JTA — Shorty, the aptly named 4-foot-8-inch medical clown, stood between two young patients riding coin-operated toy cars in the lobby of Tel Aviv’s children’s hospital, alternately blowing and eating bubbles as the children giggled.

Between mouthfuls, Shorty asked the girl’s mother why her daughter, about 6, was in the hospital. For a tonsil operation, the mother said, which had been performed by a Dr. Shaked.

Shaked is the Hebrew word for tonsil. Shorty stopped blowing bubbles and turned to face her. “You’re joking,” she said, slapping her palm theatrically to her forehead. “That’s it, I’m done. I have no reason to be here.”

Decked out in a baroque lace cravat, a disco-themed baseball cap and a pin that reads “Life is short and so am I,” Shorty is the alter ego of Shira Friedlander, one of seven Dream Doctors medical clowns assigned to Dana-Dwek Children’s Hospital at Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center, also known as Ichilov.

Israel has become a global leader in medical clowning over the past two and a half decades, with two main organizations and the world’s first full bachelor’s degree program in medical clowning, offered at Haifa University. In the three years since the bloody October 7, 2023, Hamas-led terror onslaught, which has reshaped Israeli society, clowning has taken on a renewed role in supporting healing and resilience.

Simchat Halev operates a network of about 500 volunteer therapeutic clowns in hospitals, with a focus on entertainment, emotional relief and morale. Dream Doctors, founded in 2002, has developed a more clinical model, placing about 100 salaried medical clowns in more than 30 hospitals, where they work as paraprofessionals alongside hospital teams and even participate in medical procedures.

At Ichilov, that means the clowns can be brought into operating rooms, oncology wards and transplant units. The nonprofit has also pioneered medical clowning in rehabilitation, trauma care and adult wards.

Atay Citron, who founded the medical clowning degree program at Haifa University, wrote in 2014 that after observing medical clowns in Canada, the United States, New Zealand and Australia, and interviewing clown doctors from the Netherlands, Germany, Russia and Brazil, he had not found stories resembling the Israeli Dream Doctors’ “audacity and insane courage.” He described their ethos as one of independent spirit, brash humor, bold innovation, risk-taking and creativity, alongside formal training that emphasizes careful listening, hospital rules and cooperation with medical staff.

That difference was clear to Ines Rosner, who co-founded a German medical clowning organization and has traveled to Israel about eight times to learn from Israeli practitioners.

“In Israel, it’s common that you have an idea and you just do it,” she said. “In Germany, that’s not possible.”

While medical clowns are a normal presence inside Israeli hospitals, in Germany “most hospitals think of them as visitors who come in the afternoons and have some fun,” Rosner said. The coronavirus pandemic made that status clear, she said, when clowns were among the first asked to leave hospitals.

Independent studies have found that medical clowning can reduce anxiety in children undergoing hospital procedures, with a 2024 review of 15 randomized trials involving 2,252........

© The Times of Israel