In the fall of 2000, TBS members, Elaine Aikins and Bess Hyman along with TBS administrator, Jan Seeley, had their second appearance with a group of 60 curious and bright 12-13 year-old, pre-bar/bat mitzvah students from the religious school class of Temple Sinai in West Los Angeles. It was an inspiring day for us and we had some very sophisticated questions about deafness asked of us. We fell in love with these wonderful, charming kids!
As we entered this very large building, we met Michal Frieze, the teacher who had invited us to speak the previous year. As she greeted and hugged us her face lit up and she began to tell us how much we had changed the lives of the children and the parents that October evening of last year.
Sinai Akiba Academy and religious school are made up of a diverse group of children. Many of the children, or their parents, are immigrants from Russia, Iran, and Israel. The parents drop their children off at the school in the morning and come to parent meetings but don't generally socialize with each other because of their cultural differences.
After our first trip to Sinai Temple, late last year on a Wednesday, we invited the students and their parents to come to TBS' next Shabbat service the following Friday and to sign the Shema that we had just taught them. A great mixture of young people and their parents made the long congested Friday evening drive from the West side over the hill to our valley, and evidently a great miracle happened there that we only just found out about on this second trip.
Michal went on to explain, her eyes sparkling with genuine excitement and gushing over with enthusiasm, that this was the best activity these students had done for the entire year and as a result the tensions between these Jewish students and their parents from such diverse backgrounds and cultures had dissolved.
The parents, who came to TBS on that Friday night and proudly watched all their children sign the Shema together, came to realize that they were not so different from each other after all and they began intermingling and socializing. That Friday evening, they discovered a group of Deaf Jews who seemed to be so very different from the rest of the world, yet they seemed to bridge the gap of difference so easily with sign language.
We sometimes never know the effect we will have on others, but we were lucky enough to find out a year later that we did indeed make a difference. What a feeling of accomplishment. More...