Jewish
Deaf Tidbits |
Seeking Jewish interpreter to travel with North American Federation of Temple Youth (NIFTY) summer trip to Israel with a deaf 15 year old male. An affiliate of the Reform Judaism movement. Trip expenses and monetary compensation will be paid. Five weeks. Tentative date for travelling is June 26 to August 1st. For more information, contact Laurence H. Jacobs, Coordinator NFTY Travel Programs, Union for Reform Judaism, 633 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, (212) 452 6517 Fax: (212) 650 4199 Ijacobs@urj.org and www.NFTY.org/israel
Mark Stern Joins GoAmerica Team
GoAmerica, provider of WyndTell wireless services, has hired Mark L. Stern as vice president of product management, focusing on accessible communication services. In this role, Stern will further the company's mission of delivering life-enhancing communication services to consumers who are deaf or hard of hearing. He has more than 20 years of experience in product development, having held design and management positions at companies such as Netscape, America Online and Apple Computer.
Jesse Odom, Chief Technology Officer of GoAmerica said, "We are thrilled to welcome Mark to GoAmerica. He brings a wealth of experience in communication technology, and a deep understanding of, and commitment to, the deaf and hard of hearing communities we serve. Through Mark's influence, our customers can look forward to enhancements to current products as well as new and exciting offerings in the coming months."
"As a longtime customer, I've personally experienced the meaningful benefits of GoAmerica's wireless text and voice messaging services," said Stern. "I've also seen the significant advantages these services bring to so many other people who are deaf or hard of hearing. I'm eager to apply my background and experience to developing products and services that enable even more communication breakthroughs."
Stern is an active member of the Alexander Graham Bell Association for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing, the National Association of the Deaf, and the Deaf Pilots Association. He holds a Master's degree in Computer Science from Brown University and a Bachelor of Science degree
from Stanford University in Values, Technology and Society.
OU Deaf Community Outreach
About 30 deaf adults and children and their families attended the OU's January 7-8 "Our Way" Shabbaton at Congregation Lubavitch in Long Beach, California. Attorney Allen Sragow of Long Beach put up about 10 "Our Way" attendees at his house, and sponsored the small Orthodox Union agency's fourth annual Southern California gathering. Organizers said the previous weekend's heavy rain cut into the attendance level.
Jo Cooperman drove up from San Diego County with her 3-year-old deaf son, Jadyn Avram. She said, "He always comes back really, really happy from these things. It has a wonderful effect on his self-esteem and his identification with Jews, with deaf Jews."
Jan Moore, a North Hollywood optometrist who has two deaf sons added, "It's always a fresh perspective for me to see the Jewish deaf, how they've come to understand their interaction with Jewish life." His teenage hearing daughter came to Long Beach with two of her Valley Torah High School classmates so the trio could support deaf children and their hearing siblings.
Rabbi Eliezer Liederfiend led the "Our Way" Shabbaton. He is the hearing son of deaf parents and lives in Brooklyn with his own six children - including deaf daughters Lida, 13, and Toby, 18. Both have cochlear implants. Lida Lederfeind told The Jewish Journal in a telephone interview, "I feel like I'm part of everything."
Lida's father travels every two months to Orthodox deaf enclaves around the country to conduct an "Our Way" Shabbaton. "More and more deaf youth are Orthodox. They should be able to mainstream in a shul," said Lederfeind, who oversaw the "Our Way" group's spirited - and at times humorous -dialogue about Israel in the Lubavitch shul's small study. When Lederfeind asked what was the sign language gesture to describe the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, someone jokingly responded: "It's a sign that you can't use in public."
New Stores For Successful Baker
Jimmy Libman, the owner and president of Gimmee Jimmy's Cookies, has spent the past 22 years growing the business that has its roots in his childhood home in West Orange, and is now beginning an expansion aimed at adding five Gimmee Jimmy's Cookies stores in the tristate (NJ, NY, CT) area over the next two years. His latest opening is "Gimmee Jimmy's Cookie Bar" on located at 23-25 Church St. in Montclair, NJ. It is the first phase of the expansion beyond the company's West Orange bakery and outlet.
Libman, 48, was born deaf. Throughout his career and life, Libman has overcome his inability to hear to establish a successful career as an entrepreneur and business owner. Gimmee Jimmy's Cookies was his second
venture after closing an optician business because he found it boring. He estimates that the company uses 7.5 tons of butter, 6 tons of chocolate chips, and 1.5 tons of nuts to produce 1.5 million cookies annually, all according to his mother's homemade recipe.
But Libman does not see his deafness as something he had to overcome, but as part of who he is. Being deaf, as Libman sees it, is just slightly more of an obstacle than having brown hair or being left-handed. "I try to minimize the deafness," he said through an interpreter, Mark Morrison, during an interview at his new store in Montclair.
"That's who I am as an individual. That's my identity. I'm happy with who I am, and I don't see myself as a victim. I am who I am, and who I've been my whole life."
When he closed his optician business, Libman did not have to look beyond his mother's kitchen to find his next project. Libman said he scoured local bakeries and cookie stores, tasting samples of what he might incorporate into a cookie store. But nothing he found came as close to pleasing his palate as his mother's homemade cookies. After getting her to reveal her recipe, Libman started to tinker with it and bake cookies.
Libman opened his West Orange store in 1983, and has since purchased the building and another offsite storage area. He launched a Web site, www.gjcookies.com, in 1992 for online orders.
Asked what makes his cookies so popular, Libman said it was because the cookies are all-natural and have no preservatives. "And the fact that they follow my mother's recipe," he added.
Libmman began with chocolate chip walnut - the first flavor he experimented with - and now sells 20 flavors, ranging from a traditional chocolate chip and oatmeal raisin to coconut pecan, Heath Bar Heaven and a Sinful Surprise with white-chocolate chunks and macadamia nuts.
Gimmee Jimmy's Cookies has at least one immediate fan in Montclair, Dick Grabowsky, who chose Libman out of a pool of hundreds of tenants who inquired about opening stores in the Hinck Building, the Southwest Mission-
style structure at the corner of Church Street and Bloomfield Avenue. "If you want great cookies in Montclair, you have to come to Jimmy's. It's a destination," Grabowsky said. "This is the tenant we can use as an example of what my image is."
Libman said he's glad he fit into Grabowsky's vision of the type of business that could strengthen downtown Montclair. Libman hires deaf employees to work in his stores. A flashing light notifies workers that a customer has entered his West Orange store, and another system of lights signals that the cookies are done. He has not finalized how the system will work at the Montclair store, though he has installed a flashing fire alarm for emergencies.
"There's just an awareness out there in the community that deaf people can do anything that people who hear can do," Libman said, noting that he has deaf friends who have become successful lawyers, doctors and investment bankers. Libman, who can read lips and speak, although not perfectly, also has people on staff to answer phones, and to talk with customers.
The Church Street store, with sky-blue walls and chocolate-brown counters, will include a first for Libman: a chocolate dipping fountain for fruit fondue. It will also include a full selection of coffees and cappuccinos.
Though he has never heard anything in his life, Libman said he makes sure to indulge his taste buds at least once a day-for "quality-control purposes."
"I want to make sure the taste is great," signed Libman. "But I try to limit my intake."
Linguists Excited About New Language
Language is a way of both interpreting the world and imposing order on the world. Consequently, some linguists and psychologists view grammar as one way to understand how the human mind works. There are very few opportunities to study a language that is "uncorrupted" by contact with other tongues or is not the product of cultures mingling, such as Creole. Linguists and psychologists are learning answers to age-old questions from a language created in a small village in Israel's Negev Desert.
The AI-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language (ABSL), which serves as an alternative language of a community of about 3,500 deaf and hearing people, has developed a distinct grammatical structure early in its evolution, researchers report, and the structure favors a particular word order: verbs after objects.
The AI-Sayyid village was founded about 200 years ago. Approximately 150 individuals with congenital deafness, all of them descendants of two of the founders' sons, have
been born into the community in the past three generations. It is normal for people to marry within the village. Many of the villagers have a recessive gene for deafness and when two people with that gene marry, they can have deaf children. As a result, the marriage practice has ensured that deaf people are well distributed throughout the group's population.The deaf Al-Sayyid Bedouins are full members of the tribe, bear no stigma and usually have hearing spouses. The sign language apparently developed about 70 years ago when the number of deaf tribesmen began to rise. Those people had no access to any language unless they invented one for themselves. Today, all deaf members and many hearing ones are fully fluent in their own sign language. ABSL is now in its third generation of use. Remarkably, the fixed word order of ABSL emerged within a generation after the inception of the language.
The study-the first linguistic analysis of a language arising naturally with no outside influence-is published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences the week of Jan. 31 to Feb. 4. The authors are Mark Aronoff from Stony Brook University, Irit Meir and Wendy Sandler from the University of Haifa and Carol Padden from the University of California, San Diego.
By watching native signers tell stories and describe actions, the researchers found that the language goes beyond a list of words for actions, objects, people, characteristics and so on, to establish systematic relations among those elements. Sentences in ABSL follow a Subject-Object-Verb order, such as in "woman apple give," rather than the Subject-Verb-Object order found in English - or, more significantly, in other languages in the region.
A sentence consisting of "Bob Mary kiss" -- which could theoretically mean either "Bob kisses Mary" or "Mary kisses Bob" -- unambiguously means "Bob kisses Mary" because of the word order. The researchers also found that modifiers such as adjectives, numbers, or negatives always follow nouns and never precede them.
Study coauthor Carol Padden, professor of communication at UC San Diego explained, "The grammatical structure of the Bedouin sign language shows no influence from either the dialect of Arabic spoken by hearing members of the community or the predominant sign language
in the surrounding area, Israeli Sign Language. Because ABSL developed independently, it may reflect fundamental properties of language in general and provide insight into basic questions about the way in which human language develops from the very beginning."
The subject-object-verb structure in the Bedouin sign language is the most common word order found in languages generally. There is also evidence it is the structure found in the earliest languages. The appearance of such a clear-cut rule early in the evolution of a language "is rare empirical verification of the unique proclivity of the human mind for structuring a communication system along grammatical lines," the authors write.
The research also supports the notion that languages can and do evolve quickly.
"When we first came to AI-Sayyid, I expected to see a lot of gesture and miming, but I was impressed immediately by how sophisticated the language was. This is not an ad hoc, spur of the moment communication. It is a complex language capable of relating information beyond the here and now," said Padden.
Although other new languages such as creoles and Nicaraguan Sign Language have been reported, their unusual social and linguistic environments were not characteristic of typical languages, the study authors observe. Creoles are the product of interactions between existing languages. And Nicaraguan Sign Language, the creation of a group of deaf children, evolved in a school setting.
What distinguishes ABSL is that it grew - as presumably did most languages of the world -within a socially stable, existing community.
"It is a language of the entire community, both hearing and deaf ," said Padden, who, with Tom Humphries, is co-author of the newly published "Inside Deaf Culture" (Harvard University Press, 2005). "ABSL is transmitted within families across generations, and children learn it without explicit instruction. It is the best analogue we have for studying how any new language is born and grows."
The AI-Sayyid group, the researchers point out, in some ways resembles the 19th-century whaling community in Massachusetts that produced the now-extinct Martha's Vineyard Sign Language. But that language died out before it could be recorded.
For the present study, the researchers focused on the second generation of ABSL signers. Further work will document the evolution of the language in the third generation.
The research is being conducted through the Center for Research in Language at UCSD and the Sign Language Research Lab at the University of Haifa. It is supported by a grant from the National Institutes of Health.
Abarbanell Announces Comic Tour
Alan Abarbanell has developed a stage performance based on his upbringing as the youngest of four hearing sons born to deaf parents. Going by the stage name "Abababa" given to him by a fellow child of deaf adults who could not pronounce Abarbanell, the storyteller has announced plans for "The Abababa Road Tour 2005." He'll be bringing his comedy show to Boston, Long Island, Michigan, Mississippi, California, Oklahoma, Rochester and Las Vegas. Both of his parents died in 1988, and he is quick to point out that he's not making fun of anyone. "This show is a tribute to my parents, my deaf heritage and the bicultural experiences of living in between the deaf and hearing worlds," he said. To learn more, visit http://www.geocities.com/theabababatour or write to abababatour@aol.com.
Jewish Deaf Survey
Alise Warmund, founder of All Hands Interpreting in Columbus, Ohio, has been working on a survey to help Jewish Deaf people collect data to gain better access to services. She writes, "I sit on many local boards and I have found that they continually want to know data before allocating money. I am trying to collect as much data as I can and am hoping you will also see the value of collecting the information!" She has gotten a good response from oral deaf Jews, but needs more response from Jewish deaf signers. The survey takes approximately 15 minutes. For more information, visit or write to: All Hands Interpreting, Alise Warmund, 2500 Dover Road Columbus, Ohio 43209 614-237-2809 home/office 614-5998377 Cell Warmund@TMOMAIL.net (2-way pager) Warmund@aol.com http://www.AllHandsinterpreting.com
Poet Ilya Kaminsky Speaks Against The Silence
Ilya Kaminsky's poems are sometimes deliriously happy and sometimes full of horror, but they are always immense in their ideas and their reach. Kaminsky's verse spans continents and centuries, and feels like it belongs to Russian immigrant dreamers, American tourists and the millions who perished in the Holocaust and Stalin's purges, all at once.
It's no wonder that many longtime poetry readers are excited about this young writer. When Kaminsky read in Iowa City recently, the home of the famous International Writing Program, audience members who had never heard him before were moved, and also obviously stunned by the voice of this new poet.
Kaminsky became deaf at the age of four. He hands out copies of his book to the audience so they can follow along more easily. When asked a question, he looks closely at the asker's lips so he can read them. Another source of surprise is that English is very much his second language; he came to America only a few years ago, without knowing a word of it. He taught himself English through poetry, and who began writing as a way to comfort himself after the death of a loved one.
"To defy death was what made me write in English," he says.
In conversation, Kaminsky is anything but death-obsessed, though. He loves to discuss art and life. Over and over, in his references to ancient poets and contemporary ones, Kaminsky comes back to the topic of happiness.
"I don't think it's a poet's job to witness only tragedy," he says. "I think it's a poet's job to witness joy in the world, no matter how much tragedy also exists."
Winner of the 2002 Tupelo Press Dorset Prize, this rising star from Odessa has already received the Ruth Lilly fellowship from Poetry magazine, and was the youngest person appointed Writer in Residence at Phillips Exeter Academy.
Kaminsky's newest and much-acclaimed book of poems is titled, "Dancing in Odessa" and reflects on some of the people, writers,
books, and memories from his childhood.Stern In New Comedy
Shoshannah Stern has a part in a new comic film "The Last Shot," starring Matthew Broderick, Alec Baldwin, Tony Shalhoub, Toni Collette, and Calista Flockhart. Although the movie is in limited release, it is showing in theaters around the country. Stern has performed in a number of movies and TV shows, including as a regular character on the program Threat Matrix, and guest starring roles in The Division, ER, Boston Public, Providence, and Off Centre. She also had a role in an independent film "The Auteur Theory." Stern will soon complete her degree requirements in English at Gallaudet University. She is the fourth generation deaf person in her family and her parents are Ron Stern, '73 and Hedy UdowskiStern, '74 of Santa Fe, NM.
Tal-Ell Twins In Mainstream
On a typical evening in the Tal-El home in Baka, Israel, fifteen-year-old Tamar is chatting on her cell phone while her twin sister Dana listens to music. Nothing seems unusual until one is told that both Tamar and Dana were born profoundly deaf. Modern technology, the digital hearing aid and especially the cochlear implant have enabled them to live a very normal life.
The twins were first diagnosed when they were just over two years old. They received conventional hearing aids and were taught traditional signing and speech. But the Tal-Els were not satisfied, and, at age three, Dana and Tamar became two of the first Israelis to undergo cochlear implants. In May 2004, at age 14, they became the first Israelis to undergo a cochlear implant in the second ear.
As miraculous as it is, Elaine (Ayala) Tal-El, the twins' mother, says that the cochlear implant still cannot replace the human ear. "Technology is a critical element in the formula for success for the hearing impaired, but it's the rehabilitation that really makes the difference," she explained.
Elaine and Eli Tal-El chose a controversial approach to rehabilitate their daughters, known as the AV (audio-verbal) method. According to this method, children are immersed in an audio environment. They are not permitted to lip read or use any other visual cues, and are integrated into the educational mainstream from the beginning.
There are other methods for speech rehabilitation used in Israel. They include the multi-sensory method which combines visual, lip reading, hearing and written communication in order to obtain maximum sensorial input; the total communication approach combining signing and speech; and methods that focus almost exclusively on signing.
Approximately 10 percent of the population in Israel is hearing impaired according to Bekol, an organization for hard of hearing and deafened adults. Some of the people suffer from "acquired deafness", which occurs after childhood as a result of disease, accident, or aging. Experts estimate that in Israel, 1 to 1.2 hearing impaired children are born per 1,000 live births, which is similar to the rate for most of the developed world.
Improved technology provides parents with new options, but they still face a wide array of social and bureaucratic difficulties. The cost of raising a hearing-impaired child is just one of those difficulties.
Currently, there have been about 800 cochlear implants performed in Israel, the overwhelming majority on children. The cost of one cochlear implant for minors under 18 is fully covered by law. But the cost of a second implant, considered important for allowing the hearing impaired individual to achieve maximal comprehension, is not covered.
Parents of hearing impaired children receive a total disability allowance of approximately NIS 2,000 a month from National Insurance Institute. This is supposed to cover rehabilitative therapy sessions. According to Tal-El, parents can get between 50 per cent and 70 per cent of the cost of the therapy back from their sick fund.
Deaf Workers Sue For Social Benefits
In late February, fourteen Deaf workers filed a lawsuit against a contractor with the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, where they worked until their contract was cancelled in 2004. Their precedent-setting case is being handled by the Law Clinic of the Hebrew University. If successful, the case may also establish that although it did not personally hire them, the university has some responsibility to the workers because it had a contract for their work.
Attorney Yael Menashe, a labor law expert who helped prepare the law suit with Law Clinic director Yuval Albashan commented, "I don't know of a single other case in which an employer has volunteered to protect contract workers. The university did not employ them, but they worked on its grounds. We must create a norm not to permit exploitative employment, just as we should not buy products manufactured by child slave labor."
One of the workers is Musa Jualis, a resident of East Jerusalem. He was employed as a cleaner on Mount Scopus for ten years, six of them in the university's law school. The corridors he washed were lined with posters extolling human rights. His work was terminated after the contractor who employed him lost the bid for the university's cleaning contract. Jualis and 90 other cleaning workers were summoned to the offices of Contracting Services, where he sat outside for two days without understanding what was going on. Finally he was called inside. A form in Hebrew was placed before him and a manager signaled him to sign. By so doing Jualis agreed to NIS 2,000 compensation for ten years of labor, sometimes in more than one post, and also waived any claim he had against the company.
Jualis and the other 13 workers presented their suit in the Regional Labor Court in Jerusalem, demanding almost NIS 600,000 for social benefits that they were legally entitled to but did not receive, and about NIS 1 million compensation for dismissal. The suit was prepared and written by 12 students and two lawyers working in the university's Legal Clinic, at the request of former university vice president and director general Moshe Vigdor.
The suit is directed against the contractor, but people in the legal clinic believe that, by preparing it, the university is admitting some liability for the workers and may even be exposing itself to a possible suit on their part. However, they feel the university could not have acted otherwise. "It's intolerable to speak of human rights when such injustice is done in our back yard," Albashan said.
According to university legal counsel Peppi Yakirevitz, it all started when a few professors protested to the management about poor conditions of contract workers. This prompted the university's legal bureau to post notices in Arabic around the campus, calling on workers who felt exploited to approach it. Dozens came to the bureau. Vigdor asked the Law Clinic to help them claim their rights and approved dedicating many hundreds of hours to preparing the complex suit. The university also set up a panel to monitor the laborers' conditions and pay.
Yakirevitz said that the contractor wrote her that he took a "grim view" of the university's acting on behalf of the workers and demanded that it stop interfering in the affairs between him and the workers.
The suit says the veteran workers were offered less than 20 percent of the compensation the contractor owed them. The contractor said he offered some workers alternative jobs but they refused, forfeiting their right to compensation. However, the suit claims that those workers who had been sent to Ma'aleh Adumim for work, were never picked up, and those sent to a contractor in Modi'in found that he had disappeared.
Gallaudet Names Goodstein To Board of Trustees
Harvey Goodstein of Arizona, has been appointed to the Gallaudet University Board of Trustees beginning in May.
Dr. Goodstein graduated from Gallaudet in 1965, later earning Master's and Ph.D degrees from Catholic University and American University, respectively. His tenure at Gallaudet spanned over 30 years with much of that time spent as a faculty member and chair of the Mathematics Department. In 2002, Dr. Goodstein led the planning efforts for the internationally acclaimed Deaf Way II conference in Washington, DC that brought over 10,000 people from every corner of the globe to celebrate deaf scholarship, culture and art. Dr. Goodstein also served as president of the Maryland Association of the Deaf, a trustee of the Maryland School for the Deaf, vice president of the National Association of the Deaf, and chair of the National Association of the Deaf Telecommunications Committee.
He and his wife, Astrid Amann Goodstein [Gallaudet University, Class of 1965] reside in Arizona.
Arab-Jewish Couple Seeks Asylum
Nabil Jamal, a Palestinian Muslim, and his wife, a Jewish woman from Israel, are students at Gallaudet University. Nabil and his wife have applied to the US Government for "Political Asylum". They are afraid to return to Israel for fear of their lives. Nabil 's family is part of an extreme Muslim group and has made "death threats" against his life, because he married a Jewish/Israeli woman. Right now they both have student visas. However, they owe Gallaudet University $9,000 from last year. If they do not pay Gallaudet University, their student visas will expire and they will be forced to go back to Israel. They also need to raise $5,000 to cover the Interpreting and Legal fees to get ready for their case. The goal is to raise $14,000. So far, they have received a Grant from "The Shefa Fund" in Philadelphia (dedicated to Social and Economic Justice, and Middle East peace) for $5,000. A special bank account has been set up at M&T Bank, for Nabil's case. The money will be collected and then donated to CAIR (Capital Area Immigrants' Rights Coalition), a 501-c3 organization. They will disburse all money received to Gallaudet University and to the Interpreting Agency. CAIR has a very small staff and therefore cannot deal with 900 checks. Lore Rosenthal has volunteered to do this and can be reached at lorelyon@aol.com
U.S. Court of Appeals Rejects Pinchas' Appeal
The United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit on 24 January 2005 in Richmond, VA rejected Rafael I. Pinkashov Pinchas' appeal by affirming the judgment of the United States District Court for the District of Maryland in Baltimore. In Pinchas' appeal to the Appeals Court, he said that the Baltimore court decision was another huge setback and moral insult to him.
When the U.S. Court of Appeals rejected Pinchas' appeal, Pinchas then requested an en banc (full) hearing. On 8 February 2005, the United States Court of Appeals immediately denied Pinchas' 2nd request. Therefore, the Civil Action No.WMN-03-2690 is considered closed.