The bar and bat mitzvah ceremonies mark Jewish children's public passage into a new identity as people responsible for their actions and for living in accordance with their faith.
What about autistic children, however, whose identities seem locked away inside them? How can they profess themselves responsible members of a community?
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Sunday, December 23, 2007 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 1 inches; 59 words Type of Material: Correction
Autistic child: In an early edition of today's Section A and the California section, two photo captions about an autistic child having his bar mitzvah identified Sarah Armstrong Jones as the mother of Dov Shestack. She is the boy's aunt. The article also referred to his mother, though not by name; those references should have been to his aunt.
Such questions sometimes occupied Elias Lefferman, chief executive of Vista del Mar Child & Family Services, a nonprofit agency with roots in the Westside Jewish community, and he went looking for answers. He found them in Elaine Hall, a tiny woman with an outsize reputation for coaxing autistic children out of their sequestered worlds using methods she developed working with her own autistic son.
Hall had trained youngsters for theatrical productions. Lefferman wondered if she might apply her methods to prepare autistic youngsters for bar and bat mitzvah ceremonies. Hall leaped at the opportunity.
On a recent afternoon, three boys in the program demonstrated how they train for the ceremony -- Hall's son Neal, who is nonverbal; 12-year-old Wyatt Isaacs, a highly functioning, keenly articulate boy; and Dov Shestack, a lanky 15-year-old who is nonverbal and seems disconnected from the world around him.
Wyatt and the adults sang a song titled "Because of My Brothers and Friends," while Neal danced with his mother and intermittently hummed. Dov sat on stage with his aunt, who kept one hand on his cheek to help him maintain eye contact with her and the other hand on his throat to feel the vibrations that indicated he was singing.
Such moments are a constant source of encouragement.
Hall started the program in October 2006. Working with a group of five children, she and her volunteers taught prayers by having their students sing them, dance them, act them out, and, for the profoundly nonverbal, beat drums to show they were sharing the experience. To teach Hebrew letters, they had the nonverbal children form them with their bodies or bake them as cookies. They had the youngsters make their own yarmulkes and rehearse in Vista del Mar's sanctuary where they would eventually perform.
Last May, two of the boys, including Neal, had their bar mitzvahs, appearing before an audience of 92.
With the help of his speech therapist, Neal had written a long speech, which was spoken by his stepfather. One of Neal's coaches, Cantor Steve Puzarne, had recorded songs and prayers into an electronic device, and Neal had to push the right buttons at the appropriate times in the ceremony to play them.
