Resettlement: a cultural and psychological crisis

Resettlement is a crisis that can offer enormous opportunities as well as many risks. The resettlement worker's task is to maximize the opportunities and minimize the risks by helping families with the many concrete tasks of immigration while remaining attentive to their many emotional needs. All immigrants go through stages of resettlement and need to integrate their past cultural experience into their new life and culture. Although every cultural group does it differently, the stages of resettlement and the basic elements needed to manage the resettlement process are described. The present wave of Jews immigrating from the former Soviet Union is used as an example to illustrate the psychological and cultural issues that most affect this group during resettlement. Three specific groups of clients are identified, and case management methods are presented for dealing with the issues raised by each group.