COVID+5: From Crisis to Personal and Communal Growth
Gila Muskin Block
Reflecting on the pandemic feels both like yesterday and a lifetime ago. In the moment, its impact was raw and all-consuming, yet as time passes, life seems to have settled back into a rhythm that mirrors a pre-COVID existence. But for those of us who have walked the path of infertility, the echoes of that time—of isolation, uncertainty, and desperation—still resonate deeply.
As a fertility advocate, I often view life through the lens of awareness and support for the 1 in 6 struggling to build families. And I can’t help but wonder: Has the Jewish community, which lived through a collective experience of loneliness and fear, emerged with a greater understanding of what it means for couples struggling with infertility to cope with the enduring and agonizing loneliness of infertility and paralyzing fear of the uncertainty of their future? Did COVID shift the way we support those who endure these silent struggles, or have we returned to old patterns, failing to “show up” in the many ways we might have? Five years post-pandemic, it’s time to reflect on whether we have truly learned from our shared experience of isolation or simply moved on.
The pandemic was a collective experience of uncertainty, isolation, and waiting. For months (and for some, even years), we lived in limbo, unsure of what the future would bring, longing for answers, for normalcy, for the life we had envisioned. It was a time of desperation, of deep loneliness, of grappling with an unknown timeline for when, or if, things would ever feel whole again. Research confirms that so many experienced heightened rates of anxiety, depression, and psychological distress during the pandemic.
The COVID-19 pandemic triggered a global mental health crisis as people across the world faced prolonged uncertainty, isolation, and fear. Studies documented a significant rise in anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and psychological distress. Lockdowns and social distancing measures, while important for maintaining public health, definitely left many feeling disconnected from their support systems, amplifying feelings of loneliness and helplessness. The unpredictability of the pandemic, not knowing when it would end, if life would return to normal, and what the long-term consequences would be, created a pervasive sense of unease that weighed heavily on the emotional well-being of so many of us.
Quarantine, in particular, had severe psychological effects, including post-traumatic stress symptoms, confusion, and anger. The enforced separation from loved ones, upended daily routines, and the fear of infection all contributed to increased stress and complete emotional exhaustion. Many experienced a sense of loss of control over their lives, exacerbating feelings of frustration and despair. The prolonged nature of isolation took a toll on motivation, productivity, and overall mental resilience, with many people left struggling to find some purpose amid the uncertainty. Even as restrictions lifted in the months that followed some lingering effects of this collective trauma remained, highlighting the profound and lasting impact that extended isolation and unpredictability can have on mental health.
COVID-19’s Heightened Isolation for the Fertility Community
COVID-19 took the fertility journey for those seeking to build families, an already-isolating experience that is marked by endless waiting and uncertainty and further compounded these realities. In the first few months as the world as a whole and medical professionals were attempting to grasp some understanding of the anomaly of the virus, all “non-essential” medical treatments were paused. On March 17, 2020, the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) published guidelines that recommended the suspension of all new treatment cycles for what at the time was an undetermined period. This pause in treatment added immense anguish for so many who were actively fighting to grow their families and working against time they felt they didn’t have. And to the 1 in 6 nothing felt more essential than treatment to achieve this dream.
Additionally, being home in the quiet without the children and families that they were fighting to have, deepened the loneliness and void they were experiencing. Many Yesh Tikva participants shared how painful it was to be surrounded by complete silence when all they were dreaming of was the noise of family. According to a study conducted at a Columbia University fertility clinic in which over 500 of their patients participated, it was found that “of those who had a cycle canceled . . . 22% found it to be extremely upsetting where extremely upsetting was defined as the equivalent of the loss of a child.”
According to a study conducted of 500 fertility patients on the emotional impact of COVID-19 fertility clinic closures, patients reported feelings of “‘powerless/helpless’ (78.3%), ‘frustrated’ (59.3%), and ‘anxious’ (54.7%).” Furthermore, though infertility impacts both women and men, the brunt of a fertility journey occurs in a woman’s body. For those blessed to have partners and who face this journey together, there is solace in knowing that on some level, you are not the only one experiencing this (even if you are experiencing it very differently). But COVID-19 stole that as well. Once doctors’ offices finally reopened, slowly and with many restrictions, only one patient was allowed to attend each appointment. The small solace that was once found in companionship with your spouse or a friend holding you through this journey was taken. As a Yesh Tikva participant reflected on one of the many difficult appointments she had to attend without any support: “I remember shaking from feeling so alone in that very moment; I so badly wished my husband was with me.”
Have We Increased Communal Empathy?
For those who have battled infertility, the experience of loneliness and fear during the Pandemic was all too familiar. Long before COVID-19, fertility warriors knew what it meant to live in a world of unanswered questions, where timelines are indefinite, and each passing day brings both hope and heartbreak. The emotions that gripped the world during the pandemic—helplessness, longing, fear—are the same ones that define the infertility journey. And yet, as we emerge from the pandemic’s shadow, the question lingers: Has this collective experience changed how we support those still living in that limbo?
If anything, COVID should have given our communities a newfound empathy for the struggle of infertility. All who experienced the Pandemic now know what it feels like to be trapped in uncertainty. We all know the pain of isolation, the frustration of delayed dreams, the deep ache of waiting. And yet, despite this shared understanding of these emotions, infertility, and the fact that it carries with it these exact same struggles, still often remains on the periphery of Jewish communal awareness. The pandemic forced us into discomfort, but for many, that discomfort faded with time. For many, it remains ever-present.
Based on my experience at Yesh Tikvah and on my interactions with individuals and families struggling with infertility, it would appear that the pandemic has not yet led to a major shift in how the general community approaches those facing these fertility struggles. There have not been increased efforts to translate the parallel experience into greater support and empathy for those facing infertility. It is incumbent on us in the broader Jewish community to do better and make that shift.
So, now that we are five years out and not much has changed, what do we do? How do we ensure that the lessons of COVID are not lost? How do we translate our communal experience into a more compassionate, inclusive approach to supporting those struggling to build their families? These are the questions we must ask ourselves if we are truly committed to fostering a Jewish community that sees, hears, and holds those in pain.
We have an opportunity to make the next five years count. Now that we have acknowledged the deficit in translating our lived experience into empathy, we have the opportunity to do better. We have a motto at Yesh Tikva called “Yes, And.” Yes, we live in a child-centered religion that focuses on ritual around family and children, and there is room for inclusion of those dreaming of growing their families. Yes, we are blessed to be past the pandemic, not wanting to relive the experience or dwell on it, and we have the opportunity to tap into empathy, the understanding of emotions from our lived experience, without having to relive it ourselves. For those reasons and more, in five years from now, when we reflect on a decade post-COVID, I hope the answer to this question will be YES. Yes, we have used our lived experience to increase communal empathy for the 1 in 6. Yes, our synagogues are more welcoming and now find creative and sensitive ways to make room for both families and children and those who are still dreaming of having their children. And yes, we go out of our way to raise awareness so that no one should have to face their fertility struggles in isolation, but rather the fertility warriors in our midst should feel surrounded by a community that is well-educated about this struggle and able to offer support and empathy.
Gila Muskin Block is the Executive Director and Co-Founder Yesh Tikva.
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Carl Hochhauser
COVID-19 was officially declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO) on March 11, 2020, but for the Jewish community, the date of significance is Purim 5780. It is around that date that Jews in Israel, America, and around the world began to be impacted by the medical and social ramifications of the virus. Yeshivot closed and shuls were shuttered. In some communities, seudot Purim were toned down. In others, the festive holiday meals served as mass virus-spreading events that led to many fatalities. In the aftermath of Purim, the Jewish world began to shut down.
As we pass the five-year mark since the outbreak, it is worth looking back to see how the pandemic impacted the Jewish community and whether those changes were temporary or represent shifts that will perhaps continue into the post-COVID era. While there is a wealth of data on some of these changes during the pandemic, the data on what has happened since is significantly more limited due to the typical time-lag from data collection to final publication in scientific journals.
As is well known, in addition to the health ramifications of COVID, including direct neurological/psychiatric damage from the virus itself, there was also an indirect but significant impact on mental health from the way that the pandemic impacted our lives. The greatest impact seems to have been from isolation and loneliness. On a community level, this manifested in multiple lockdowns, and on an individual level, this was caused by going into quarantine as a result of contagion or exposure. Other factors that also contributed included grief and loss from family, friends, and community members dying or being significantly ill; economic instability; and disruptions to daily loves/routines (e.g., Penninx, et al., 2022).
The results were significant. On a worldwide level, the Global Burden Disease study reported a 25% increase in both anxiety and depression in the first year of the pandemic (Santomauro, et al., 2021). These increases were greater in areas with more disease, in women more than men, and in younger adults (20-24) more than older adults. Data for the Jewish community are less conclusive but still informative. In Great Britain, the Opinions and Lifestyle Survey and Annual Population Survey data from the Office for National Statistics indicated a 15% increase in average anxiety rating from 2019 to 2020 among the 140,000 Jews surveyed (Institute for Jewish Policy Research, 2020). 64% rated their mental health as having deteriorated since the outbreak of COVID and 47% of respondents indicated greater levels of frustration and anxiety than they did beforehand. Here, too, younger British Jews (16-29) were more likely to be negatively affected, as were women. In Israel, a large study of the general population (80% of the respondents were Jewish) found that 46% of the subjects had their mental health negatively affected by the pandemic. This was particularly true for those who lost their jobs, were placed on unpaid leave, or who suffered other significant financial strains (Feitelson, et al., 2022). A similarly comprehensive study of American Jews was not carried out, but the Orthodox Union surveyed four communities from different parts of the country and did not find a deleterious impact on mental health (Bankier-Karp and Shain, 2022). A study done by Pirutinsky and colleagues (2020) during the first wave also found little to no negative impact, but this too only studied Orthodox Jews and was not geographically diverse (67% from the New York/New Jersey area).
From the data that is available, it appears that religion was a major tool in coping with stress from COVID. Pirutinsky and colleagues (2020) found that trust in God, integrating religion into one’s life, and using religion to find meaning and support, mitigated the impact of COVID on stress and mental health. They also found a correlation between COVID exposure and one’s level of religiosity. While it is possible that this was due to more religious individuals continuing to attend communal prayers (e.g., church or minyan) and thus at greater risk of exposure, they suggested that the results of similar studies led them to believe that the subjects turned to religion as a way to cope with the pandemic. It is worth noting, however, that in a Pew survey done of US Jews (not just the Orthodox community), only 7% felt that the outbreak had led to their faith becoming stronger (Pew Research Center, 2020). Religion as a coping mechanism was not assessed in the British survey, but they did find significantly lower levels of distress among Jews who are members of a synagogue as opposed to those who were not. So too, rates of distress were lower on average among those belonging to the more observant branches of Judaism, as opposed to those from more liberal denominations.
For those who did need mental health care during COVID, social distancing requirements and restrictions on travel made access significantly more difficult. On one hand, the fields of psychotherapy and psychiatry were particularly vulnerable to lockdowns and masking because of the importance of clinical rapport and face-to-face contact. But on the other hand, these fields were also uniquely able to seamlessly move to online video platforms.
According to McKinsey and Co. (Bestsennyy, et al., 2021), from February 2020 to April 2020 there was a 78-fold increase in the use of virtual methods of providing health care. While this decreased over time from this peak level, by July 2021 the use was still 38 times as great as it was before the pandemic. Born out of necessity, this opened the eyes of patients and physicians alike to the potential efficacy of telehealth. This same survey found that 58% of doctors now viewed telehealth more favorably and 57% planned to continue to offer it going forward. Among patients, there was a shift from 11% who made use of telehealth before the pandemic to 40% who believed they would continue to use it after COVID was over.
In the McKinsey study, the area of medicine that had the greatest use of telehealth was mental health care. Similarly, in the 2021 Medical Expenditure Panel Survey, 31% of the children and adolescents who received mental health care had at least one visit via video (Olfson, et al., 2025). While there aren’t data on the use of telepsychology in the Jewish community in particular, one can surmise that use is similar to the general population, if not higher. The one exception may be in the ultra-Orthodox community, where smartphones and laptops with internet access are often forbidden. Presumably, in some cases, this led to the termination of therapeutic relationships. But in other cases, such as those described in Latzer, et al. (2021) from the Maayanei HaYeshua Eating Disorders Clinic (Bnei Brak, Israel), the families were able to adapt and use such technologies in order to continue the necessary therapy.
While telepsychology enabled patients and providers to overcome the technical barriers to psychotherapy and psychiatry during the pandemic, there have always been those who refrained from seeking help due to the stigma attached to mental illness and mental health care. In Israel, Shapiro and colleagues found that these stigmas seem to have declined since the outbreak of COVID (2024). The greater prevalence of psychological distress may have led to greater empathy and understanding, and thereby destigmatizing illness and therapy. In addition, the pandemic led to mental health issues being more at the forefront of national consciousness, which further reduced the stigma. Two recent studies of American Jews found significant stigmas toward psychiatric illness and mental health care but did not assess the impact of COVID on these variables (Smith, et al., 2024; Gearing, et al., 2023).
As we stand nearly two years after the official end of the pandemic, there is a natural desire to determine how many of these changes represented tipping points, moments in history when shifts in behaviors began and futures were changed, and how many were simply temporary spikes but ultimately returned to pre-COVID behaviors and attitudes. From a scientific perspective, two years out is too early to tell. However, we can discuss certain indicators that may give us insights into future directions.
The adoption of online video platforms for psychologists and even psychiatrists appears to represent a paradigm shift. As per data from the American Psychological Association’s Practitioner Pulse Survey (2024), the trend appears to be continuing. While the number of psychologists working exclusively on video has not surprisingly gone down over the past five years, the percentage of psychologists working at least partially via video has remained stable at about 90%. From my experience speaking with patients and colleagues, the pandemic forced them to use a new method of communicating with their providers/clients and they became “hooked.” One telling anecdote is that when the first lockdown was over, I contacted a 22-year-old patient with the “good news” that my clinic was reopening and that we could meet face-to-face. Rather than jump at the offer, he kindly informed me that he “preferred Zoom” and requested we continue online.
An unintended consequence of this shift was also that it increased mental health care access for disabled and immunocompromised patients who did not have recourse prior to 2020. In the Jewish community in particular, a parallel phenomenon is taking place with online shiurim. Many of these have shifted back to being in-person, but a significant number continue to flourish online, granting access to Torah knowledge and even halakhic training to individuals in communities where such classes and teachers are not available or to elderly individuals less able to travel.
A similar phenomenon may have occurred regarding the negative mental health stigmas in the Jewish community. The increase in psychological diagnoses and symptoms, globally and (in some cases) communally, forced the issue out of the shadows. This “normalization” of therapy in general and at least certain kinds of mental illness (schizophrenia and other serious illnesses perhaps being notable exceptions) has led to individuals feeling less uncomfortable about seeking professional help and even discussing it with others.
Will shifts in religiosity or religious practice hold steady over time? Will Jews who “found religion” as a result of coping with the crisis maintain or slide back? Not only is it too early to tell, but it does not appear that there are available precedents that might shape our predictions. A pre-pandemic literature review and meta-analysis of religious changes in response to traumatic events found that most people do not have long-term changes in religious beliefs. For those that do have an increase or decrease in their religiosity, however, it’s not clear from the data how permanent this is (Leo, et al., 2019). A large study done after 9/11 did collect longitudinal data and found that religiosity and spirituality were correlated with better health over time since the terror attack, but it did not assess whether the subjects’ religiosity or spirituality changed over time (McIntosh, et al., 2011). The best indicator might be the 2022 American Religious Benchmark Survey (Witt-Swanson, 2023). They found that most Jews attend religious services at about the same frequency as they did pre-pandemic and that they did not change their religious affiliation over the course of COVID or thereafter. While they did not provide within-group data about these phenomena for Jews, one could reasonably extrapolate from their data on other religions that younger Jews and more liberal Jews did have declining attendance.
While there may be “no atheists in foxholes,” what happens to those former atheists 5 to 10 years after they leave the battlefield? Presumably, some of those who changed maintain their new beliefs and some do not. In the absence of data, I would conjecture that those who translate these beliefs into consistent practices are more likely to persist than those whose changes are in the realm of belief alone. In addition, I presume that those who are part of a community system where all have changed, or who join a new community whose members reflect their new religiosity in the wake of the crisis, also maintain their change.
More fundamentally, the adage assumes that the individual in question views themselves as actually being in a “foxhole” (does a Zoom classroom qualify as a foxhole—for teacher or student?). The literature on post-traumatic growth (Tedeschi and Calhoun, 1995) suggests that it functions as the mirror image of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The impact is less about the actual trauma and more about the perceived impact it had on the individual. For those who went through the pandemic and never felt medically threatened, never truly felt the depressing burden of isolation, and never feared for their family’s financial solvency, they avoided PTSD and presumably the other negative mental health ramifications of living through the COVID era. However, by not having to face these fears and learn to actively cope with them, they also remain unable to reap the benefits. Yalkut Shimoni (Psalms 5:628, commenting on Micha 7:8) observes:
Rejoice not over me, O my enemy; when I fall, I shall rise—Had I not fallen, I would never have arisen. When I sit in darkness, the Lord will be a light to me—Had I not sat in darkness, I would not have received His light.
Growth as a result of crisis or trauma presumes that for the individual in question it was actually a crisis or a trauma. For many in the community it was not. As such, analysis of those individuals over time may not uncover positive changes in religiosity, spirituality, or other domains. However, this may be different for the minority who did experience significant trauma such as severe illness, death of family members, depression, or even from economic hardships and loneliness. Perhaps as we look to the future to see how our community may have changed over the past five years we may find that those hit harder may also be those among whom we may see the most growth. Let’s direct our focus there. It will allow us to help those still struggling to recover and learn from those who have risen from the ashes.
Dr. Carl Hochhauser is the yeshiva psychologist and a teacher in Jewish philosophy at Yeshivat HaKotel. He also works as a pediatric psychologist at the Zichron Menachem Foundation for Children with Cancer and maintains a private practice in Beit Shemesh and Jerusalem.