About the Organization
TERRA UMA is a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping combat veterans living with PTSD reclaim their lives through a unique emotional, agricultural, and productive journey in the world of winemaking. This process restores and empowers essential life skills that may have been diminished as a result of psychological injury.
The “Raising a Glass to Life” Wine Journey is a therapeutic experience rooted in the vineyard and winery. Over the course of a year, participants engage in hands-on work among the vines, barrels, and their own personal wine casks. Through this process, abilities worn down by the invisible wounds of combat are gradually restored, and personal resilience is strengthened — paving the way for reintegration into society.
At the heart of the journey lies the personal barrel, symbolizing the inner self — the internal fermentation, the emotional sediments left behind by combat experiences. The personalized wine bottles that each participant produces embody new life, renewed capabilities, and the dreams they aspire to fulfill.
We believe that taking responsibility and initiative in the “life after injury,” through meaningful, creative, and grounded work, can bring about profound and positive transformation — both emotionally and physically.
"Recognition that post-traumatic injury and the prolonged struggle it entails can deeply impair daily functioning and limit the ability to pursue personal aspirations, our mission is to provide warriors with a safe, natural, and empowering environment that enables them to create new paths of ability and fulfillment, on their way to meaningful reintegration into society."
Tomer Weinberg, founder of the association
The story behind the founding of the association
My name is Tomer Weinberg and I founded the TERRA UMA association in April 2022 after many years of dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder that developed in me following a serious injury at the beginning of the Second Lebanon War.
For many years I tried unsuccessfully to return to the level of functioning I had before the injury, until I finally came to terms with my outbursts and my inability to change the situation.
Several years ago, I lost my late father Yitzhak in a motorcycle accident. The deep connection to him, which had grown stronger since the injury, was suddenly severed.
What was supposed to be the "knockout" of my life turned out to be their resurrection.
My father had a makeshift home winery where he made wine as a hobby. During the shiva, I stared at the wine barrel that stood in the center of the house and promised my father that I would continue his hobby. I didn't know then that I had made one of the most important decisions of my life. I couldn't understand that I had received from my father the ticket back to life.
I took my first steps in the world of wine with Assaf Margalit at the Margalit Winery and with the Haifa wine family, the Wortmans. Leaving home to work in the vineyards and winery awakened something in me that had been dormant for years. I felt that I and the wine in the barrel were going through similar processes. The fermentation, the sediment, the breathing. Everything spoke directly to my soul. In the vineyard, the soul calmed down and the body relaxed.
Later, I began professional studies in the field and not long after, I established a small winery in the warehouse under the house. Suddenly, there was something to get up for in the morning. For the first time in a decade, I had an answer to the question, "What do you do in life?" My sense of competence and worth began to grow stronger, and the connection to agricultural work and the exciting wine product reawakened my passion for life.
After a year in the world of wine, I realized that something big had happened to me, something that no medication or other treatment had been able to do up until that time. Self-confidence increased, triggers decreased, motivation and ability were reawakened.
When I summed up the year I had just passed, I saw how all the pieces fell into place. Everything connected and became very clear. The calming connection to the earth, the meditative activity in the vineyard, the senses that were sharpened and operated continuously and pleasantly in the winery, the deep connection to the processes of the mind and the sediments we accumulate in it – and the wine barrel and the sediments that form in it, and of course the final and exciting product.
At this point, the question began to burn in me, "Can this help other guys like me?" That's how the vision was born, that's how the decision to establish the organization matured, and that's how we set off.
Cheers!
Tomer
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