Hebrew Seminary of the Deaf in Skokie is about to ordain three new rabbis…

Hebrew Seminary of the Deaf in Skokie is about to ordain

three new rabbis…
By Pauline Dubkin Yearwood
The Chicago Jewish News Online
06/25/2010

Hebrew Seminary of the Deaf in Skokie is about to ordain

three new rabbis. All are women. One is the daughter of one of

Chicago’s best-known and most beloved rabbis. Another is the

first deaf student to be ordained at the seminary. All will give

their graduation addresses in two languages: English and

American Sign Language.

Hebrew Seminary of the Deaf in Skokie continues to make

history.

It did so 13 years ago when it was founded as the first

pluralistic Jewish seminary to train professionals to work with

both the deaf and hearing communities.

And again earlier this year, when its rabbinical graduates were

accredited as members of the Chicago Board of Rabbis.

Now, the school will ordain three new rabbis. All are women.

One is the daughter of one of Chicago’s best-known and most

beloved rabbis. Another is the first deaf student to be ordained

at the seminary.

All will give their graduation addresses in two languages:

English and American Sign Language.

“All the students are fantastic,” Rabbi Douglas Goldhamer,

founder and president of the school, says. While he doesn’t

expect all of them – with the exception of Ellen Roth, the deaf

graduate – to work within the deaf community, they will all have

a function in that difficult-to-serve segment of Judaism, he said

in a recent conversation.

“When I first started the school, I had hoped students would

work with deaf people all over America and start synagogues

as I did,” Goldhamer, who founded Skokie’s Congregation

Bene Shalom, said recently. “But it is very hard to get the deaf

community to accept a hearing person as a spiritual leader.

What I see is that the rabbis who are graduating here, when

they meet deaf families in their synagogue, they will treat them

with respect. They will be able to communicate with the families

in their own language. Every rabbi here learns English, Hebrew

and American Sign Language.”

More deaf Jews would attend synagogue if they were aware

that the rabbi knew ASL, rather than having to ask for an

interpreter, he says.

“We’re making rabbis who are deaf-friendly. They are making

themselves available to any deaf person who joins a

congregation, so they will have parity in the synagogue, in their

child’s classroom, board meetings. No one will have to

convince that rabbi to be loving and sensitive to the deaf

community,” he says.

Goldhamer adds that even though Roth will be the school’s first

deaf rabbinic graduate, two deaf students have previously

graduated with certificates for teaching Sunday school to deaf

students, since the seminary has a two-tier program.

Roth’s ordination marks a particular watershed, Goldhamer

says.

“There are two or three deaf rabbis in America, but (Roth) is

also culturally deaf, and that has never been done before,” he

says. Roth was brought up in a deaf culture – “deafkeit,” he

calls it in a play on a familiar Yiddish word.

“It’s like having a Yiddishe kup,” a “Jewish head,” he says.

“Ellen has a deaf Weltanschauung,” or world view,” he says.

Becoming a rabbi, however, was once the farthest thing from

Ellen Roth’s mind.

“It wasn’t something I had planned on. I really wasn’t

interested. I didn’t have anything to do with the Jewish faith at

all because of hearing/deaf issues,” Roth said during an

interview conducted through a video relay service.

She was born and brought up in the New York City area,

profoundly deaf, the child of two deaf parents. Both came from

religious (and hearing) homes – her father Orthodox, her

mother Conservative – but because of their deafness failed to

find a comfortable home within Judaism.

“I was raised with zero Jewish background,” Roth says. “All the

rabbis who volunteered (at synagogues) couldn’t sign at all.

They took an American Sign Language class, and that was a

joke. The impression left on us was a lousy impression. We

couldn’t understand why they were giving us rabbis who

couldn’t sign. It was an insult to our intelligence. That was my

thought about the Jewish faith.”

Consequently she and her family felt like they were “bad Jews,”

Roth says. “We didn’t know anything. It really was more of a

deaf/hearing issue. The communication barrier was there

automatically. It was not a Jewish issue. I kind of had to forget

about” Judaism.

Her family, she says, “went to deaf events, deaf clubs, was in

the deaf community but had nothing to do with the Jewish

faith.”

Roth embarked on a career with a state vocational

rehabilitation agency, helping to find jobs for deaf people, some

70 percent of whom are unemployed, she says (with the failing

economy, the figure is probably closer to 85 percent, she

adds.) She also served as an administrator for the Illinois

agency that provides services to deaf and hard-of-hearing

people.

Roth first heard conversation, music and her therapy dog’s

barks eight years ago when she got cochlear implants,

implanted devices that deliver a measure of sound to previously

deaf people. One impetus for obtaining the implants was her

frustration at not being able to understand what was going on

on Sept. 11, when she was living in New York City not far

from the World Trade Center.

But she is adamant in getting the word out that cochlear

implants have not changed her life, as well as her stand in what

she calls the “communication wars” that have waged in the deaf

and hearing communities for the last decade.

Implants “opened up another dimension of the world,” she says.

They allowed her to hear speech better, speak better herself

and hear music. But, she notes, she is still hard of hearing,

rather than profoundly deaf, and still must lip-read when she

speaks to people because her brain doesn’t process the

information from speech otherwise.

“I support the technology (of cochlear implants) but I do not

support the philosophy not to have deaf babies learn sign

language. That is a crime, withholding their right to a natural

language,” she says. “This is an important point. You can put

implants in babies and children, but teach sign language at the

same time.”

What she calls “that little box,” the implants, “has not changed

my way of thinking, my way of life,” she says.

Meeting Rabbi Goldhamer did change her life, though.

When Roth needed back surgery for a herniated disc, she

spoke to Goldhamer and, she says, “he gave of himself” and his

healing powers. She did not have surgery and now has full

range of motion in her back and leg, which she did not have

before.

Meanwhile, “Rabbi Goldhamer said, why don’t you study at my

school?” she relates. “I said, no way would I become a rabbi. I

have nothing to do with Judaism. He said, learn from me and

let’s see how far you can go. The rest is history.”

As a rabbi, Roth plans to work with the deaf community,

focusing not only on religion but “more of a universal, becoming

more involved with healers, telling stories, doing translation

work (especially) from the Zohar into American Sign Language

so all deaf people can have access to that information.” She

hopes to become involved in “storytelling, weddings, funerals,

all of that,” she says.

Goldhamer recalls that when he first met Roth at a Shabbaton,

“I see this deaf young woman there signing. I walk up and see

that she’s really very articulate through signs. She could sign like

Abba Eban could speak,” he says.

They began talking and Roth, who had never met a rabbi or

Jewishly literate person who signed, “asked me basic things.

Why don’t we have Christmas? Why don’t we believe in Jesus?

We talked for about three hours,” Goldhamer recalls. He

thought, “The deaf community would be thrilled to have a rabbi

like that. I had to get her interested in Judaism.”

Now that she is becoming a rabbi, he predicts a great future for

her.

“The deaf will flock to her,” he says. “They will have someone

who is native born. I’m not. I sign with an accent. She doesn’t.

She can do things I can’t – translate stories magnificently well in

sign language so that it seems as if the stories were originally

written in sign language. When deaf people around America

find out about her, they’ll be calling her to perform weddings,

bar and bat mitzvahs in all the deaf communities. She has

what’s needed.”

Studying for the rabbinate might have seemed like a natural

path for Ora Schnitzer. Her father was Rabbi Mordecai Simon,

one of the most beloved spiritual leaders in Chicago for much

of the last half of the 20th century. Head of the Chicago Board

of Rabbis from 1963 to 1995, Rabbi Simon died in 2007.

But when Schnitzer, now 53, graduated from college, “I might

have thought of rabbinical school, but the only rabbinical area I

knew of was Conservative and they weren’t accepting females

at the time,” she said in a recent telephone interview.

Instead she went to business school and worked in that field for

several years; her last job was at Kraft Foods. She married

and raised four children, including a set of twins. At one point,

she had three children under 13 months old.

Years later, with her family grown, Schnitzer did bar and bat

mitzvah tutoring at a suburban synagogue. One day, she heard

about a new assistant rabbi there who was still finishing her

rabbinical degree.

Not realizing there was a seminary in the Chicago area, “I said,

Oh, is she flying in? They said no, she’s going to a seminary in

Skokie,” Schnitzer relates. Shortly afterwards, she met with

Goldhamer, who had known Simon and considered him a

mentor.

“I had gone to Solomon Schechter Day School, was familiar

with Hebrew and Torah and even a little Talmud,” Schnitzer

says. “I was up on all that kind of stuff. I talked with

(Goldhamer) and decided to go” to HSD.

“I discussed it with my father, and for my first year, he was my

chevruta” or study partner, she says. “We would study Talmud

together.” The next year Simon suffered a stroke and could no

longer continue, “but he knew I was going to the school. He

thought it was a good idea and he was proud of me,” Schnitzer

says. “Now I have a lot of people coming up to me and saying,

your father would be proud of you.”

She found the five years of rabbinical school “difficult and time

-consuming both physically and emotionally” but enriching. She

credits the support of her husband, David, a dentist, and all of

their children. “They were very supportive,” she says. “It took a

lot of my time, and I was always taking the car.”

Now that Schnitzer is soon to be ordained, she’s looking for a

job. Currently she serves as a chaplain at Alexian Brothers

Hospital in Elk Grove Village and as a weekend chaplain at

Glenbrook Hospital. She was a part-time rabbi for a small

synagogue in Elgin that recently folded, and has worked as a

student rabbi in several small communities and still conducts

services at small synagogues in Sterling and Galesburg, Illinois.

She also does calligraphy work in English and Hebrew, and

lettered the diplomas the graduating students will receive at

HSD.

Like all students at the seminary, Schnitzer received training in

American Sign Language, but she doesn’t plan to work with the

deaf community as a rabbi.

“I told (Goldhamer) in the beginning, it’s very nice of you want

to serve an underserved area, but I don’t think I can be a rabbi

for deaf people,” she says. “It would involve learning another

language. I speak Hebrew and Spanish. I did learn sign

language – at our graduation, we’ll all make little speeches,

saying it in English but also signing it. I’ve been preparing for

that for a long time.” But, she says, she doesn’t feel fluent

enough in sign language to make it a focal point of her

rabbinate.

Instead, she feels prepared to work in any type of synagogue

setting. “I’ve worked in the Reform and Conservative

communities, and I have a lot of experience using different

prayer books,” she says. “In Elgin I prepared Torah and

Haftarah portions, gave a little speech, led services, did

chanting.”

Meanwhile, “my youngest son calls me rabbi around the

house,” Schnitzer says with a laugh. And her new position will

soon have a joyful practical application. “My oldest daughter is

getting married soon,” she says. “I’m going to perform the

wedding.”

Dena Bodian, at almost 31 the youngest of the newly ordained

rabbis, embarked on the rabbinic path early but with some

detours along the way.

“I have a very vivid memory of the ordination of the first

Conservative female rabbi, Amy Eilberg,” Bodian said recently.

“In 1985, I was six years old, and my mother said to me, ‘You

can be anything you want when you grow up, even a rabbi.’ At

the time I remember thinking, what is this even business? It had

never before occurred to me that I couldn’t be a rabbi.”

Growing up in New Jersey in the Conservative movement, she

earned an undergraduate degree in urban planning and a

master’s degree in art history, then took a job in a rural

community in northern Virginia.

Meanwhile two disparate strands continued to weave through

her life. One was Judaism, the other American Sign Language.

Bodian had a longstanding interest in and attraction to the latter

ever since she had a Sunday school teacher who taught

students to sign the Shema and several other prayers. “That

stuck with me for many years, the many different modalities of

prayer,” she says.

Later she took a night school course in ASL interpretation, and

her fascination with it continued.

“It’s a beautiful language,” she says. “It has its own grammatical

structure and has all the trappings of every other language. It’s a

very different way of interacting with language, with words.

When you think about liturgy and prayer, it’s a way of putting

your whole self in language.”

Usually this doesn’t happen, she says. “Everybody says we

(Jews) talk with our hands, but to communicate with your

whole body is very different.”

At the same time, she continued her Jewish involvement,

serving as a lay leader in a congregation that was too small to

have a rabbi. Then “someone told me there was this rabbinical

school that trained rabbis for deaf congregations. It just seemed

like a bizarre confluence of coincidences that I couldn’t really

pass up. I applied (to HSD), got in, gave up my house, job,

community and moved to Chicago,” she says.

It was the right decision for a number of reasons. “I took a

circuitous route to rabbinical school, and this really gave me

opportunities I never would have had in a more mainstream

seminary,” she says. “I’ve met amazing people here. One of the

nice things about Chicago is, there aren’t any other

(Conservative or Reform) rabbinical schools here, and people

are so willing to give me opportunities.”

She is active in the local Jewish community, where she heads

the Jews-by-Choice program at Anshe Emet Synagogue in

Chicago and participates in two chevra kadishas or Jewish

burial societies.

Bodian’s plans for her future as a rabbi will, she hopes, include

both the deaf and hearing communities. Her ambition is not to

lead a deaf synagogue, she explains.

“There are very few places in the world where there is a purely

deaf congregation,” she says, “and I don’t think any deaf

congregation is looking for someone who is not a native signer.

I would never expect an Israeli congregation to want to hire me

– it’s not my native language.”

While there are few entirely deaf Jewish communities, she gives

an example of a situation where a hearing family has one deaf

child and other hearing children. They join a synagogue. Is

there anyone there who can speak to the deaf child in his or her

native language?

“If you think there are no deaf among us, the community hasn’t

done enough to make itself accessible to the few deaf among

us,” she says. “I anticipate always having an opportunity to

work with the one or two or three deaf people in my rabbinate.

What’s important to me is the visibility, to make sure people are

aware that they are accepted.”

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Photo: ChicagoNews.jpg
Caption: Hebrew Seminary of the Deaf in Skokie is about to

ordain three new rabbis…