The moment she woke up, six-year-old Talia remembered what was happening that afternoon. Her classmate Maya was having a birthday party and Talia was going. “She came running into our bedroom at 6.30am hugging her favourite dresses, saying she couldn’t decide which one to wear,” says her mum, Amanda. “It was the first party she had been invited to since she started school, and she was beyond excited. Seeing her so happy made me well up.”
Later that day, it was Talia’s turn to cry. When Amanda went to collect her daughter from the shul hall where the party had been held, she found her crouched under a table in the adjoining kitchen. The little girl was sobbing into the hem of her bubblegum pink frock, her hands clasped tightly over her ears.
“Between gulps she told me she’d been hiding there for ages. The party entertainer had used a microphone and the amplified sound booming into her cochlear implants had become unbearable,” says Amanda.
There are roughly 45,000 deaf children in Britain, of whom around 200 are Jewish. We make up 0.5 percent of the population but are slightly more likely to be born deaf than non-Jews because intermarriage increases genetic disorders.
In one significant way, life will be easier for these infants than it was for their forebears. Technology for the deaf has advanced so greatly in the last 25 years that more than 80% of youngsters are now able to attend mainstream schools. In a previous generation, Talia would not have had cochlear implants and would have been sent a specialist deaf school that would, arguably, have hindered her ability to adapt to the hearing world.
But while there have been great strides in deaf technology, Jewish parents say communal understanding of what it means to be deaf remains worryingly low. They feel let down, upset and, with the notable exception of the Jewish Deaf Association (JDA), say they get little help from the community.
And they are scared of speaking out. Scared that they are already misunderstood by their children’s schools and synagogues and that if they do so publicly what are already often tense relations will get more so. In fact, none of the people interviewed for this article wanted to be identified.
Sarah still shudders when she recalls her first meeting at daughter Esther’s school.“ I left in tears. I went to explain how they could best support her and thought they’d welcome my input. But I got the distinct impression they saw Esther as a problem and they’d that prefer I took her elsewhere.”
That first impression proved accurate. “It’s been very hard to get teachers to accept that being deaf is a barrier to learning. It feels like she has an invisible disability,” she says. “I must have told the school a dozen times that she needs to sit at the front of the class so she can lipread. Just the other day she came home crying after a well known writer came in to give a talk. Esther asked to move to the front row and instead was sat right at the back.”
Despite his parents repeated requests to the contrary, Zack also often finds himself at the back of the classroom. “And for an hour every week he is sent out of a woodwork lesson because the class is too noisy for him. The answer, surely, is for the teacher to control the kids,” says dad Mike. “His teachers don’t have any real appreciation of what it feels like to be excluded because you are deaf.”
The family’s experiences at shul have not been encouraging, either. “Adult services are generally fine, but social events are invariably super noisy,” says Mike. “We’ve been to family Friday night dinners there and had to leave because Zack couldn’t cope. And the other month the rabbi hosted an afternoon tea at his house — after an hour we got a call asking us to pick Zack up because he couldn’t bear the noise the other kids were making.
“Zack’s barmitzvah is approaching and we didn’t bother involving the shul in the preparations. We found our own teacher. I doubt the shul would have known how to help.”
Meanwhile, Rebecca didn’t even try to send her son, Ben, eight, to cheder. “Acoustically poor halls with wooden floors and staff who aren’t trained in deaf awareness — it would never have worked. Ben went to a children’s service once, but the noise was overwhelming — he didn’t join in the songs even though he knows all the words.”
But much as she and other parents would like their shuls to be more inclusive, they say they are also realistic about the prospects of change. As one father put it: “At the end of the day, our family is just one out of several hundred. And ultimately Jewishness comes from the home.
“School is the real issue for us. If the environment in school is not right, our child won’t get an education and that will affect the course of her entire life.”
These days, the schools in question are usually Jewish. The JDA says the proportion of Jewish parents who send their deaf children to communal schools is higher than the 60% of hearing Jewish kids who attend them.
Put another way, Jewish schools are now used to teaching deaf youngsters and should therefore know how to best support them, particularly those located in Barnet and Hertfordshire which have a noticeably high concentration of deaf pupils.
Rachel says that if her son Leo didn’t enjoy Jewish studies so much, she would probably wave goodbye to his Jewish education. “He went to a non-Jewish primary and I have to say it was better at talking to pupils about difference. Leo had more friends there. Now we are forever fighting for him, asking the school to do things such as ensuring only one person in the class talks at a time, and for teachers not to talk with their backs turned, so he can lipread. I dread to think how we are seen. It’s hard to fight like we do and make friends.”
It is also hard for deaf children to make friends. According to the National Deaf Children’s Society, six out of ten deaf children report having been bullied because of their deafness. But by simply explaining to hearing pupils how they should communicate with their deaf classmates, schools can do much to combat this bullying, says the organisation.
Talia has not been bullied for her deafness but, as the dearth of party invites illustrates, neither has she flourished socially at her Jewish primary.
“She tells me she doesn’t like playtime and I know this is because the other girls don’t want to play with her. She gets lost in conversation and they get bored repeating things. I think if the school did more to ensure pupils understood what being deaf means, things would be easier for my daughter in the playground,” says Amanda.
Clare and Phil sent their son Ruben, 12, to a Jewish secondary because they were worried about the anti-Semitism he might experience at a non-Jewish school. But while they have protected him from racism, they have inadvertently exposed him to other forms of prejudice.
“He has rare a condition called bilateral microtia which means his ears look different from other kids’, and he suffers for it. The other kids exclude him, and he hasn’t been invited to a single bar or batmitzvah. Do I think the school could do more to ensure he is included? Yes, I do,” says Clare.
Leah’s seven-year-old son Isaac, does have a circle of friends but she says that at busy break times he often gets lost in their conversation. “He plays along, pretending he understands. But at home he’ll often confide that he couldn’t follow what the other boys were talking about.”
“A similar thing happens at football. Isaac will often do things a little after the other kids because he is copying them instead of following the teacher’s instructions that he can’t entirely decipher.”
But although he holds it together in the playground and on the football pitch, at home Isaac often expresses the frustrations of the day by lashing out at his older brother. “Noah is his punchbag,” says Leah. “He will literally get down from his chair and hit him for no reason. He thinks that because his brother can hear it means he is also good at everything. Actually, things often come more easily to Isaac than they do to his brother. But being deaf has ruined his self-belief.”
Leah, meanwhile, believes in her child passionately. As do all the parents interviewed for this article. With the right support they know their kids can fly. And communal support starts, they say, with imaginative empathy, by trying to understand how it feels to be young, deaf and Jewish.
