Sign Language

Videos teach sign language

Israeli politicians learn to sign on the day that the Institute for the Advancement of Deaf Persons in Israel inaugurated a new online dictionary at the Knesset on Oct. 21. (photo from Institute for the Advancement of Deaf Persons in Israel)

A new online Israeli Sign Language (ISL) dictionary is helping people communicate by teaching hearing people via short video clips how to sign words. It is Yael Kakon’s vision come to life.

Kakon is the executive director of the Institute for the Advancement of Deaf Persons in Israel (IADPI).

“Our institute is working in several fields and one of them is to increase the use of sign language, especially with the people working with [those who are deaf], but also in the general population in Israel,” said Kakon, whose parents are deaf. “We have done several smaller dictionaries that were meant for specific industries. This is the first one that is online that people can reach anywhere.”

The previous dictionaries were on CD-ROM disks. These versions became outdated, as operating systems changed to the point that people could no longer use them.

There was a Signs in Crisis dictionary that was widely used by Magen David Adom and in hospitals. Signs of Judaism was another, as was Dictionary for Terminology, which was designed for high school science and math and was also translated into Arabic. The newest lexicon incorporates all of these versions, as well as additional words. Its video dictionary currently has just over 3,000 clips of signing in four languages: English, Hebrew, Arabic and Russian.

The limit on words and languages is because the cost was prohibitive to go further at the moment, said Kakon, who is hopeful that more clips will be added along the way.

Every 10th word out of the dictionary was chosen, followed by a manual check to ensure that all the important words were on the list. This is a systematic method that linguists use when compiling dictionaries, she explained.

“The translation into four languages was very complicated,” said Elias Kabakov, director of program development. “Even translation into Hebrew, because, if there are two languages, each one can have synonyms and each one can mean different things in different contexts…. English can have different context. It’s the same with Russian and Arabic. This must have delayed completion of the dictionary by two years. It’s not just a matter of translating a bunch of words, but making sure the intention of each sign was right.”

“Although we just started,” Kakon said, “I can tell you that there has been a huge celebration in the deaf community. People felt pride. They felt like a unit, a big unit, a unit that got a lot of attention.

“One deaf person came and told us that he came to work the day after the release, at the place he had worked for several years, and one of the workers, a hearing person, came to him and told him in sign language, ‘Good morning. How are you?’ And he was shocked, and said, ‘I worked here for seven years. He never came to me and told me good morning.’

“He continued by asking the person, ‘What’s going on? How do you know how to sign?’ And the answer was, ‘I looked on the dictionary.’ He was very proud to tell us the story.”

Kakon said that all the people in the videos are deaf, as IADPI gives priority to employing deaf professionals. “Although I sign very well myself, due to my parents being deaf, I will never be in the front, because I think the deaf person should be in the front and I can hear,” she explained.

According to its website, the dictionary was produced with contributions from Alex Garfeld and the late Prof. Miriam Shlesinger, “who actively supported linguistic accessibility for the deaf and the hard-of-hearing population of Israel.”

Visit isl.org.il to use the dictionary or get the Signs in Crisis app. For more information about IADPI, including information about donations, visit dpii.org.

Rebeca Kuropatwa is a Winnipeg freelance writer.

E-books for deaf kids

A person – as opposed to an avatar – signs American Sign Language in the eMotion Stories app.

It is hard to beat the pleasure of sitting down with your children or grandchildren and reading them a bedtime story, whether that story is a classic like Goldilocks, a Yiddish folktale or even a book written by someone you know. This simple pleasure was not even an option until recently for families with deaf kids, as Israeli American, Eyal Rosenthal, 34, discovered.

While visiting family in New York, Rosenthal had a chance to read a bedtime story to his nephew before heading out to visit with a friend over coffee. Rosenthal told his friend about his nephew, and she told him about her niece, who was born deaf.

“I asked her how she reads to her niece,” said Rosenthal. “She said, ‘We don’t…. We can go to Barnes and Noble across the street and you can find some books with baby sign language or whatever, but you won’t find any actual story to read to a deaf child.’”

Learning of this inspired Rosenthal to look for a solution. “Being an Israeli, we tend to think we can solve everything,” he noted. And, in this case, he could – he created an app called eMotion Stories.

Coming from a high-tech background and being an investor/developer of apps, Rosenthal initially mulled over the idea of creating an avatar to sign the books for eMotion Stories, but found that it was much simpler and less costly to have a live person do it.

“It’s the placement of a sign, the body language within that,” said Rosenthal. “To try to get an avatar to do that is incredibly difficult and costly, and probably something that’s 10 years down the road.”

The other problem Rosenthal encountered was that sign language varies from country to country. “It’s not a universal language,” he said. “Each country, each region, actually develops on its own.”

While Rosenthal was able to overcome most obstacles by himself, there were two that stumped him – the sign language itself, as noted, and the development work of the videos. “One of the good things about being in Israel, especially in Tel Aviv, is there are developers everywhere,” he said.

Rosenthal found Go UFO, a company that was just getting started at that time. On connecting with the Go UFO team, Rosenthal said, “It was like two minds meeting. The moment they heard the idea, they were like, we love this, we love your passion for it, we want to help you create it.”

Choosing the stories to feature was the next challenge. Rosenthal decided to start with the Brothers Grimm.

Since the whole concept began with Rosenthal wanting to enable his friend to share a story with her niece, he opted to do the stories in American Sign Language (ASL). And, to find a signer for the e-books, he went to New York Deaf Theatre. As for the illustrations, a Go UFO team member’s father was an illustrator, and he offered to have some of his friends help out (making it possible for Rosenthal to afford the illustrations).

“It was interesting convincing people to help when you don’t have the money to pay them what they want and you have to successfully convince them to do it anyway,” said Rosenthal. “That took some learning.”

As of now, five e-stories have been created for the iPad. When downloading the free app, the e-book of The Ugly Duckling is included. Each additional story is $4.59. The stories available are The Ugly Duckling and Goldilocks and the Three Bears so far, with Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella and The Three Little Pigs coming soon.

Rosenthal would like to produce five more books.

“The classic stories are ones that a parent can relate to because he/she read that story as a child and they can read it to their child,” he said. “One of the unfortunate facts I uncovered in the research is that the level of comprehension for deaf children is several levels below that of [hearing] children. This is a gap that widens through the years. One thing I was hoping was, at least, to be able to bridge that gap. When you’re 6 years old and you’re one year behind, it’s not the same as when you’re in high school and you’re … behind.”

One of the goals Rosenthal has for this coming year is to create a version in another language, one similar to ASL, the simplest example of which would be Canadian Sign Language.

“The guys at Go UFO are trying to create more of a platform where any country can simply add its sign language videos or an individual can add videos to a particular story and modify the text, since the illustrations already exist, to make it more broad,” said Rosenthal.

So far, the app has been downloaded 3,000 times.

“I’ve gotten emails from parents saying that they love it and when are more stories going to come out,” said Rosenthal. “Some were asking when an android version would come out.”

Rosenthal would like to create an android version, but that will require more funding, which he hopes to raise with a Kickstarter or Indigogo campaign.

Many people have been helping move the project along, such as members of the Israeli Society for the Deaf and the Hard of Hearing. Rosenthal has also been recently approached by a deaf Israeli actor who asked Rosenthal to let him know when things proceed on the Israeli front because he would like to help.

Rosenthal said that without the Go UFO programmers eMotion Stories would never have come to fruition. “I’m incredibly indebted to those guys,” he said.

For more information about the app, visit emotionstories.com.

Rebeca Kuropatwa is a Winnipeg freelance writer.

Films offer glance at Bedouin life

A still from the movie Voices from El Sayed.

When one is a Bedouin living in southern Israel, ironies seem to multiply with regularity. Two relatively recent Israeli-made films bring this incongruous life into sharp focus.

In the first, Voices from El Sayed: A Snail in the Desert (2009, documentary), director Oded Leshem examines a minority within a minority – a special needs Bedouin group. In the second, Sharqiya (2012, drama), director Ami Livne focuses on an Israeli Bedouin who, although he has spent his young adult life protecting other Israelis – first as a soldier and then as a security guard – faces eviction from his land because the Israeli authorities do not acknowledge it as his.

Leshem focuses on both the social and technological challenges facing the deaf members of the El Sayed Bedouin. In an understated but convincing manner, Leshem makes this point: for people who are deaf, this Bedouin tribe is both heaven and hell.

Leshem presents a lot of information in his 75-minute film. For starters, he unearths this nugget: the El Sayed have the highest concentration of deaf people of any community in the world. Estimates are that this desert community located northeast of the Negev city of Be’ersheva has 3,000 tribal members and, of this number, 125-150 are deaf. Intra-marriage is high – 65 percent of El Sayed’s couples are somehow related – so deafness is, therefore, more often transmitted from generation to generation. Almost every family has a deaf family member.

In this village, deafness is acknowledged as a fact of life. Not only is it considered normal, but everyone in the film – hearing and deaf – knows and uses sign language. At first glance, deaf community members appear totally accepted and functioning comfortably within the group. There is always someone with whom to converse – but in which language does one communicate?

According to Leshem’s film, language is one of the major social challenges facing Israel’s minorities. The film notes that the older deaf members of El Sayed converse in their own form of signing: El Sayed Bedouin Sign Language (EBSL). A number of the younger members, however, have studied in schools outside the community. These schools fall under the jurisdiction of the Israeli Ministry of Education, so these Bedouin study Israeli Sign Language (ISL). In addition, these same young students learn to read and write in Hebrew, rather than in Arabic, their mother tongue.

There is no school for the deaf on tribal land: children are bused to a school in Be’ersheva. But not every deaf child attends or has attended this facility. As the audience learns, some young adults studied in the centre of the country. However, on the positive side, the film explains that Be’ersheva has a special early childhood class for the hearing challenged, which is taught by traditional Bedouin teachers.

The deaf young adult tribal members who speak in the film want to marry deaf partners. But in this strongly paternalistic society, their parents still have a lot of say in marital matches. Some of the hearing parents want their marriage-age children to break what they see as a chain of deafness, so they are interested in having their deaf offspring pair off with hearing mates.

Not only are there parents who want to alter the course of future generations, but there are those trying to improve the life of their offspring in the present. The movie depicts one set of hearing parents who decide that one of their children will be the first El Sayed member to undergo a cochlear implant.

The good news is that the Israeli health-care system will cover the cost of the surgery and the implant itself. But, as viewers soon grasp, this family faces many other obstacles. The first several months following surgery entail regular and frequent trips back to Be’ersheva’s Soroka Hospital. During these hospital visits, the parents learn how to encourage their toddler to listen in everyday situations. Both the mother and father accompany the child to the hospital. There, they work with a Hebrew-speaking professional staff. The father speaks and reads Hebrew fluently, but the mother does not. No Arabic translator is provided. This point is critical as, at home, the mother has the huge task of ensuring that all the other children participate in the training.

No less significant is the hospital staff’s lack of awareness of the overall situation in El Sayed. While Leshem’s camera reveals that high-tension wires stand in close proximity to the village, the film’s narrative discloses that El Sayed is not hooked up to the national grid. There is no electricity, except for the generators that power the village. Just as the hospital staff comes to terms with the family’s difficulty in keeping all the implant parts properly charged, so the audience grasps just how challenging this procedure is for this family.

El Sayed lacks what most Westerners would consider basic utilities or services. For the dispersed Bedouins living in areas of southern Israel, which successive governments have classified as “unrecognized,” not having electricity or running water is a common situation. Nowhere is that brought home more clearly than in Livne’s drama Sharqiya.

photo - a still from Sharqiya — A still from *Sharqiya*.

The story of Sharqiya centres around two brothers and the wife of one trying to live on family land. The land appears fairly inhospitable. Family members live quite minimally in one-room tin huts, serviced by a temperamental generator. In the barren surroundings, one brother herds a small number of goats, while Kamel Najer, the other brother and main character, works as a security guard in Be’ersheva’s central bus station.

Westerner viewers might wonder why it is so important to keep this undeveloped plot of land, especially when Israeli authorities offer compensation for leaving it. Coming from a Western society, it is also hard to get one’s head around the notion of inheriting land without documentation. But this is exactly what the Najer brothers claim: their family has lived on the land for generations.

In the film, viewers watch the authorities stand by, waiting to destroy the Najers’ homestead, as Kamel packs up cherished memorabilia from his army service. We witness this young Israeli Bedouin – who has felt enough sense of belonging to hold on to his army pictures and banners – have his living space made not just unfit, but non-existent. Livne makes it clear that if Israeli society does not appreciate the irony of this situation, it will not understand that such treatment puts the fragile foundation of Israel’s democratic structure at risk of collapse.

When the human and humane element is missing – as depicted by the Israel Land Authority’s tractor leveling the family’s meagre housing and corral – the cracks in society’s foundation deepen. The frustration and the disappointment do not fade out: in the closing shot, they are inscribed on Kamel’s face.

Deborah Rubin Fields is an Israel-based features writer. She is also the author of Take a Peek Inside: A Child’s Guide to Radiology.

More on the Bedouin

The following links are to position papers or websites of some of those involved in Israeli Bedouin affairs.

From the Israeli government: mmi.gov.il/static/HanhalaPirsumim/Beduin_information.pdf

From Jewish National Fund: www.kkl.org.il/eng/about-kkl-jnf/kkl-jnf-in-public-discourse/kkl-jnf-conferences/kkl-jnf-european-leadership-conference/kkl-jnf-position-bedouin

From a few nongovernmental organizations:

• adva.org/uploaded/NegevEnglishSummary.pdf

• dukium.org/eng/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/NCF-CounterClaims-Dec10.pdf

• acri.org.il/en/category/arab-citizens-of-israel/negev-bedouins-and-unrecognized-villages