience programs for coping with trauma, which were translated into 15 languages and implemented in many of the world's most disastrous events. Dr. Berger is also an adviser at the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education at Stanford University, where he collaborates in designing programs which cultivate mindfulness and compassion. Lately he has worked with the Mind and Life institute founded by H. H. the 14th Dalai Lama, in developing pedagogy which fosters civic ethics. The program written at the institute has been implemented in Israeli schools since 2014, under empirical research by Dr. Berger and Dr. Tarrasch.

Maty Lieblich

Director of Professional Training

Lieblich is a scholar and practitioner integrating mindfulness-based practices and theory from current psychological research and traditional Buddhism. She is the co-founder and academic director of the Mindfulness Based Therapy program at The School of Social Work, Bar Ilan University. Lieblich has also co-developed the two-year course for educators at Tel Aviv University’s School of Education, and directs school counselor supervisors at Israel’s Ministry of Education. She has been practicing and studying mindfulness for 30 years, and teaching mindfulness practice and theory for 20 years. She holds an MA in East-West psychology (1999) from The California Institute of Integral Studies. Her first book At the Edge of Ego was published in 2009 by Keter-Rimon publication, followed by the national best-seller Mindfulness - Here and now, theory and practice (2018) and Mindfulness Paths: Width of Practice in Everyday life (2020).

Ravid Bogaire

Director of Community Relations

Educational psychologist at the Psychological Public Services, and organizational consultant at the Research and Development Department of the Ministry of Education, specializing in mindful and compassionate school systems. Bogaire develops and teaches mindfulness and compassion based Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) programs and workshops for therapists, educators, children and adults to fulfill personal and social growth and wellbeing. She has also established the Mindfulness Forum for educational psychologists to enhance the integration of mindfulness-based therapy and school interventions in educational psychology. In the last decade Bogaire has been practicing yoga and learning Buddhism as a way of life. These, along with her rich background in dance in Israel and France, influence her professional work as a psychotherapist, school psychologist and organizational consultant.

Dr. Ricardo Tarrasch

Dr. Ricardo Tarrasch

Chairperson & Director of Research

Ricardo is a faculty member at the school of education and school of neuroscience of Tel Aviv University, with over 30 years of experience in practicing meditation and yoga. For the past decade he has integrated mindfulness into education and academic research, developing a mindfulness program for children and studying the effects of this program and others among children and teachers. Additionally, he studies the effects of mindfulness practice in adults with attention deficit disorders and/or dyslexia on cerebral, cognitive and emotional measures. Dr. Tarrasch is the co-recipient of the 2019 research grant of the Chief Scientist at the Israeli Ministry of Education.

Moriya Rosenberg

Moriya Rosenberg

CEO

Rosenberg is a social entrepreneur and educator, walking the path of meditation for a decade. She specializes in developing mindfulness, movement and compassion-based educational content, and training educational teams in Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) programs. She is a senior workshops facilitator at Rhythm Therapy® for people from all walks of life. Previously a dance artist and journalist, she has been involved in peace activism, primarily through The Peres Center for Peace and Innovation, Women Wage Peace and Minds of Peace. Currently, Rosenberg holds a Master degree in social psychology from Tel Aviv University.

Advisory Board

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Prof. Phillip Zimbardo

Prof. Alaina Brenick

Prof. Alaina Brenick

Associate Professor of Human Development and Family Sciences and Associate Director of the Center for the Study of Culture, Health, and Human Development at the University of Connecticut. She received a pre-doctoral traineeship from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development to obtain her Ph.D. at the University of Maryland prior to her postdoctoral fellowship at the Friedrich Schiller University, Germany. She analyzes how diverse groups of youth—sometimes with vastly different societal structures, norms, and expectations—experience, reason about, and respond to intergroup peer relations and group-based victimization. This work is translated into multifaceted, contextually, and developmentally appropriate intervention programs ranging from mindfulness training to intergroup contact, designed to promote compassion, empathy, social equity, and positive intergroup relations.

Prof. Stevan E. Hobfall

Prof. Stevan E. Hobfall

Dr. Hobfoll has authored and edited 12 books, including Traumatic Stress, The Ecology of Stress, Stress Cultire and Community, and The Imperfect Guardian. As well as the upcoming book Tribalism: The Evolutionary Origins Of Fear Politics. In addition, he has authored over 300 journal articles, book chapters, and technical reports. He has been a frequent workshop leader on stress, war, and terrorism, stress and health, and organizational stress. He has received over $18 million in research grants on stress. Dr. Hobfoll is currently the Judd and Marjorie Weinberg Presidential Professor and Chair of the Department of Behavioral Sciences at Rush Medical College in Chicago, joining Rush in 2008. His current research focuses on trauma in zones of conflict and on the connection between stress and biological-health outcomes in women’s lives.

Dr. Britta Hölzel

Dr. Britta Hölzel

Research Fellow at the Institute for Medical Psychology at Charité in Berlin, Germany. She was previously a Research Fellow in the Psychiatric Neuroscience Division at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. Dr. Hölzel is a mindfulness-based stress reduction instructor and a certified yoga teacher (Sivananda Organization), and has been a dedicated yoga and meditation practitioner since 1997. Dr. Hölzel is a recipient of the Marie Curie International Outgoing Fellowship within the 7th European Community Framework Program, and the Positive Neuroscience award from the John Templeton Foundation, among other honors. Her magnetic resonance imaging research focuses on the effects of mindfulness practice on the functional neuroanatomy of emotion regulation as well as on structural changes in the brain.

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