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When I attended a Jewish Day School (called Yeshiva), I remember a class lesson on conversion. Rule #1 in conversion - You cannot convert to Judaism to just marry someone you love. Being Jewish is more than just a piece of paper. It means keeping kosher, attending the synagogue, educating your children in Judaism, follow the mitzvahs (as best as you can) but above all, to live in a Jewish life to the best of your beliefs. Not to say “I’m Jewish, now let’s get married, and please pass the bacon.”

This deaf lady wanted to convert to Judaism to marry someone she loved. The rabbis should’ve ruled that it’s impermissible to marry for love, and stop right there. But no, that’s not the reason why she couldn’t convert. The reason is that “those who cannot hear, cannot fulfill mitzvoth and therefore, believes rabbinical court in 2008, cannot convert to Judaism.” And that’s what this controversy is all about.

Keep in mind that I’m not ignoring or putting down the rest of the non-Orthodox in the Jewish Deaf Communities. The issue is that the ruling was made by a group of Orthodox Rabbis interpreting the Torah and the Jewish Laws their way. So I want to focus on this from their Orthodox angle.

What is an Orthodox Jew? “Orthodox Judaism has held fast to such practices as daily worship, dietary laws, intensive study of the Torah, and separation of men and women in the synagogue.” In other words, to worship daily is a Mitzvah, to study the Torah is a Mitzvah, etc. (Mitzvots is a plural form of Mitzvah). So basically the Rabbinical Court is saying that deaf Jews can’t pray, can’t study the Torah, etc. And this is not the first time they’ve ruled this way. There has been numerous rulings against the Jewish Deaf people simply because can’t do mitzvots. What’s different is that this is year 2008 and we know now that Jewish Deaf are capable of performing Mitzvots, and that the Rabbinical Court needs to be educated why this ruling is so outdated today.

The Israeli Rabbinical Court should visit Baltimore where Orthodox Rabbi Fred Friedman and Rabbi David Kastor lives.

The Israeli Rabbinical Court should visit Nefesh Dovid, the world’s only Orthodox Deaf Yeshiva High School for boys in Toronto.

The Israeli Rabbinical Court should attend the annual Melave Malka held by Beth Torah of the Deaf in Brooklyn, NY where many Orthodox Jewish Deaf gather once a year.

I personally call on Orthodox Rabbi Eliezer Liederfiend of NCSY- Our Way to immediately call the Chief Rabbinical Court to tell them not only that their reasons for their ruling is wrong, but that it is so damaging and dangerous to the Jewish Deaf Community.

The Jewish Deaf community is already facing an estimated 90%+ interfaith marriage rate. The Jewish Deaf community is facing intense pressure from the Christian Missionaries. This ruling is just adding fuel to the fires. I’m willing to bet that the Christian Missionaries are already printing copies of this article to show the next time they target a Jewish Deaf to convert. Oh yea, this will make their job a lot easier!

I don’t think the Rabbis have thought of the consequences of this ruling. And the Chief Rabbinical Court have made a mockery of Judaism, because this is just one of the many crazy and inconsiderate rulings to date. For the sake of the ENTIRE JEWISH COMMUNITY, The Chief Rabbinical Court deserved to be roundly condemned and replaced immediately!

Update: The Rabbinical Court can be enlighted right in their backyard with the Orthodox organization -   Council of Young Israel Rabbis in Israel’s Judaic Heritage Program for the Deaf and Hearing Impaired.

Best cartoon drawings about how USA has gotten into the subprime mess. Really simple to understand and gets right to the point.

How subprime works

Warning: swear language

Another brave Israeli soldier killed. This one is different - his parents are deaf.

At first glance, the hundreds of mourners gathered at the Ashkelon military cemetery Sunday for the funeral of Israel Defense Forces Staff Sergeant Liran Banai seemed to display both agility and morbid curiosity as they climbed every available surface in a scramble to get a good view of the proceedings next to the freshly dug grave. But then the reason became clear: Many of the mourners were deaf. They came to the funeral in a show of solidarity with Banai’s parents, Guy and Gila, both of whom are deaf, and wanted to find a spot from which they could read the lips of the eulogizers. Due to the mass of mourners in attendance, however, few succeeded.

Rest of the story…

Here’s more details of Liran Banai. He didn’t have to serve in combat because he has deaf parents, but he wanted to.

Magen David Adom is Israel’s equivalent of Red Cross. They just came out with a new services allowing deaf/hard of hearing to call for help by texting MDA dispatch, as reported in Ynetnews.

Text messages received at Magen David Adom’s central dispatch will be immediately displayed on a plasma screen along with a vocal alert to on-call staff. The new service will also allow MDA staff to send a text message back, informing the original sender that help is on the way.

Some 650,000 people living in Israel are hearing impaired. In accordance with the instructions of Magen David Adom’s Chief Medical Officer, Eli Bin, the new text service will be taking over for the fax service MDA introduced a decade ago.

The text service, like the fax service before it, is considered a breakthrough in emergency services’ accessibility.

Will be real handy for the next wave of suicide bombers or rockets coming from Gaza, West Bank, or Lebanon. And no, I’m not being sarcastic.

The Case of the Red-Cockaded Woodpecker

A few months ago, a prospective patient called the office of Andrew Brooks, a top-ranked orthopedic surgeon in Los Angeles. She was having serious knee trouble, and she was also deaf. She wanted to know if her deafness posed a problem for Brooks. He had his assistant relay a message: no, of course not; he could easily discuss her situation using knee models, anatomical charts and written notes.

The woman later called again to say she would rather have a sign-language interpreter. Fine, Brooks said, and asked his assistant to make the arrangements. As it turned out, an interpreter would cost $120 an hour, with a two-hour minimum, and the expense wasn’t covered by insurance. Brooks didn’t think it made sense for him to pay. That would mean laying out $240 to conduct an exam for which the woman’s insurance company would pay him $58 — a loss of more than $180 even before accounting for taxes and overhead.

So Brooks suggested to the patient that they make do without the interpreter. That’s when she told him that the Americans With Disabilities Act (A.D.A.) allowed a patient to choose the mode of interpretation, at the physician’s expense. Brooks, flabbergasted, researched the law and found that he was indeed obliged to do as the patient asked — unless, that is, he wanted to invite a lawsuit that he would probably lose.

If he ultimately operated on the woman’s knee, Brooks would be paid roughly $1,200. But he would also then need to see her for eight follow-up visits, presumably with the $240 interpreter each time. By the end of the patient’s treatment, Brooks would be solidly in the red.

He went ahead and examined the woman, paying the interpreter out of his pocket. As it turned out, she didn’t need surgery; her knee could be treated through physical therapy. This was a fortunate outcome for everyone involved — except, perhaps, for the physical therapist who would have to pay the interpreter’s bills.

Brooks told several colleagues and doctor friends about his deaf patient. “They all said, ‘If I ever get a call from someone like that, I’ll never see her,’ ” he says. This led him to wonder if the A.D.A. had a dark side. “It’s got to be widely pervasive and probably not talked about, because doctors are just getting squeezed further and further. This kind of patient will end up getting passed on and passed on, getting the runaround, not understanding why she’s not getting good care.”

So does the A.D.A. in some cases hurt the very patients it is intended to help? That’s a hard question to answer with the available medical data. But the economists Daron Acemoglu and Joshua Angrist once asked a similar question: How did the A.D.A. affect employment among the disabled?

Their conclusion was rather startling and makes Andrew Brooks’s hunch ring true. Acemoglu and Angrist found that when the A.D.A. was enacted in 1992, it led to a sharp drop in the employment of disabled workers. How could this be? Employers, concerned that they wouldn’t be able to discipline or fire disabled workers who happened to be incompetent, apparently avoided hiring them in the first place.

Of course, if they had a UbiDuo, none of this would be a problem anymore!