The sober face of former Israeli police spokesman Gil Kleiman dominated the screen in the auditorium at the Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in New Brunswick.

“I’ve witnessed 47 suicide bombings during the Intifada,” Kleiman said, staring into the camera lens. “My job was to respond to every suicide bombing. My job was to get to the scene…and I saw things people shouldn’t have to see.”

One time, Kleiman said, he was on the scene at two separate suicide bombings, from four o’clock in the afternoon to four o’clock the next morning. At the scene of the second bombing, while he was giving an interview to CNN, he said, another reporter came up to him and told him the name of one of the victims — a man whose father had officiated at his wedding.

“It suddenly hit me. I broke down,” Kleiman said. “I went across the street and stood behind a car and cried for about five minutes.… A week later, I found myself in my office, crying. It was a nonstop flooding of tears. Once I broke down, I wasn’t able to control it anymore.

“People don’t understand,” he said. “You’ve got hundreds of people you’ve got to mourn for. It’s as if victims of every bombing attack are saying, ‘Look, don’t forget me. I was on the Number 2 bus. I was in Sbarro’s.’ You see the faces.”

The brief film offered an unforgettable illustration of everything Israeli clinical psychologist Ruth Pat-Horenczyk had come to impart to her colleagues in New Jersey. Her June 28 presentation, Post-Traumatic Distress and Resilience: The Israeli Experience, was the second in a series of lectures and symposia jointly sponsored by the International Center for Terror Medicine at Robert Wood Johnson and the Hadassah Medical Organization in Jerusalem.

“This is something we very much support,” Benjamin Krasna, deputy consul general of Israel in New York, told New Jersey Jewish News before the program. “It was our initiative today to bring Dr. Pat-Horenczyk here,” he said. “We thought it was very appropriate, doing whatever we can to support the center.”

The center was created for just such exchanges of expertise between Israel and New Jersey, said Dr. Clifton Lacy, president and CEO of Robert Wood Johnson.

“We have a lot to learn from our Israeli colleagues on the best ways to cope with and rebound from the acute stress of repeated terror attacks,” said Lacy, who joined Dr. Shmuel Shapira, deputy director general at Hadassah, in signing the memorandum of understanding that established the center last spring.

“Thanks to conferences like these,” he said, “both New Jersey and Israel are better prepared not just for the physical effects but the psychological, sociological, and cultural effects of terrorism.”

Lacy introduced Pat-Horenczyk to the audience of some 60 health-care professionals as a “luminary” in the understanding of those effects. She is director of child and adolescent clinical services at the Israel Center for the Treatment of Psychotrauma at Herzog Hospital in Jerusalem.

In her presentation, Pat-Horenczyk outlined some of the consequences of exposure to terrorism in a nation that has sustained more than 22,000 terror attacks in recent years. During the period of the second Intifada, she said, Israel suffered 144 suicide bombings that left 1,113 Israelis dead — including 211 children — and 7,143 injured.

“Traumatic events overwhelm the usual methods of coping that give people a sense of control,” the psychologist said. “When we talk about coping and terror, we’re not only talking about physical survival, but also the survival of our values — spiritual survival.”

Exposure to an act of terror can result in hyper-arousal, causing hyper-alertness and flashbacks, but also hypo-arousal that freezes feelings, according to Pat-Horenczyk. “Some people can be frozen after exposure to an event and feel guilt or shame because they are not functioning as they would like to,” she said.

The majority of people are resilient enough to recover from traumatic events, she said. But about 15 percent of people experience the acute distress disorder known as post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, and its disturbing cluster of symptoms — flashbacks, hallucinations, hyper-vigilance, insomnia, numbness, withdrawal, irritability, and a restricted range of feeling.

There is no consensus among psychologists about what allows most people to be resilient enough to avoid PTSD, Pat-Horenczyk said. “We as psychologists would like to find the components of resilience that can be taught,” she said, “because we want the ability to recover.”

Pat-Horenczyk also touched on the impact of terror events on first responders. “There is a cost to caring,” she said. “The concept of compassion fatigue emerged only recently. It represents the cost of caring about and for traumatized people.”

But one group of first responders — the volunteer religious organization ZAKA, the body handlers — is different, she said. “They’re carrying out the task of body removal after a terror attack, and this is the most horrible job you can imagine,” Pat-Horenczyk said. “But they have a very low level of psychological distress. Positive feelings are their altruistic reward.”

At the end of the program, Danny Brom, PhD, director of the Israel Center for the Treatment of Psychotrauma, joined Pat-Horenczyk onstage for some impromptu remarks.

“The question is not whether there will be more terror attacks,” Brom said. “The question is whether we can survive them and still maintain an open society. How do you keep society resilient? How do we keep our staff resilient? How do you combat fear?”

His center sees its mission as more than reactive, Brom added. “We know the next attack is going to come,” he said. “What we are trying to develop is a whole concept of continuity of services. When a bomb goes off, people call each other. This is the importance of getting a multidisciplinary team to think about this together in a multidisciplinary way.

“When things will happen, it’s terrible, but we will be prepared,” he said. “At the end of the day, there’s only one thing that’s going to help people after trauma, and that is bonding with other people.”