When Rabbi Douglas Goldhamer arrived in Chicago from Cincinnati in the early 1970s, he found deaf Jews attending church services because they had no place of worship to accommodate their needs or view them as equals. So in 1972, Goldhamer founded Bene Shalom, a Reform Judaism congregation in Skokie that interprets all of its services in American Sign Language. It’s often cited as the only full-service synagogue in the nation dedicated to the deaf.
