Shalva is an award-winning Israeli organization in Jerusalem that aims to provide peace of mind to mentally challenged children and their families. Kalman and Malki Samuels founded Shalva in June 1990 to fulfill a promise Malki, now 50, had made to God.

Kalman was born in Vancouver, Canada, and moved to Israel during his college years, where he became ultra Orthodox and married European-born Malki.

In October 1977 the Samuels' second child, Yossi, became brain-damaged after receiving a DPT (diphtheria, pertussis or whooping cough, tetanus) vaccine in Israel, two weeks before his first birthday. He became blind, deaf and extraordinarily hyperactive.

Kalman explained, "He couldn't hear, he couldn't see, but he was a living dynamo."

The Samuels family moved to New York for five years in the hope they could find better care for Yossi there. The parents rejected suggestions they put their son in an institution to allow them to give more attention to the rest of the family. Over the years, they had a total of six children.

According to Kalman, Malki did a lot of crying at first. He said she made a deal with God: "Ribono shel olam [God almighty], I'm not putting Yossi away, but I can only say if you help Yossi, I'll help other mothers who are crying with me."

The Samuels' returned to Israel in 1983, where they enrolled Yossi, then eight years old, in a school for the deaf. There they met Shoshana Weinstock, an Israeli teacher of the deaf who is deaf herself. A few sessions after she began tutoring Yossi, she ran to the Samuels' Har Nof home, shouting in Hebrew, "He's got it! He's got it!" Kalman said.

She had finger-spelled the Hebrew word for "table" into Yossi's palm, and Yossi had made the connection between the word and the object. Israeli media dubbed Yossi "the Helen Keller of Israel," and they haven't lost interest yet: Channel 2 is filming a documentary about Yossi that is set to air in the fall.

At that point, said Kalman, Malki decided it was "payback time," and began creating a "unique blend of programs designed by a mother to fill the gaps society didn't provide us and still doesn't provide others."

Shalva began in June 1990 in a rented apartment in the Har Nof neighborhood of Jerusalem with two professional staff members and eight mentally challenged children. By then, Yossi had no need for Shalva. Now there are 85 staff members and 18 National Service girls in an 18,000square-foot building decorated in bright colors and Disney characters.

Kalman, founder and director of Shalva, said that the organization is open to all on a first-come, first-serve basis. Shalva has also advocated for client needs to the Israeli government, and helps people in other countries to establish similar organizations.

Last year Samuels petitioned the government to allow an Ethiopian Christian couple with two children enrolled in Shalva to remain in Israel, saying the children would die if they were sent back toAfrica. The couple won United Nations recognition and were permitted to remain in the country. Shalva has also helped a Washington, D.C., church and a Dutch group establish similar programs for the mentally challenged.

Prof. Malka Margalit researches developmental and learning disabilities at Tel Aviv University's Constantiner School of Education. Margalit said that the focus on helping families cope with the disabilities, in addition to treating the children themselves, is what makes Shalva unique. She has spent the past two years studying Shalva and has co-written an article on the subject that will be published next year in the Journal of Policy and Practice in Intellectual Disabilities.

Shalva, which means "serenity" in Hebrew, serves more than 400 people with disabilities. Its youngest participants are the babies in the Me and My Mommy program. The oldest participant is 34; she is in an evening social program for adult women with disabilities.

Other programs include a newly established kindergarten, afternoon activities such as drama and music classes, summer camp, and overnight and weekend stays-which provide a needed respite for frequently overburdened parents, who can use the time to rest or pay more attention to their other children. There is also a separate center in Alon Shvut, a settlement south of Jerusalem, that opened in 2001 and serves nearly 30 children.

It costs $3 million a year to run Shalva but Kalvan Samuels explained that to ensure that children are not accepted based on financial criteria, parents are not asked to pay for the program. The Israeli government supplies 10 percent of that money and the rest comes from donations, mainly from the United States, he said. Due to a lack of funding and space, more than 100 families are on the waiting list.

In May, Samuels and his wife Malki won the Jerusalem Foundation's Teddy Kollek prize for leadership in public service, for their work with Shalva. It was the fifth award won by Shalva or people involved with the organization in the last year alone.

The Knesset is expected to soon pass a landmark law requiring the majority of television broadcasts in Israel to carry subtitles. The change will benefit some 600,000 deaf and hard-of-hearing people.

Some broadcast organizations tried to block the legislation, but a compromise agreement reached between the organizations for the deaf and disabled. The broadcast networks states that the introduction of subtitles will be gradual, beginning with 40 percent to 50 percent of prerecorded prime-time programs and broadcasts in January 2006 and increasing to 100 percent of prime-time broadcasts by 2010.

Subtitles for live programs will begin in 2009, covering 25 percent of broadcasts and reaching 100 percent by January 2015. However, beginning in 2007 there will be at least one daily live broadcast accompanied by subtitles.

The bill was first proposed three years ago and achieved its final form in marathon negotiations headed by Knesset Member Shaul Yahalom, a member of the National Religious Party (NRP). He was determined pass the bill before resigning from his post as chairman of the Labor and Welfare Committee.

Before negotiations began, there was concern that the two proposers of the bill, Eliezer Cohen (National Union) and Ayoub Kara (Likud), would withdraw it at the last minute due to pressure from the broadcasters.

Zevulun Gorni, director of the Shema organization for the rehabilitation of hard-of-hearing children and youth said, "The picture we got was that we were way behind other Western countries, although no technical obstacles were involved and the costs were a tiny fraction of the profits."

"We were subjected to threats and intimidation and perhaps that is why the broadcasters were treated so generously. But we decided to swallow the gradual implementation formula, so that every hard-of-hearing person could be part of the family excitement surrounding television."

To explain the reason for extended deadlines in this provision of the agreement, broadcasters claimed that for technical reasons they could not provide subtitling for live programs in the near future.

The subtitling law will apply to the five major channels decided on by the Cable and Satellite Broadcasting Council and to three dedicated channels: one Russian-language, one news and one heritage channel.

Beginning in 2007, children's channels will be required to provide subtitling in 50 percent more programs than that required from other channels.

Before she joined a synagogue for the deaf where services are conducted in sign language and two of the five choir members cannot hear, Roz Robinson found herself lost, unable to follow the cantor in her former synagogue as he chanted the prayers that had once been so familiar.

To Ms. Brunnlehrman, 43, signing a service is much more than a matter of direct translation. Knowledge of the service, especially nonverbal components, must be complete, especially in times of great emotion, when, Ms. Brunnlehrman said, it is important to cue deaf congregants to look around the sanctuary at other congregants to get a sense of what is happening off the page.

Today, some synagogues have their own signers. Temple Emanu-El in Westfield, N.J., also has two members who use sign language. Carolyn Shane, the executive director, said invitations went out to congregants and noncongregants to attend services when one of the signers was translating, with the first two rows of the synagogue set aside for deaf people. The synagogue also has assistive listening devices installed in those first rows.

Congregation Ohev Shalom, a synagogue in Orlando, Fla., has a rabbi, David Kay, who can sign. Rabbi Kay met his future wife, who also signs, while they were working temporarily at Congregation Bene Shalom- Hebrew Association of the Deaf in Skokie, III.

With signing more easily available in synagogues and assisted technologies to help, deaf Jews have been going to worship and becoming educated in far greater numbers. But that has created a challenge for Mrs. Robinson, who sometimes leads services at Temple Beth Solomon, which has no permanent rabbi and where attendance has dwindled. Jan Seeley, the administrator of the synagogue and a hearing, non-Jewish interpreter said that there are currently 71 members, down from a high of 400.

"Deafness doesn't run in families," Mrs. Robinson said, "so as our founding members are dying, few new members come to replace them."

Five years ago, the synagogue sold its building and shut its Hebrew school. It now shares space with Temple Judea, a hearing synagogue in Tarzana.

Ms. Seeley said that the synagogue also used to attract many non-deaf Jews, but that with greater access all around, there was less need today.

"The fact that deaf people have so many choices now," Ms. Seeley said, "and can live in the mainstream with the help of gigantic technological advances and much less frustration is a triumph of their struggle."

Mrs. Robinson said she wanted to see her synagogue for the deaf survive. She said, "Temple Beth Solomon gave me back the ability to fully participate in services enriched by the use of hands."

According to Deaf Digest, the "Deaf Cookie Maker" is getting out of the cookie business. For years Jimmy Libman generated publicity for baking high quality cookies for sale in New Jersey and on the Internet. He sold his business and has plans to go into another business venture, details of which he preferred to keep secret for a while. As a result, three deaf employees in the cookie plant may lose their jobs.

The Landaus, the world's only deaf Jewish matchmakers, ply their trade via fax machine, teletypewriter telephone and computer at their Elizabeth, NJ, home. Being cut off from the primary tool of modern romance -- the telephone -- comes with its challenges. When one of the Landaus' clients got lost on the way to a first date, the lack of a nearby TTY telephone left both parties wandering. The relationship was almost called off.

The occasional communication barrier between clients, though, is the least of the Landaus' problems in trying to bring together deaf Jews. There are, by most counts, no more than 20,000 deaf and hard-of-hearing Jews in America -- most of them elderly -- and few of them have access to a Jewish community that can address their needs. The general deaf community, on the other hand, is far more accessible, and it is there, the Landaus say, that most deaf Jews end up socializing -- and finding spouses.

Sam Landau said, "In America, it's very difficult for Jewish deaf people to find each other. The identity is usually, 'First I'm a deaf person, second I'm a Jew."'

Despite this, the Landaus estimate that they have been the force behind 10 marriages and countless near misses in the course of their own 30-year union. The work has required quick thinking and a willingness to travel great distances. The Landaus went to Florida with many of their clients for what is perhaps the best place to find other single deaf Jews: the biennial Jewish Deaf Congress. But when that event ends, the Landaus are left more or less on their own with the task of crafting one of the most essential building blocks of Jewish life: the shidduch, or match.

The enormous distances their clients are willing to travel are evident from the personal ads listed in the newsletter the Landaus publish twice a year. A recent listing from a 36-year-old South African woman is nearly indistinguishable from those found ordinarily: "Loves long walks, travel... renting movies with captions and learning something new." But it ended with something you wouldn't find on JDate: "Willing to live in USA." In the Landaus' own case, Sam moved from Israel to come live with Rachelle in America.

Sam and Rachelle Landau publish the newsletter in their respective roles as coordinator and associate coordinator of the Jewish Deaf Singles Registry, which is sponsored by Our Way, part of the Orthodox Union's National Jewish Council for the Disabled. This is the only such program run by any of the religious movements, and everyone involved makes it clear that it is open to Jews from every denomination -- as long as the mother is Jewish. Of the 58 personal ads in the May newsletter, only 13 were Orthodox. There was a Conservative Jewish woman in England and a man in Israel who labeled himself "not religious."

One of the Landaus' recent "projects" was Avremi Swerdlov, a 36-year-old postal worker from a Chabad Lubavitch family in Brooklyn. Swerdlov had tried dating a hearing woman in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn where he grew up but he said that "it was a waste of time." He had grown up in a hearing family from which he had felt excluded. He didn't want to re-create the same feeling in his marriage.

The turning point for Swerdlov came three years ago, after he was nearly killed by a fire in his parents' home. (He couldn't hear the alarm.) After being rescued he decided it was time for a change. "It hit me," he said. "I'm 33 years old. I should stop taking my time." He joined the Landaus' registry, and when he checked into the online chatroom he found Sandra, a Toronto woman from a Reform background. Initially Sandra was dating another man, but when that was called off, Swerdlov drove straight to Toronto. In September 2003, Avremi and Sandra were married.

The basic rule for the Landaus is that Jews marry other Jews.  Intermarriage is, of course, an issue for the hearing Jewish community, as well, but hearing people can easily stop by any one of hundreds of Jewish communal institutions in America and find a single person to talk with. There is no such variety for deaf Jews. Chicago and Los Angeles both have deaf synagogues, though neither has services year round. New York has a deaf club -- Beth Torah of the Deaf -- that offers lectures and other activities. And then there is the Jewish Deaf Congress, which took place in Tampa Bay, Fla., from July 3 to July 10. The organizers there guess that during its 49year history, the biennial congresses have been responsible for 50 marriages.

But a major problem facing deaf institutions both inside and outside the Jewish world is that they no longer have the power to attract members as they once did. At one point the Jewish Deaf Congress drew 525 people, but this yearonly200 attended. In the era before the Internet, TTY telephones and closed captioned television shows, deaf clubs were the only forums for deaf interaction.

"Alas, flash to today," Joseph Slotnick said ruefully. He is president of Temple Beth Solomon, the deaf synagogue in Los Angeles. It was founded in the 1960s, before the invention of TTYs. "Most young people today prefer other ways of getting together on Friday evenings than going to services, or they prefer going to movies with captioning."

Even in those cities with deaf clubs, singles face difficulties. Take Mordechai Weiss, who met the Landaus when he was a shy 13-year-old Orthodox boy who did not yet know sign language. Today, Weiss is an outgoing 28-yearold architecture student and the vice president of Beth Torah of the Deaf. Weiss, in an ad placed in the Landaus' newsletter, eagerly professed his desire to find "an Orthodox deaf girl that I feel is the right one for me." Despite all his efforts, however, he has thus far only landed four dates with Orthodox girls - including a woman the Landaus recently set him up with. "It has been very frustrating," Weiss wrote in an e-mail. "The Orthodox deaf girls want to marry hearing guys [who] go to Yeshiva."

Four years ago, one of the Landaus' clients had enough devotion to become a board member, but in the end she tired of waiting and ended up marrying a non-Jewish deaf man. The Landaus said they did not feel it was appropriate for them to attend the wedding.

In many cases, it's a wonder people are able to preserve the Jewish connections that they do. Taking part in the life of a community centered on discussion and call-and response prayers is not easy when you cannot hear. Rachelle Landau was the only member of her family who did not go to a Jewish day school. When she enrolled in an after-school program for Jewish study, most of the

lessons involved reading out loud. The other students laughed when Landau tried, and she never returned. Even today she has difficulty at synagogue; she can't follow the service and has no way to talk with the other congregants.

Nevertheless she devotes herself to keeping the Jewish flame alive. The aforementioned man and woman got lost trying to find their rendezvous spot, the man wandered around the city before eventually finding his way to the Landaus' home, uncertain what else to do. When Rachelle returned from work she found him waiting in her living room. The panicked woman had e-mailed Rachelle from an Internet cafe. After calming her down, Landau set up another date for the two of them for the following day.

Schwarz Financial Services LLC, located in Bethesda, is the only deaf-owned, independent, registered investment advisory firm, according to its president, Louis Schwarz, 59, who became the first deaf man to have gained the credentials as Certified Financial Planner (CFP). Schwarz is joined in his firm by Simon Roffe, 29, who is also deaf. Their main goal is to help deaf people achieve financial security,

Roffe explains that Deaf people, have often been at a disadvantage when dealing in financial matters. Their literacy skills are often not on a par with their hearing counterparts, making financial information difficult to grasp -even more so than it is for most consumers not trained in finance.

Both men are fluent in English and American Sign Language so that Roffe and Schwarz are well able to communicate with deaf clients, and their offices utilize the latest in communication assistive technology.

"The Internet has leveled the field, professional-wise and social-wise," Roffe says, noting how a 20-minute phone conversation with someone, using an old-fashioned telecommunications device for the deaf (TDD) hooked up to a telephone, could now be handled in a two-minute Internet exchange.

Both men can draw upon their own life experiences to empathize with the needs of their deaf clients, about 70 percent of their business.

After 15 years as a chemist at the U.S. Geological Survey, Schwarz hit the "deaf glass ceiling" and, in 1983, his business was born, as he turned his part-time occupation as an income tax preparer for deaf clients, which he had been doing out of his then-Silver Spring home since 1971, into a full-time career.

Self-taught in finance, except for a correspondence course he took to earn his CFP designation, Schwarz has since added a string of other financial credentials to his title as the firm's president.

Born and raised in Chicago into a Reform Jewish, hearing family, Schwarz had no difficulty being understood by his family and close friends, even though profoundly deaf. Life in the classroom, however, was difficult and hearing aids ineffective.

Yet, he maintained above-average grades by keeping up with his reading. In fact, he recalls, in his senior year, he graduated at the top of his chemistry class, which astounded his fellow students. He said, "They wondered how I did it."

He added, "I have to thank my family," who persisted "to motivate me and socialize me to participate in activities," who kept him from becoming isolated in the hearing world. His older brother and sister, he said, always took him with them to the library, and his parents maintained high expectations for him.

At age 18, Schwarz came to Washington, D.C.'s Gallaudet University--the world's only university designed to serve deaf and hard of hearing people, graduating in 1968 with a bachelor's degree in chemistry. It was there he met his future wife, Doris Fowler.

Both later taught for a short spell at the Illinois School for the Deaf in Jacksonville, III., before returning to Greater Washington, settling in Bladensburg when Schwarz went to work at the USGS in Reston, VA.

Though raised in an observant Reform household, the Bethesda resident now says that he is not very Jewishly engaged, preferring to be actively engaged in the deaf community.

"When I show up at a deaf event, it's 'Hi, so good of you to come,' " he says, waving his hand as though to draw someone in.

He cites the lack of easy communication with congregants and the irregular use of sign language interpreters at temple as factors in his lack of synagogue affiliation.

For his part, Roffe was the first Marylander to receive, through state assistance, two hearing aids instead of just one after being diagnosed at 8 months old with a profound, bilateral hearing loss, which was precedent-setting for that kind of state assistance.

Being diagnosed that young, says his mother, Sarina, "was revolutionary at that time," given that most children with hearing loss went undiagnosed until typically 2 1/2 years old (which was the case for Schwarz) -- and he was fitted with his aids only a month later.

Even with aids, learning English was not easy.

At age 3 1/2, his mother says, "he had a vocabulary of only 150 words. He was two years language-delayed for his age," she says, adding that children at that age acquire roughly three-quarters of their working vocabularies that they will use throughout life.

But, two years later, he had more than caught up with his peers with normal hearing. What made all the difference, he and his mother believe, was the use of cued speech, a manual method of helping lipreaders distinguish speech sounds.

Created in the 1960s, cued speech utilizes eight handshapes in four different placements near the face, in combination with mouth movements of speech, that effectively translate the sounds of spoken language, distinguishing them for lipreaders.

Eager to give her son every benefit possible, Roffe's mother said that, when he was a toddler, she took a crash course in cued speech at Gallaudet and became her son's first cued speech teacher.

He later entered Flower Valley Elementary School in Rockville, the first school in the country to offer cued speech to students, and became one of the first young deaf adults to have been mainstreamed through public schools with cued speech.

Roffe also learned Hebrew with the aid of cued speech, so that he could recite his bar mitzvah haftorah at Magen David Sephardic Congregation in Rockville. Later, he was active with the Orthodox Union's National Conference of Synagogue Youth's group for deaf Jewish high schoolers, Our Way.

A proponent today for cued speech, as is his mother, who is president of the National Cued Speech Association, Roffe says, "I'm positive that cued speech is responsible for my success today . ... I wouldn't be where I am today without it."

Roffe also credits Jeffrey Archer's novel, Kane & Abel, which his mother gave him as a young teen, for boosting his confidence level. Roffe says he identified with one of the book's characters, a poor immigrant turned wealthy businessman.

"When I read the book, I [had] felt difficulty being accepted . ... If he [the character in the novel] could overcome those odds, so could I," Roffe remembers deciding.

He then realized, he says, that one of his greatest strengths was perseverance. Now, he says, "I never give up. I always get what I want."

And he knew he was good at business, having run a successful neighborhood lawn mowing business with a friend.

His confidence grew such that, when he graduated New York University in 1998 with a B.S. in finance, he told his congratulating dean, "I'll be back to put my name on a building."

But, his confidence was soon put to the test. He started his own Wall Street hedge fund, but "it went bust," he says, leading him to return to Greater Washington, where he was offered a job "with another dot com" in Northern Virginia that, after six months, "also went bust."

The year "2000 was a rough period," Roffe says, but he persevered, seeking out Schwarz, an acquaintance through the deaf community.

Schwarz took Roffe on as an associate at his firm after Roffe received the necessary credentials.

Recently, the younger man capped his professional success with his marriage in New York to Nicole Houck Welzer, who also is deaf. The Sephardi-style wedding was conducted in American Sign Language, cued speech and English. Schwarz, meanwhile, is now hearing certain sounds for the first time in his life, thanks to a cochlear implant he obtained last March.

Last month, he heard a baby cry for the first time when he visited his new -- and first -- granddaughter.

"I never even heard my own daughters cry," he says, beaming, and throwing a glance over his shoulder at the photographs of three young women on his office credenza.

State police identified the pilot as Alec Naiman and one passenger as Jeffrey Willoughby in the single-engine plane on June 23, 2005. The other passenger, a young woman, was not identified because she is a minor.

The three were treated for broken bones and lacerations and were in stable condition overnight. The Martha's Vineyard accident occurred around 1:15 p.m at the grassy airfield near the island's southern coastline.

The plane crashed as Naiman and his passengers were making the approach to land one of 11 planes that had flown from Plymouth Municipal Airport as part of the 12th annual Deaf Pilots Association Fly-in.

Cause of the accident remains under investigation. Eyewitnesses said that on Naiman's approach he seemed to react to a bi-plane on the runway where he intended to land and stalled the 1979 Cessna Skyhawk. The plane dropped from about 50 feet, witnesses said.

Deaf pilots can earn flight certification, but can only use airports that don't rely on control towers - like Katama. Of the 13,000 airports in the country, only 700 - typically the larger ones - use such towers.

Hearing aid patients have a new style of aid to consider, thanks to Dr. Natan Bauman. He developed a special hearing aid for a friend whowas having trouble with the traditional styles and what he came up with is so simple, he wonders why it hasn't been done before.

Bauman said the hearing aid business has the highest returns rate of any other market and the main reason is, the consumer doesn't have a chance to try it out before they take it out of the shop. Traditional aids are constructed and custom fitted to fill the entire ear canal. One can simulate that sound by talking while holding the ears closed.

One patient said, "You ought to try to eat something crunchy with those ear pieces on." That patient can't stand to wear hearing aids.

Bauman said not everyone is completely deaf but, by obstructing the ear canal, the hearing aids force them to rely only on the hearing aid and can't continue to also use the hearing abilities that remain. He's designed a piece that fits behind the ear. That, in itself, is not so unusual but the thin wire running from behind the ear and into the ear canal is. At the end of that wire is a speaker fitting into the ear canal not even a quarter inch in diameter.

"It makes the sound so natural," Bauman said. "It's also fully digital. This leaves the ear the way it was designed, to do what it is supposed to do. We can still use the microphone in the ear."

Bauman was a refugee from Poland at the age of 25. He and his family left Poland to escape abuse because of their Jewish race. "As much as I wanted to stay in Poland, I have never been back," he said. "It was traumatic for me."

He said his son just graduated from New York University with a medical degree. "I think the U.S. is the best country ever," Bauman said. He added that he will always be thankful for "what this country did for me."

Bauman said his hearing aids, called Vivatone, come in four selections and prices are comparable to those of traditional hearing aids.

For more information about Vivatone hearing aids, visit the web site at www.vivatone.com.

A long-standing belief that getting pregnant will lead to deafness in women with a hearing defect called otosclerosis is probably wrong, according to report presented at a medical conference in Florida.

Dr. William H. Lippy, an Ohio physician in private practice discovered that the original idea that pregnancy was dangerous for such women did not come from medical research, as most scientists think. Instead, it was a decision made by a high-ranking official in Nazi Germany's eugenics program to remove people with genetic defects from the population.

Lippy made his report at a meeting of the Triological Society, an organization of ear, nose and throat doctors.

The key to disproving the link came from his observations of devout Jewish women in Israel.

The tale is a lesson in how information that "everybody knows to be true" is handed down from one generation of physicians to the next without question, Lippy said. "What I practiced all these years, what many of my colleagues practiced, was wrong."

Dr. Brad Welling of Ohio State University said: "This is good information, better than what we have ever had. In terms of family planning, however, it is not going to make a lot of difference."

Treatment for otosclerosis is now so successful, he said, that most women with the disorder can feel free to have children whether the pregnancy exacerbates hearing loss or not.

However, Dr. Rick A. Friedman of the House Ear Institute in Los Angeles said that his experience made him more skeptical of Lippy's findings.

"Each of us has gotten histories from women in which they noted onset of hearing loss during pregnancy or exacerbation," he said. "I still think there is some association."

But because of advances in treatment, he added, "there is simply no reason anymore to tell a woman not to get pregnant. It is one of the disorders that can be readily fixed by a brief operation under local anesthesia."

Otosclerosis is a problem with the stapes, one of the three bones of the inner ear -- commonly known as the hammer, anvil and stirrup. These bones carry sound vibrations from the eardrum to the inner ear.

In otosclerosis, for reasons that are unknown but that may be primarily genetic, the third bone in the series, the stapes or stirrup, becomes fixed in the inner ear. It is almost like the bone is cemented into place, preventing it from conducting sound efficiently.

The condition affects an estimated 500,000 Americans, two-thirds of them women. It once doomed its victims to a life of deafness, but it can now be improved with hearing aids or, in more severe cases, with a stapedectomy, a brief procedure in which an artificial stapes is implanted in the ear.

Physicians have long believed that pregnancy makes the condition worse. Lippy said that as late as 1950, abortion or sterilization was often offered to women as an alternative to their pregnancy. More recently, physicians have warned women that pregnancy could worsen the condition -- but that treatments are available.

Lippy began to question the common wisdom based on his experiences in Israel, where he teaches and practices several weeks each year.

"Many of the patients I saw were ultra-religious Jewish women who had multiple pregnancies-five, six, eight, 10 children," Lippy said. "We advised them not to have children and argued with the rabbis, but to no avail. Finally, I noticed that the hearing in those with multiple children was no worse than in those with none."

Curious, he examined the records of 94 age-matched women in his own practice, 47 with children and 47 without. Using a variety of technical measures of their hearing, he concluded that the hearing of those who had children was no worse than that of those who did not.

The results could mean that age progression is more important than pregnancy in determining overall hearing loss, Friedman said. Even if pregnancy speeds up the hearing loss, "in the end, they all wind up at the same level."

After his testing, Lippy tried to find the source of the belief. Ultimately, he tracked down a paper written in Germany in 1939. A conference of nine doctors had considered the cases of 79 pregnant women with otosclerosis.

"Only two of them believed that otosclerosis was really made worse by pregnancy," Lippy said. "But a man from the Nazi Party wasn't really interested in whether it was made worse by pregnancy. He made a eugenic decision. The rule was made that if a physician discovered a pregnant woman with otosclerosis, she had to be turned over to a government agency."

Sixty-nine of the women were forced to have abortions, according to the paper, and many of them were sterilized. That decision filtered down through history, with the conclusions remaining, but the source fading.

Lippy's results will have to be confirmed before being widely accepted, said Dr. Thomas J. Balkany of the University of Miami School of Medicine. "But at least now the question is out there," he said.

Dr. Harvey J. Corson, Executive Director of American School for the Deaf since 2001, will step aside from dayto-day operations of the school effective June 30, 2005. He will continue as Executive Director until his retirement on June 30, 2006. In the year remaining prior to his retirement, Dr. Corson will devote his efforts to the important task of managing the Gallaudet Hall renovation project and maintaining external relationships with ASD's various constituencies, including the State of Connecticut.

During his tenure, Dr. Corson was responsible for leading the school through an important directional change resulting in a comprehensive strategic plan which will continue after his retirement. Among the changes are a stronger educational program, forging strong relations with the State of Connecticut, and putting in place the scheduled major renovation of Gallaudet Hall.

Details on a national search for a new Executive Director will be made available in coming weeks. The Board of Directors of ASD, through its various committees, will take an enhanced role in the operations of the school during the transition period to a new Director.

About 600,000 Israelis are hard of hearing or deaf, but state subsidies for hearing aids, which have to be replaced every two to four years, is inadequate, according to Knesset Labor, Social Affairs and Health Committee chairman MK Shaul Yahalom.

A committee session was dedicated to National Hearing Day, which was marked with seminars, hearing checks at 30 locations, phone information lines and a new Web site (www.hearing.org.il).

Hearing loss occurs in one to 1.2 babies born per 1,000 each year, according to the Health Ministry, as well as in one in three people over 65.

Representatives of patient groups told the committee that hearing aids cost between NIS 3,000 and NIS 9,900. (Approximately $663 to $2,190 in U.S. dollars.)

With help from the National Insurance Institute and the Social Affairs Ministry, the Health Ministry covers NIS 625 ($138) of the cost of a hearing aid for adults and NIS 3,500 ($774) for children up to age 18.

The health funds cover part of the additional cost of members who hold their supplementary health insurance policies.

Ahiya Kamara, chairman of the voluntary organization Bekol, said that many people with hearing loss are ashamed of their problem. About 10,000 lip read, but unlike people who have to wear glasses, many deaf people are ashamed to wear hearing aids.

In Denmark, 70,000 such devices are sold each year, but in Israel, the number is minimal.

Rahel Zohar of the voluntary organization Micha said that children up to the age of three not suited to cochlear implants get only half of the cost of hearing aids paid for by the government.

She said that many parents who cannot afford the rest of the cost receive digital devices on loan from Micha, which raises money for them via donations, but when none are available, young deaf children have to wait in a queue at the most critical age for development.

Yahalom called on the Health Ministry to do more, and asked the voluntary organizations to provide data on how much money was required to subsidize hearing aids for the most needy sectors in the population.

Ruth Seeger, 81, won her 300th Senior Games medal at a sports event June 9th in Pittsburgh, winning gold in the long jump in the women's 80-84 age group with a leap of 7 feet, 10-3/4 inches. Sports have always been Seeger's life, despite her mother's long-ago attempts to steer her into more "ladylike" pursuits.

Seeger, who is deaf, started her career as a physical education teacher and coach at the Texas School for the Deaf in Austin. She coached girls volleyball, softball, swimming and her specialty, track and field. She led track teams to eight different World Games for the Deaf and was a four-time USA Deaf Track and Field coach of the year. She retired in 1986 after 36 years at the Texas school, which named the gymnasium in her honor.

Soon after winning her 300th medal, Seeger won her 301st, in shotput. She dedicated it to her husband, Julian, who had recently suffered a heart attack but insisted she compete in the Games. "He's always encouraged me," she said. "He's a wonderful man."