Jul 12, 2012
Community News Service
By Yehoshua Soudakoff – N’shei Chabad Newsletter
Yehoshua Soudakoff shares his life story: The suspicions during childhood, learning with a deaf Rosh Yeshiva and becoming Lubavitch.
My parents didn’t see it coming.
It was on a warm May evening that I was delivered into the loving hands of my parents. We lived in the heart of the Los Angeles Jewish community, within walking distance of most of our extended family. My mother eagerly looked forward to enrolling me in the local Jewish school in a few years. Though my parents weren’t strictly observant of Jewish tradition, they felt comfortable interacting with the Jewish community and identified with it.
Both my father and mother had no doubts that I could hear. After all, they were the only members of their respective families who were deaf.
A few weeks later, while a loud lawnmower worked its way past the window of the room we sat in, my parents and grandparents noticed that I didn’t react at all to the noise. Could he be deaf? After a visit to the doctor, their suspicions were confirmed. I was deaf.
My parents’ lives were turned upside down. They had to begin a search for a school that would meet my educational needs. They sought speech therapists and met with various teachers. In later years, my parents had two more children, my siblings Michael and Rachel, both of whom were also deaf.
My parents were later tested for the Connexin 26 gene, and they both have it. This gene causes deafness in children.
Soon my parents made a tough decision: we moved to another (non-Jewish) neighborhood, so that we all could attend the local school that provided a program for deaf children. Naturally, this meant that our involvement with the Jewish community declined somewhat. Though we continued to keep a kosher home and have weekly Shabbos dinners, my family increasingly identified more with the deaf community than with the mainstream Jewish community.
As my siblings and I grew up, we were fortunate to have access to Judaism in the form of my mother’s non-profit organization
