Toronto-born Ayala (Elaine) Tal-El was recently chosen as one of 12 recipients of the prestigious Worthy Citizen of Jerusalem, Yakirat Yerushalayim recognized for outstanding and significant contributions to the city. The municipality receives dozens of applications for the coveted honour every year, which was presented May 22.
Tal-El, who made aliya some 40 years ago, was honoured for her pioneering work founding AV Israel (AVI), which has been instrumental in diagnosing, training, supporting and actively advocating for deaf and hearing-impaired children to learn normative speech and language and be mainstreamed into Israeli society and schools.
“A deaf child, if one starts early, will not need a special education framework,” she maintains.
For Tal-El and husband Eli, a filmmaker and musician, the involvement with the international AV (Auditory-Verbal) therapy program started when their twin daughters Dana and Tamar were diagnosed as deaf at the age of two.
“At first, we thought, well, they have their own language, but as time went on it became clear that the twins were hearing impaired.”
The journey began with Tal-El’s sister Anne, a physician at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, who connected the family with the AV approach. Her research on behalf of her nieces led her to AV International, which helps children with hearing loss through technology, speech therapy and parental involvement.
“When my sister told me of the AV approach, I was skeptical. It did not exist in Israel. On an unplanned trip to visit us that first summer, my sister signed us up with AV International and brought us the Learning to Listen book about the AV approach. Thanks to her research in Toronto and subsequent connections with a family that we met through AV International, we decided to use AV with the twins,” said Tal-El.
Tal-El said that they were told at Hadassah Medical Center where the twins were diagnosed, that they would never speak like their older sisters nor go to a regular school or to the army.
“Everything was no, no, no. We were broken.”
Tal-El explained that Auditory-Verbal therapy differs from other strategies which assume that hearing is the weakest link so the emphasis is on vision. It is easier to learn lip reading and sign language.
“AV rejects that approach. Hearing takes place in the brain. If you can get to the brain by circumventing the problem of the inner ear, there is no reason you can’t develop the part of the brain responsible for hearing and teach the child to listen and learn language that way.”
Dana and Tamar were among the first children in Israel to get cochlear implants at a time when such a procedure was seen by many as the death of deaf culture.
“We were told that deaf people do not need to be ‘fixed’, that deafness is not a disability- it’s a difference,” Tal-El recalled. “But, in fact, not being able to hear and to speak limits opportunities for deaf people to maximize their potential.”
“My personal journey morphed into a national journey,” Tal-El said. “When we went to see the preschool for the deaf run by the Micha organization, the room was totally silent and the teacher was over-articulating so the children could read her lips.
“We did not want our girls in a special needs program. The Micha approach was not for us. We had already started AV, teaching our girls to hear using the technology. Whatever it takes to help the child use their brain to hear; cochlear implants, hearing aids, whatever. The resistance we met was not to the technology but to our belief that deaf children could be mainstreamed from the start and learn speech and language.”
The Tal-Els connected with another Toronto family who had made aliya with two children with profound hearing losses who had been taught the AV approach. “They wanted to bring this program to Israel as a Zionist contribution and so did we.”
The Learning to Listen book was translated into Hebrew and the Tal-Els started holding parlour meetings. They brought several Canadian audiology experts to Jerusalem to teach professionals and to meet with parents and discuss the advantages of the AV approach.
AV Israel became a nonprofit in 1994, starting with the Jerusalem centre which is now at Yad Sarah. During Tal-El’s leadership, AV centres have opened in Beit Shemesh, Haifa and near Sderot in the Negev where a hearing booth was built and audiologists work with the families who were waiting a year-and-a-half for services.
“We are providing AV speech therapy to more than 100 hearing impaired children weekly, and thousands of hearing tests and cochlear implant mappings a year for children from all over the country, from all sectors of the population,” she said.
Just 7 percent of their annual budget comes from the government, although cochlear implant surgery and the technology are covered by health insurance. The education ministry, she says, knows who they are but does not recognize their struggle to integrate hearing impaired children into mainstream schools.
“But I never gave up,” Tal-El said. “I sometimes think my being an immigrant may have been a liability to AVI’s growth because Israelis don’t take kindly to people from abroad telling them what to do. There’s the old boys club,” she continued. “The guys who attended the same schools, did the army together. I don’t have that.”
She credited her upbringing with giving her the tenacity to keep going when doors closed and the organization was refused the help they desperately needed.
“Maybe it’s because I come from a family of social activists. Maybe it’s my need to do something good. It’s been a struggle and a journey.”
After over thirty years of hard work and an uphill battle, the reward of recognition as Yakirat Yerushlayim is the stamp of approval for the work that has been done on behalf of children with hearing loss and their families.
“Meeting the families has been one of the most enriching experiences of my life, including haredi-Orthodox families who are involved in the AV program. It’s allowed me a window into Israeli society I never would have had otherwise. I thought I’d become an academic, or a high school principal.”
Tal-El and her team had submitted the application for the prestigious award because quite frankly they were hoping a monetary gift was part of the honour. Most of their budget comes from services they provide to the families and fundraising.
“Nope, no money” she said with a smile. “We were given two burial plots on Har Hamenuchot, Jerusalem’s local cemetery, in a special section reserved for the Yakirim overlooking the city.”
Today, 35-year-old twins Dana and Tamar are fully integrated into Israeli society. Dana is a professional photographer and Tamar is a teacher in Tel Aviv working with children diagnosed with autism.
“It empowers the parents to see what their children’s teacher is achieving with the class, despite her impairment,” Tal-El said.
Tal-El, who grew up in Toronto (as Elaine Matlow) and attended Beth Tzedec Congregation, is a regular Torah reader and prayer leader at Kol HaNeshama synagogue in Jerusalem. Ten years after the twins were diagnosed, they had their bat mitzvahs at the synagogue, just like their older sisters Michal and Noa.
“I taught them how to read Torah, but the Haftorah was too difficult to sing so they did a dramatic reading of the portion which was Dry Bones from Ezekiel,” she recalled proudly. “They spoke, gave a drasha. The only difference between their bat mitzvah and those of their older sisters were the boxes of tissue we placed at the entrance of the sanctuary because we knew that when the girls were done, there would not be a dry eye in the room.”
