Setting The Wheelchairs In Motion

Launched by longtime activist Sharon Shapiro, the newly formed Yad HaChazakah empowers Jews with disabilities.

Sharon Shapiro brought the ideas she learned from the Independent Living Movement into the Jewish community when she created Yad HaChazakah.

by Randi Sherman
Staff Writer

For many years, Sharon Shapiro needed assistance to study at her beit midrash, and participate in shul events and simchas. Bound to a wheelchair due to cerebral palsy, Shapiro often needs her husband, Wayne Yisroel Lacks, to carry her up the stairs so she can participate. Not seeing anyone else with an obvious disability, she wondered if she was the only one, impossible, since one out of five people in the latest U.S. census report being disabled.
“I wanted to know where all the Jews with disabilities are,” Shapiro told The Jewish Week. “I couldn’t be that no Jew except me and a handful of people had a disability.”
To empower people like herself, in October 2005, Shapiro, a “Torah-observant Jew committed to the Orthodox

process of understanding the Torah,” resigned from a well-paying management position at the Manhattan Center for Independent Living, which counsels New Yorkers with disabilities about rights and resources, to start her own organization. Yad HaChazakah, the Jewish Disability Empowerment Center is one of eight projects currently assisted by Bikkurim: An Incubator for New Jewish Ideas, which provides Shapiro with technical assistance, office space and a stipend.
The organization held a launch party on Jan. 13 at Toras Emes Kamenitz in Midwood, one of the few accessible yeshivot in Brooklyn. The event brought together 150 people including Assemblyman Dov Hikind and City Council Member Michael Nelson to celebrate the group’s official beginning. Keynote speaker Chava Willig Levy recounted her experience as a person with a disability going through the yeshiva system and the kinds of physical and attitudinal barriers she faced, problems Yad HaChazakah intends to fight head-on. Prominent rabbis Meir Fund and Benjamin Hecht of Nishma were also in attendance.
Shapiro sees the organization as “the independent living model, infused with Torah ideology and precepts so we can address the religious and cultural needs of Jews with disabilities.” The launch is a goal many years in the making.
“It was a dream I’ve had for, dare I say, 20 years. It happened because I wasn’t seeing Jews with disabilities, at least obvious ones, in shuls, beit midrash, yeshivot. I would often go places and be the only one in a wheelchair,” she said.
After working for 17 years in the independent-living movement, a network of centers led by and for people with obvious and hidden disabilities that grew out of the 1970s amidst civil rights action, Shapiro decided to focus her expertise on the Jewish community. She created the initial board with a combination of Jewish leaders with disabilities and “other talented people,” she said. “The Jewish community has many organizations geared to helping people, and it’s wonderful. We’re bringing self-empowerment to the table.”
The Yad HaChazakah client has obvious or hidden disabilities or a chronic health condition and is “someone with an idea of what they’re looking for, who just needs encouragement, resources or the proper networks in order to achieve their goals,” Shapiro said. They know what they want, but just need some assistance. If they’re unsure, the organization will coach them to help determine for themselves what they need.
Whether it’s a matter of gaining access or changing policy, Yad HaChazakah will help navigate through the necessary channels. “Where something doesn’t exist, we’re going to ask people to join together to advocate, for expansion of resources, access or a change of attitudinal barriers needed to fulfill Jewish life.”
Yad HaChazakah’s involvement doesn’t end there. “Once we find the resources, we follow up to make sure that resource was appropriate and that they’ve connected with the right people,” Shapiro said. “We’re not sending them off with a phone number and hoping for the best.”
One thing the organization definitely won’t do is insert itself in the conversation. “We’re not going to go to a random store or synagogue without someone belonging to that community or someone asking for access,” she said. “We’re here to support the voices of the community, not be the voice.”
Immediately after the launch, Yad HaChazakah added a list of 120 clients to the 50 they were already in the process of helping. Their services include life coaching, resource navigation and assistance in finding a marriage partner.
“We work with them to show their strengths, highlight the positive things they offer,” Shapiro said. They also teach “how to flirt and at the same time how to listen and respond to the other person on the date so they can get an advantage over others. This applies to employment as well. We have to market ourselves for our abilities and strengths to be seen and noticed.”
Shapiro believes one of the organization’s strengths is that “we are led by the very people with whom we are working.”
“We know what it’s like to live with disabilities or a chronic health condition and we know what works and what doesn’t.”
One of the leaders in the organization is board member Michael Levy, director of the Travel Training program for the MTA, which helps disabled New Yorkers navigate the transit system.
“[One of my goals] is to begin to teach the Jewish community that informed Jews with disabilities are a valuable source of information for making decisions about a disabled child or yourself if you have a disability later in life,” said Levy, who is blind.
He’d also like to see communities considering the needs of disabled Jews from the beginning of any building project or program. “Jews with disabilities should be included not as an afterthought,” he said. “If you’re building a synagogue, build it with Jews with disabilities in mind. Make facilities accessible, including educational institutions, wedding halls and community centers. It should become as natural as putting computer cables in a building because you know you’ll have a computer.”
It’s surprising that more isn’t done within the Jewish community for people with disabilities, considering prominent Jewish figures that have served as examples. “Isaac, Joseph and Moses all had what could be considered disabilities,” Levy said. “I often wonder if Moses were growing up today, would he have been sent to a special school because he had a speech impediment?”
Levy wants to see Jews with disabilities able to participate fully in communal life, much in the way he did. When he was growing up in Bradley Beach, N.J., some people believed his blindness would confine him to the margins. A man from the local synagogue visited the Levy house when Michael was 3 to teach him the Shema, thinking that’s all he would ever know. Levy later defied the well-intentioned man’s expectations, as his father began teaching Hebrew Braille to his son and a blind girl living in a nearby town. Levy became bar mitzvah, participated in the Conservative movement’s United Synagogue Youth and was eventually ordained at the Jewish Theological Seminary. Today, with the help of software from CSB CARE, a nonprofit organization that develops computer programs for the visually, physically or learning disabled, Levy is able to study Jewish texts without assistance from volunteers like the ones who helped him study for ordination.
Levy stresses that advocating for the rights of people with disabilities is akin to the struggles for women’s rights and the Civil Rights Movement. “We experience the same stereotypes that women, blacks and even Jews have faced,” he said. “We want responsibility ... we want change.”
Malky Ganz also wanted change, which is why she contacted Yad HaChazakah this past summer, while she was vacationing in Monsey. Ganz, who asked to use a pseudonym to protect her privacy, was having trouble with a Jewish-owned bus company that refused to allow her to board its buses with her guide dog, Princess.
The first time a bus driver refused her, “I called the police, but they never came,” Ganz said. “The bus driver called his boss, and the compromise was for me to sit in the back of the bus. I sympathized with people who went through it during segregation. They said it was a private bus company and they didn’t have to follow the law.” By law, no one is allowed to deny access to a blind person with a guide dog.
The bus company claimed that Princess scared the children, and they were thinking in the children’s best interests, afraid they would run scared off the bus and possibly get hurt. Ganz’s husband said he didn’t see any children run from the bus.
On behalf of Ganz, Wayne Lacks and board member Chaim Biberfeld, who is also blind, met with the CEO of the bus company and set up a contingency plan. When Ganz boarded the bus, she would introduce herself and Princess, and explain she needed Princess to help her. Due to an injury, Ganz was never able to act out the plan.
Ganz believes that the Jewish community needs to be better educated about guide dogs. “[In the Orthodox community] I come from, animals are not usually accepted in the household,” she said. “I always had animals, a cat, later a bird. We came from a generation after the war where people were afraid of dogs.” For many children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors, the dogs stir memories of Nazi searches. “They don’t know animals can be kind beings. They need to be educated and I love the opportunity to do it.”
Knowing she has a resource like Yad HaChazakah to turn to feels “very good, because I know I can pick up the phone or send an e-mail to Sharon,” Ganz said. “Just knowing she’s there, that I can consult with her. We speak the same language. Not Hebrew, English or Yiddish, but she knows what I’m talking about.” n
Yad HaChazakah brochures are available in large-print, Braille and sound recording from its Web site, www.yad-jdec.org. The organization can be contacted by phone at (212) 284-6936 and Voice and 711 TTY Relay Service is available.

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