The signing community, i.e. people with a hearing loss who use sign language, is well-served here in Baltimore under the Macks Center for Jewish Education’s JADE: Jewish Advocates for Deaf Education. In fact, the JADE Interpreter Fund is one of the reasons many Jewish Deaf and hard of hearing people chose to move to Baltimore over the past 2 decades! Yet, 20% of the American population, and by inference, of the Jewish population as well, report having a hearing loss (www.hearingloss.com). While they do not use sign language, they share many of the same frustrations in trying to navigate the Jewish community.

“About 70% of speech cannot be seen on the lips. Try this: Make the sound of “pah.” Now make the sound for “bah.” ... Relying only on what can be seen, there is no difference in how the “pa” and the “ba” sounds are formed on the lips." (http://www.michdhh.org)

Dina falls into this category, as do many of her friends who like to attend lectures in the Jewish sphere, and not just read a transcript of the speech. In response to Dina’s appeal, the Disability and Inclusion team at the CJE contacted WIT and Jliteracy asking for permission to caption Rabbanit Mizrachi’s Purim video. With an eye for research and technology, Martha Goodman, our Disability and Inclusion advocate, jumped through numerous hoops and figured out how to add captions to movies.

Rivky Segal of Jliteracy in Israel promised us the video by early Thursday morning. Concerned for the quality of the production, Andrea Schulman of WIT requested to preview the captioned video by 10:00 AM Friday morning to ensure that it is up to standard in time for Sunday’s showing.

Martha found professional stenographer, Miriam Hirsch who was willing to rush this job so that Martha would have time to test her newly-invented process for inserting captions before the deadline.  Since then, WIT has partnered with CJE to caption 3 of Rabbanit Mizrachi’s videos for Pesach, Shavuos and the Three Weeks 2017.

Panting but exhilarated the team looked around to figure out where to go from there. A meeting with the local deaf and hard of hearing community turned up an interesting phenomenon. When we asked what videos they would like captioned, a few people mentioned Rabbi Shmuel Silber’s online lectures. The other responses were, “We don’t know because we never had access to any Jewish videos!”

Think about that. Think about all the video clips you receive each day from

• Project Witness

• Project Inspire

• JEM

• Torah Living Tzaddikim

• Aish.com

• Chafetz Chaim Heritage Foundation

• Yizkeirim

• Rev.com

• Inspire Clips (Yoel Gold)

• Torah Anytime

• Yad Vashem

• Rabbi Amnon Yitzchak and Rabbi Dror

• Chevra Lomdei Mishna…

…without captions, people who have a hearing loss cannot experience them!

We reached out to Moshe Mordechai Tzvi Coleman, a young man from England who is deaf and attended Yeshiva Nefesh Dovid under Rabbi Chaim Tzvi Kakon. MMT, we learned, is spearheading an effort to raise awareness and money for captioning Jewish videos. We turned to him to see what he is doing and how we can work together. He sent us a lengthy document of his correspondence with each of the above organizations asking them to add captions to their videos.

In response, Dina volunteered her time and expertise to follow up with the organizations most likely to cooperate.

Meanwhile, Rachel Turniansky, director of Disability and Inclusion services at CJE, applied and won a grant to supply CART: Communication Access through Realtime Transcription for one year.

Rabbi Yissocher Frand’s Teshuvah Drasha, which attracts upward of 1000 Jews each year, was natural prey for our advocacy claws. Working closely with Mr. Eli W. Schlossberg and his technology team, we pounced on this opportunity to allow so many more Yidden to be inspired alongside the rest of Jewish Baltimore.

Notice of this planned accommodation drew enthusiastic response from many of our “usual” constituency. We are excited to invite all those people whom we do not yet know, people who typically stay home for this community event because hearing the lecture is a challenge, to come out this year and join your friends to hear what stirring message Rabbi Frand will hone in on this year in preparation for Yom Kippur.

We are eager to hear what the community’s response will be to the initiative to promote captioning on Jewish videos and at live lectures. If this affects you, please write to us and share your feedback. We are eager to share good news of break-throughs and inroads made to include more people in the definition of "Jewish community."