When Alyssa Chadow attends Shabbat services next week at Oakland’s Temple Sinai, she will have with her a Braille version of the new Reform prayerbook, “Mishkan T’filah.”
All 14 oversized volumes of it.
Chadow is legally blind, due to a brain tumor she developed as a teen. For years, she used a Braille copy of the former Reform siddur, “Gates of Prayer.” But when the Reform movement switched to its new prayerbook last year, a promised Braille version didn’t materialize.
Chadow finally has a siddur of her own — thanks to Temple Sinai disability activists and a group of volunteer Braille transcribers in the East Bay.
Those transcribers will be honored at Shabbat services June 12. The Braille siddur, which will be kept at the synagogue because of its size, will also make its debut that evening.
“I want people in my congregation to see how important Braille is to me and for people like me,” says Chadow, 48, an Alameda resident and teacher at California School for the Blind in Fremont. “If I’m not able to practice Judaism, does part of Judaism die?”
Chadow’s friend, Toby Berger, did not want to find out. When she learned of Chadow’s dilemma, she took action. Berger contacted a friend who’d formerly volunteered as a Braille transcriber. That led her to a Contra Costa–based group that has been transcribing Braille for more than 40 years.
Anne Kelt, 81, of Pleasant Hill, has been a transcriber for most of that time. She says her group usually works on school textbooks, so a Jewish prayerbook was something new.
“This has been a wonderful experience,” Kelt says, adding that “the thing that was hardest for me was starting at the back of the book,” referring to the book’s Hebrew-style, right-to-left format.
The Braille siddur is English only, as the Hebrew and its transliteration proved beyond the scope of the transcribers. Total cost of brailling the book: less than $100. And now it’s on computer disc, available for anyone who needs a copy (a Braille embosser can print a book directly from a computer).
Chadow did call the Jewish Braille Institute, the Union of Reform Judaism and the Central Conference of American Rabbis (CCAR) last year, asking when she could expect the Braille version of “Mishkan T’filah.” She got no definitive answer.
Rabbi Hara Person of CCAR, the Reform movement’s New York–based rabbinical association, attributes the holdup to production problems with the print version, as well as personnel cutbacks. By the time Person joined the CCAR executive team seven months ago, she knew she had some catching up to do.
“The CCAR has been in the process of fixing a lot of things that have not gone right in the past. Today we’re in better shape in all kinds of ways. One of my priorities is to create a Braille version [of the siddur].”
Ellen Isler, president and CEO of the Jewish Braille Institute in New York, says her organization has brailled every siddur for every Jewish denomination throughout its 80-year history, and intends to do the same with “Mishkan T’filah.”
“We just signed a contract with the CCAR,” Isler says. “The process of producing a Braille siddur with both English and Hebrew is very labor intensive and very costly. It will cost us close to $40,000. We will begin producing as soon as we get some money to start the editing and keying.”
It will take about a year to complete the first volume, she said.
For Chadow, the new siddur means a lot. Raised in a non-observant home in the Long Island, N.Y., town of Little Neck, she came to Judaism wholeheartedly as an adult. She’s a regular at Temple Sinai’s Torah study group.
Though she felt slighted by the Reform movement organizations, “I’m not as angry now,” she says. “I would like to think something like this is not going to happen again. I want it to be water under the bridge.”
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