Regarding Julie Gruenbaum Fax’s article “Finding Their Place” (Feb. 24), about 20-somethings with special needs, I want to express my profound disappointment regarding the fact that, once again, there was no mention about the supports and services provided by the Regional Center system.
Tamir Appel scampers to his room to pull out a photo album of his latest trip to visit family in Israel. He sets it on the dining room table, where some of his housemates are gathered to talk about their daily life at the Ryzman Family Group Home for Men in Valley Village, one of three run by the Etta Israel Center, the only Jewish group homes on the West Coast.
A little while ago, Hendel Schwartz got a call from a city bus driver. “Your son walks with God,” the driver told her.
Lauren Levine is settling in with a group of friends apartment to watch “American Idol,” when a look of panic comes over her face. She rummages around, finds her keys and darts out.“I left the hair thing on,” she says when she returns, breathless, from her own apartment downstairs. “I was straightening Jasmine’s hair before we came up here, and I forgot to turn it off. Wow. That was close.” Levine has wide blue eyes accentuated with sparkly eye shadow, and her voice is spiced with a sense of interested wonder.
In synagogue last Friday night, just after her sermon, the rabbi announced she had invited a special guest in honor of Jewish Disabilities Month. The woman next to me leaned over and whispered. “What’s Jewish Disabilities Month?” “That’s for Jews who get B’s in school,” I said.
The Union for Reform Judaism has launched two new summer programs for children with special needs. Camp Chazak in Massachusetts, opening this summer, is for middle-school children with communication and social delays. It has recreational and therapeutic programming. Like the Reform movement’s existing programs for autistic teens — the Mitzvah Corps program at Camp Kutz in Warwick, N.Y., and the Camp Nefesh program at Camp Newman in Santa Rosa, Calif. — the new camp aims to provide a Jewish experience to youngsters often left out of mainstream opportunities.
As her daughter Amy was nearing graduation two years ago, Pattie Earlix was crushed by the thought that her religious education was ending.
\” . . . As grandparents, we go through a range of feelings. Some of these are triggered by the child\’s behavior and how the parents react to it. Grandparents are frightened and upset that their grandchild is experiencing these problems . . . \”
Lior Liebling davens everywhere: in the backyard, in school and on the swing set. Some congregants at his synagogue, Mishkan Shalom of Mount Arie, Pa., call him the \”little rebbe.\”
\”The Zohar tells stories of miracle children who were spiritual geniuses,\” one synagogue member said. \”Well, that\’s what Lior is.\”
Lior is the 13-year-old featured in the new documentary, \”Praying With Lior,\” which highlights the bar mitzvah of a Jewish child living with Down syndrome. The character study of this boy tells of how Lior\’s community successfully integrates him into communal life — a challenge many Jewish communities face with mentally and physically disabled members.
As soon as they put him on my belly, I knew. I looked at his eyes, and they were a bit puffy, as is normal after a regular delivery, but I knew.
My husband, Mark, said he looked perfect, with all fingers and toes accounted for. I kept asking if he was all right; he was our second child, after all, and I knew he wasn\’t, because a mother knows.
Mark kept believing everything was OK until he followed the nurses down to the nursery, and they asked for pediatricians to come in. Nurses attended to our first born, Jason — not doctors.
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