Sunday started the Jewish new year. I am announcing that this coming year their will be some new things I will be starting.
I am looking to start some support groups one for parents, and one for the disabled.
I have some big events I will be starting which hopefully will get the Jewish community thinking more about disabilities.
I am also hoping to do many speaking engagements speaking about my life, engaging disabled people in the community, disabilities in Judaism, and Disabilities in the Israeli defense force (contact me if interested).
Also I am looking at creating new content on the blog to help better educate people on all things relating to disabilities.
I look forward to doing my best to change lives!
Sunday, September 4, 2016
Photo of F.S.U. Football Star Sitting With Boy Eating Alone at School Charms Internet
Photo
Travis Rudolph, center, a Florida State University wide receiver, having lunch with the sixth grader Bo Paske at Montford Middle School in Tallahassee, Fla., on Tuesday.Credit Michael Halligan, via Associated Press
Travis Rudolph, a star football player at Florida State University in Tallahassee, is no stranger to the spotlight. He is famous for his award-winning athleticism, catching high and running far as a wide receiver.
But it was Mr. Rudolph’s action off the football field that earned him national attention this week when, visiting a local school on a good-will visit with his teammates on Tuesday, he made a simple gesture.
He sat down at a lunch table.
In a moment captured on camera and shared widely on social media, Mr. Rudolph saw a boy sitting alone in the cafeteria at Montford Middle School.
“So I asked him could I sit down and have lunch with him,” Mr. Rudolph said in an interview with “Fox and Friends” on Thursday. “And he said, ‘Sure why not?’ ”
The boy introduced himself. His name was Bo Paske. He was a sixth grader.
“And the conversation went from there,” Mr. Rudolph said.
Although Mr. Rudolph, 21, did not know it at the time, Bo has autism and often eats lunch by himself, according to the boy’s mother, Leah Paske, who wrote about the moment and published the photograph on Facebook on Tuesday. Since then, the image of the football star eating pizza while seated opposite Bo has became an example of how a small act of kindness can go big.
Mr. Rudolph, Bo and Ms. Paske have since been inundated with requests for interviews with national media organizations, appearing on news programs and in newspapers. Ms. Paske’s post has been shared more than 13,000 times, and the photograph has been circulating on Twitter, including on the account of Autism Speaks, an advocacy and support organization, from where it was retweeted nearly 600 times.
“I did not even recognize that it will be this big,” Mr. Rudolph told the Fox show as Bo sat next to him and his mother sat on the other side of her son. “Everybody is the same, and one man can make a difference.”
Efforts to reach Mr. Rudolph through a family member were unsuccessful on Thursday. Ms. Paske did not immediately return emails and phone calls seeking comment.
The story also shed light on some of the challenges that face families coping with relatives who have autism spectrum disorder, which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention defines as a group of developmental disabilities that can cause social, communication and behavioral challenges in about one in 68 children.
Ms. Paske said in her Facebook post that she was sometimes “grateful” that her son had the condition.
“That may sound like a terrible thing to say, but in some ways I think, I hope, it shields him,” she wrote. “He doesn’t seem to notice when people stare at him when he flaps his hands. He doesn’t seem to notice that he doesn’t get invited to birthday parties anymore. And he doesn’t seem to mind if he eats lunch alone.”
She said that she asks him questions about his school experience every day.
“ ‘Was there a time today you felt sad?’ ‘Who did you eat lunch with today?’ Sometimes the answer is a classmate, but most days it’s nobody. Those are the days I feel sad for him, but he doesn’t seem to mind. He is a super sweet child, who always has a smile and hug for everyone he meets.”
She said that a friend of hers was at the school on the day that Mr. Rudolph and his teammates visited.
“I am not sure what exactly made this incredibly kind man share a lunch table with my son, but I’m happy to say that it will not soon be forgotten,” Ms. Paske said on Facebook. “This is one day I didn’t have to worry if my sweet boy ate lunch alone, because he sat across from someone who is a hero in many eyes.”
During the interview on Thursday, Ms. Paske recounted how anxious she had been as Bo attended middle school. As she spoke, Bo occasionally looked up at her and reached over to touch her arm whenever he saw that she was distressed.
Bo said that it was “amazing” that Mr. Rudolph had chosen to sit down with him, adding that the player had even signed his lunchbox.
Asked how the encounter had made him feel, Bo said, “It was kind of like me sitting on a rainbow.”
The IDF's “Roim Rachok” (“Watching the Horizon”) program, which integrates soldiers on the autism spectrum into the IDF, has expanded to the Ordnance Corps, reported the IDF Blog Saturday evening.
Roim Rachok volunteer IDF Website
The Ordnance Corps is now welcoming its first eight autism spectrum volunteers, as part of Roim Rachok. After testing and interviewing approximately 70 candidates, eight men were chosen to be a part of the program that began in November 2015.
“These men embody extraordinary visual memory and a great desire to learn and work in the best possible way,” the military blog quoted Major Yitzchak, Commander of the Optotronics Unit, as saying.
Autism-spectrum IDF volunteer. IDF Website
"It’s amazing to see the progress in these men,” he added. “They come on the day of their interview, shy, hardly understanding the wires and tools in front of them. Today, they are working just like their peers beside them.”
The volunteers learn social skills along with specialty skills. They attend recreational yoga classes, but also learn how to carry out routine activities like riding a bus. Four of them will be joining an optics unit and four will be in electronics.
Since tasks like fixing wires and molding cord coating are part of the work in almost any electrical field, the IDF hopes to make the volunteers as comfortable as possible in a normal workplace, both in and out of the army.
Autism-spectrum IDF volunteer. IDF Website
On June 30th, the future soldiers will wear their IDF uniforms for the first time. “I just want to be like everyone else,” Omer K, one of the future recruits in the group, told the blog. “I am very excited to put on the uniform.”
Maj. Yitzchak added, “The project creates a beneficial environment for both the volunteers and the IDF. The proteges receive occupations for life and we receive experienced, efficient, and motivated workers.”
Dahlia Joseph and James Trout have a rhythm. Trout either positions himself in the front row or figures out which campaign staffer has a microphone for the audience Q&A. Either way, he aims to maximize his chances of asking a presidential candidate a question. Joseph takes her position in the press pool, with her Canon EOS Rebel T5 camera. After weeks in Iowa and New Hampshire, where they’ve attended dozens upon dozens of campaign events, they’re now pros. Trout usually tells candidates that 70 percent of people with disabilities are unemployed, and then asks them what they intend to do about it. Dahlia captures it on film.
Joseph told me, “James and I—we’re a team. We’ve worked together for so long now that we have a flow when we go to events. It’s unspoken. We don’t even talk about it. We know exactly what we’re supposed to do.” Sure, events don’t always go as planned. Sometimes the twists and turns of a campaign event pull the candidate’s attention away from them, but there’s always the next town hall or rally. They’re in this for the long haul.
2015 marked the 25th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). The ADA has made life better for disabled Americans in many ways, but also failed in a few important respects. Unemployment remains shockingly high as do rates of violence against disabled individuals. The disabled community has never acquired the level of political influence its numbers would seem to justify.RespectAbility, a nonpartisan nonprofit focused on shaping policies that affect disabled Americans, aims to change that. It’s put a class of fellows on the campaign trail, Trout and Joseph among them, to attend presidential campaign events over the last few months.
Ben Spangenberg and Justin Chappell spent two weeks in January traveling around Iowa, committed to a grueling schedule to get to as many campaign events as possible. Chappell, who married Spangenberg last November, called it “a political nerd’s dream honeymoon.” Both men are wheelchair users with spina bifida, and the snowy sidewalks, ramps, and streets of Iowa were not always easy to navigate. At one Ted Cruz rally where the pair couldn’t get close during the event, Chappell made his way towards the stage while Spangenberg circled around the building to wait by the bus, hoping to catch the senator on his way out. “It was really cold,” said Chappell, “and Ben was outside for at least half an hour waiting for the senator to come outside to talk to him. We didn’t take the easiest path to talk to these candidates.”
There are over 56 million Americans with disabilities. Tens of millions more are caregivers or family members of people with disabilities. In fact, pretty much everyone is at most one degree of separation from someone who is disabled. This is a large population that has all hallmarks of a powerful political constituency. Its members are diverse, stretching across the population; they are aware of their rights; and they rely on government officials to enforce the ADA, fund programs like Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI), and otherwise work to make American society more inclusive and accessible. Other well organized political groups, such as gun owners or the elderly, have long since found ways to push their issues into the national political dialogue, tapping wealthy donors and organizing interest groups like the NRA and AARP. Why not disabled Americans?
One issue, says Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi, the CEO of RespectAbility, is the conventional wisdom that all people with disabilities are Democrats fixated on government spending. She told me, “Democrats take the group for granted, and Republicans don’t reach out to it,” even though her data says that disabled Americans are much more interested in opportunity than government benefits. That’s an approach that could easily bridge both sides of the aisle.
The complexities of disability culture, though, also come into play. Many disabled individuals reject the word disability, claiming only their specific diagnosis or dismissing language of impairment all together. Stigma forces many people with invisible disabilities to pass as typical if they can. Voting sites are not always fully accessible, depressing the percentages of disabled voters in any region. Disability-rights organizations tend to be focused on promoting and shaping specific policies, brilliant in their wonky advocacy, but perhaps less focused on broad political impact. Finally, it’s possible that the fact that disabled Americans come from all political parties, races, classes, religions, and regions makes it difficult to build political coalitions around electing specific candidates. And yet, disabled people have specific needs that the political process seems to be ignoring.
As the presidential election cycle got underway in 2015, Mizrahi launched a new approach to make every candidate think about the issues most important to disabled Americans. Instead of forming a super-PAC or trying to influence specific candidates through donations, she found funding to hire a group of fellows and send them out into the field. Many of them are disabled. All of them are keenly aware of the major issues facing the community. They would act as journalists, writing reports under the editorial oversight from Communications Director Lauren Appelbaum. When possible, RespectAbility would obtain press credentials for fellows, getting them access to post-debate “spin rooms” and press conferences. Otherwise, the fellows would do what reporters have always done—log the miles, ask the questions, and report on the answers.
The new approach seems to be having an impact. The fellows are determined, well prepared, and most of all—so visible. When campaign officials see the Spangenberg and Chappell in wheelchairs, or when Trout identifies himself as having Aspergers every time he asks a question, they realize they need to be ready. Trout laughed as he told me about being recognized by Secret Service agents at a Trump event because they had seen him just days before at a Clinton one. “It’s one of those Iowa things,” he said.
More significantly, the campaigns are getting better at answering the questions.Jeb Bush took a question from Trout at Grinnell College a few weeks ago. First Bush talked passionately about employment, and then a few minutes later cycled back to Trout’s question to call Donald Trump a “jerk” for disparaging people with disabilities. Chappell described meeting Bill Clinton in Iowa and asking about his wife’s support for SSDI. A few days later, at another event, the former president paused to call out Spangenberg and Chappell in the front row, compliment them on their hard work, then took five minutes out of his stump speech to tout his administration’s work on supporting SSDI, before transitioning to his wife’s plans to go even farther if she’s elected.
Candidates don’t want to get caught on film unprepared on these issues. When they see the reporters from RespectAbility coming, they prepare clear talking points.
The success of this handful of reporters on the campaign trail highlights how inadequately conventional media outlets have highlighted these issues in the past. Few reporters are savvy about disability, beyond the basics of reporting on inspiring achievements or horrific tragedy. Major news outlets almost never have anyone on a disability “beat,” but rather fold such issues into health and medicine. Many in the disability community have spent 40 years trying to move outside a medical model of disability, but the media has been slow to catch up.
The RespectAbility fellows are not traditional, objective, political reporters. They are avowedly nonpartisan, but they are in Iowa and New Hampshire to shape the news, not just cover it. To some extent, though, that’s true of all reporters. Anyone who chooses to ask a candidate about one issue rather than another influences the realm of possible answers and the parameters of political debate. Groups and individuals who would like more discussion of their issues—climate change, reproductive rights, eminent domain, the drone war—complain about this routinely. Instead of complaining, though, the RespectAbility fellows are succeeding in shifting the conversation, just by showing up on the trail and asking questions. In the age of super PACs and the most expensive presidential campaign in U.S. history, that’s a remarkable accomplishment.
Israel’s first college aimed specifically at students with autism, Asperger’s syndrome and complex learning disabilities is set to open in March 2016.
According to the NRG news website, the BE Academic College will be a collaboration between Beit Ekstein, an organization that provides services to people with a variety of learning and developmental disabilities, and the Open University, a distance-learning institution with branches throughout the country.
“Out of close familiarity with the world of graduates with learning disabilities comes the establishment of the BE Academic College, whose goal it will be to make academic learning possible by building a supportive and adapted curriculum,” Beit Ekstein said in a statement announcing the institution’s upcoming opening.
The new institution will be housed at Beit Ekstein’s campus in Givatayim, a suburb of Tel Aviv. It will offer three interdisciplinary tracks meant to prepare its target population for the workforce. The programs announced by the academy are psychology and education, economics and computer science, and psychology and communications.
The Open University of Israel’s main campus in Raanana. (Ingsoc/Creative Commons)
One of the features of the new college will be the elimination of admissions requirements, giving those with learning and developmental disabilities the chance to begin studying for a degree without preconditions.
In addition to offering students specialized instruction in their fields of study, the programs will also provide career workshops and guidance in planning for the outside world. In addition, students will get support for their emotional and social needs.
Upon completion of the four-year programs, students will receive a degree from the Open University, an officially accredited institution by the Israel Council for Higher Education.
On its website, Beit Ekstein describes itself as a pioneer in the concept of inclusion in Israel of people with the following disabilities: mental retardation, minimal brain damage, learning disabilities, autism and Asperger’s syndrome. The organization provides these populations with assistance in housing, employment and educational services.
The organization runs a number of elementary and high schools around the country, including two in Givatayim.
According to the Israeli Society for Autistic Children, one in 100 Israeli babies are diagnosed with autism every year. There have been a number of recent Israeli initiatives related to autism and learning disabilities.
The IDF has begun providing opportunities for autistic soldiers in itsRoim Rachok (“Seeing Far”) program, drafting them into intelligence units where they decipher aerial reconnaissance photos to provide information to combat soldiers ahead of missions.
Roim Rachok helps people with autism integrate into the IDF and enables them to serve in key positions. (Courtesy of IDF)
Other tracks train candidates to be army electricians, who deal with devices like night vision goggles, or optics technicians, who work with binoculars.
In August, the Middle East’s first autism research center was established in Jerusalem by Hebrew University and Hadassah Medical Center.
The Autism Center is a collaborative and interdisciplinary effort bridging several faculties within both institutions, anchored in the Hebrew University’s Faculty of Medicine. The center brings together cutting-edge research, clinical services, state of the art training, and education for professionals and parents in the community.
David Shamah and Ben Sales contributed to this report.
Smiling and hugging Iranian and Israeli athletes have become the unintentional symbol of this summer’s Special Olympics now taking place in Los Angeles. “Modelling a heartwarming example of sports diplomacy,”GOODmagazine reports about the budding friendship between the two sports teams.
In previous sporting events, Iranian athletes have been ordered to withdraw from competition if their opponent was meant to be an Israeli. But at the Special Olympics something, well, special, is happening.
The Israeli and Iranian teams broke the ice even before the competition when they found themselves on the same transatlantic flight to California from Rome.
Smiling together: Iranian and Israeli athletes. (Photos: Special Olympics Israel Facebook)
“We were sitting next to each other and it was a twelve-hour flight,” Israeli Head of Delegation Reuven Astrachan tells GOOD. “So what do you for twelve hours? You talk. You talk to your neighbor.”
The Special Olympics Israel Facebook site is now peppered with blue-and-white uniformed athletes alongside red-green-and-white clothed participants.
In addition to making new friendships, the Israeli contestants at the international event are showing their prowess on the sports field and in the water. So far, Israel’s delegation has won medals in kayaking, long jump, tennis, bowling and track.
A hug worth a thousand words. (Photos: Special Olympics Israel Facebook)
The software development company has a goal to raise $350,000 through a 45-day crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo. The money will pay for 3,000 young autistic adults to take a six-month online training course.
The program is a modified version of LiveCode's Create It product, which teaches people with no coding experience how to create basic apps like messaging, calculators, and clocks. LiveCode says the goal is to give people on the autism spectrum an opportunity to develop job skills.
Autism is a developmental disability caused by a neurological disorder that affects a person's social and communication skills. But most people with autism are highly skilled in other ways. Many are particularly adept at recognizing patterns and paying close attention to detail.
"That can make coding tasks ideal," LiveCode says.
The company launched its Indiegogo fundraiser on Thursday, to coincide with World Autism Awareness Day.
In 2008, by a unanimous vote, the United Nations General Assembly established April 2 as World Autism Awareness Day to "highlight the need to help improve the quality of life of children and adults, who are affected by autism, so they can lead full and meaningful lives."
Earlier this year U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called on businesses to make firm commitments to hire autistic people.
"[They] have enormous potential," the Secretary-General said in a statement. "Yet even where autism awareness is most advanced, more than 80% of adults with autism are unemployed."
LiveCode wants to help in this respect too. Part of the new campaign is dedicated to job placement.
The company plans to create an online job marketplace where trainees can advertise their skills as freelance app developers.
In addition, "a very small number" of people who finish the training will be hired by LiveCode for a project based in Edinburgh, Scotland, where the company is headquartered.
"The goal is to create a sustainable commercial venture to boost employment prospects for those on the autism spectrum," LiveCode says. "If successful we will look at expanding to other cities and/or hiring from our autism-friendly online marketplace to create content, in future years."
While modern society strives to reach equality between men and women, the scientific community has often raised the question of whether gender differences could affect our health and well-being. A new Israeli study shows that gender differences affect autism and Alzheimer’s disease; its results could potentially help in improving treatment for other illnesses as well.
Autism and Alzheimer’s are cognitive-physical conditions that pose great difficulties for the patient, family and friends. While men are more likely to have autism with a ratio of three to one, women are more likely to suffer from Alzheimer’s disease. At this point, medicine can only offer limited treatments for these conditions, but this new Tel Aviv University study could shed light on how these diseases are formed, and more specifically, on what drives their development – so that doctors can better treat them.
The new research focuses on how a certain gene called ADNP – which regulates 400 proteins involved in the development of the human body – is causing gender-specific tendencies towards autism and Alzheimer’s disease. This means that to find a cure, men and women should be tested separately because they may respond differently to treatment.
Male and female mice have different cognitive abilities
In the study, researchers removed the ADNP gene from mice, and compared them to mice that had the gene. The mice showed gender-specific learning and memory differences: Male mice that had the gene removed expressed degraded object recognition, which means they could not identify objects well. They also exhibited degraded social memory.
Female mice of the same test group, however, showed social deficiency without degraded object recognition. “The gene’s gender-dependent expression changes male and female chemical tendencies toward different neurological disorders,” TAU’s Prof. Ilana Gozes said in a statement. “Male and female mice may look the same and their brains may look the same, but they are not. When the expression of ADNP is different, it may cause different behaviors and different cognitive abilities.”
Providing new hope for patients and their families
Gozes has studied ADNP in the past 15 years, and her new findings may be just enough to propel a revolution in drug research for autism and Alzheimer’s disease. “This study emphasizes the need to analyze men and women separately in clinical trials to find cures for diseases because they may respond differently,” she says.
While further investigation into gender differences in conditions such as autism and Alzheimer’s disease is needed, the researchers believe that this study could provide a stepping stone in finding a cure for autism and Alzheimer’s. Says Gozes: “If we understand how ADNP acts differently in males and females, we can try to optimize drugs for potential future therapeutics to treat both autism and Alzheimer’s disease.”
Research for the study was led by Prof. Ilana Gozes, and conducted by graduate students Anna Malishkevich, Noy Amram, and Gal Hacohen-Kleiman, in collaboration with post-doctoral fellow Dr. Iddo Magen, and staff scientist Dr. Eliezer Giladi.
The idea was born on the lawn. Some two dozen middle-aged men seated in a semicircle had come in February 2011 to comfort Dror and Yehudit Rotenberg, who had lost their son, Staff Sgt. Nadav Rotenberg, a month prior just outside Gaza. The men all knew each other well – they had served together with Dror in the Paratrooper Brigade recon unit in the seventies – but hadn’t seen each other in decades.
T, his blue eyes shaded by sandy eyebrows, shared a close bond with the father, who had, back in 1974, been his radio operator. The two had not seen each since. But T, who was teaching yoga classes and guiding solo trips out into the desert — newly retired after more than 20 years in the field as a Mossad officer — was immediately struck by the man’s predicament. He said he realized then and there that working with autistic young adults was his calling.
“Everything I had done up to this point prepared me for this,” T said, describing, among other things, the ability to tackle a complex issue, to swiftly separate the wheat from the chaff, and to focus intently on the critical elements. “I learnt that when something is really, really important then there is nothing that can stop you from doing it. And the trick is just to figure out what is really, really important.”
In this case, it was the integration of high-functioning autistic teens and young adults into one of the IDF Military Intelligence Directorate’s more crucial functions: aerial photography interpretation.
Israel’s Ofek-10 satellite takes off from Palmachim air base in central Israel on April 9, 2014. (photo credit: Israel Ministry of Defense and Israel Aerospace Industries)
The army has at its disposal, among other aerial reconnaissance vehicles, five military satellites orbiting the globe. The surveillance satellites deliver 3D images, at night and through any sort of cloud cover, to Tel Aviv in real time. Military intelligence’s Unit 9900 is in charge of interpreting the images. The work can be Sisyphean. It requires long hours of concentration and constant attention to detail.
The unit, like others in military intelligence, has the pick of the draft, selecting, from among the top tier of students, those with the necessary spatial intelligence and visual perception for the task. The commander of the unit, though, told T that he suffered from a dearth of decipherers. The soldiers he got, generally from the best schools and with the best grades, wanted to move on quickly and take command positions. “I live in a constant lack of manpower,” T recalled him saying.
Software that might replace the human decipherer, he added, was nowhere on the horizon.
For T and another Mossad alumna, L, a mother to an autistic young adult who came from the technology side of the secret service, the predicament in Unit 9900 presented “a win-win situation.”
Looking far
In early 2012, as T was looking into the relative strengths of those diagnosed with autism, he received a call from Tamir Pardo, the newly appointed head of the Mossad. “He said: ‘I hear there’s a guy called T dealing with this issue, is that you?” T recalled. “‘Listen, I’m devoted to this. If you need any help at all, turn to me.'”
A few weeks later, T asked Pardo if he could lend him “a few of the folks from the technology side of the game.”
Days later, L called. She had joined the Mossad after her service in the army’s elite Talpiot program and, as a physicist, had risen up the technology chain of command. But like many no-longer-young parents she worried about her autistic son: would he ever be able to live independently and would he have a profession to support himself.
Approaching retirement age, she said that while she was familiar with some of the skills common among autistic people “from the perspective of a mother,” Pardo was the one to suggest to her that perhaps autistic people would have a knack for interpreting visual images, especially satellite photos.
It turns out that it isn’t that simple. There are those who can glimpse the skyline of Rome from a passing helicopter and then recreate it perfectly on paper, and others who are able to see the irrational number of pi as something more like an image rather than an endless sequence and commit tens of thousands of consecutive numerals to memory with relative ease. These are savants, and they are exceedingly rare.
Dr. Yoram Bonneh, a senior lecturer at the University of Haifa’s Department of Human Biology, has led several research studies, including one later funded by the Defense Ministry, into the visual perception of people on the autistic spectrum.
He has found that they often have “a different” rather than categorically better visual perception, he said in a phone interview. They seemed to approach complex visual images “objectively,” he said, unburdened by “concepts of how things are supposed to be.”
Often people interpret what they see, he added, following a narrative that their brains have devised, but the majority of those with autism tended to focus “on the raw data.” He suggested looking at it like a chessboard. Those invested in the game, focused on the strategy and plotting moves and the repercussions of those moves, “are blinded” to the details of the board, he said. Those looking at the board more objectively were more likely to notice a slight aberration in the alignment of the pieces or a stain on one of the pawns.
For Unit 9900 this was more than enough. The commander of the classified unit, aware of some of the research in the field, said he would be glad to cooperate, and not for reasons of social awareness or the garnering of good karma.
Soldiers from Unit 9900 at work (photo credit: IDF Spokesperson’s Unit)
The plan was as follows: secure funding, find an academic home, find the appropriate applicants; build a program with the army that teaches the applicants the necessary deciphering skills, at first in a comfortable civilian setting, and then within the unit; equip the volunteers/soldiers with the tools to enable them to integrate not only into the tumult of a military unit but, later, into the wider workforce as well; and ensure that both the initial training and, later, the service, is accompanied by a cadre of trained therapists and socially minded officers.
T met with Professor Dudi Schwartz, the rector of the Ono Academic College. He chose it because it was in the center of the country and it had a well-regarded department of health professions, which included occupational therapy, speech therapy, and physiotherapy. Over a cup of coffee and without signing a single paper, they reached an agreement whereby T would put up half the funds and the college would provide the other half. When, several months later, T’s US-based partner, his old radio operator, stepped back from his financial commitment, the college agreed to foot the entire bill until other contributors could be found.
A steering committee staffed with Education Ministry professionals helped locate suitable applicants. The army secured all of the authorization necessary to teach the initial course — using army computers on a civilian campus — and appointed Lt. M, a reserves officer, to command the 12 civilian recruits.
Rotem Rosen, the program’s occupational therapist, described the therapeutic side of the course, which was designed by Efrat Selanikyo, the professional director of Roim Rachok (Looking Far). Rosen, speaking from unit’s main office, said that one point of focus was on daily activities, such as catching a string of buses and commuting to military intelligence headquarters in Tel Aviv.
The father of one of the soldiers serving today, a former F-16 fighter pilot, said he followed his son, without his knowledge, in his car during his first days commuting to the course, and that he helped him out on the first day when the bus transfer did not work according to plan, but that since then his son’s independence has improved immeasurably.
Additionally, the staff worked on communication and social skills. The military, they knew, even in the famously lax IDF, stresses hierarchy, and the volunteers, all of whom had been exempted from the draft before the genesis of the project, would need help understanding how to approach an officer. “Generally the focus is more on the result and less on the manner,” she said, noting that even when an individual has thought carefully about what he would like to convey, there cam be difficulty organizing the thought and then expressing it in an optimal, or rank-appropriate, manner.
Some of the Roim Rachok program soldiers at the base (photo credit: IDF Spokesperson’s Unit)
She worked with the first group of 12 volunteers while at the Ono Academic College and then moved with them, in October 2013, to the unit.
The transition was not immediately smooth. Once the volunteers completed the first classified course, within the army unit, they were given the choice of leaving the army or becoming soldiers. If they chose to join up – a process that the commander of the program in the unit, Lt. Batchen, described as the most emotional sight she had seen in “the 23 years of my life” – they were given some additional training and then dispersed among the operational desks, which are split according to region and country. Their work there is individual, each soldier assigned to his or her own screen, but the service itself is fully integrated, regular draftees and soldiers with autism serving side by side. The otherness of these new recruits can be, for soldiers who are almost all still in their teens, “very, very scary,” she said, noting that with the first group of soldiers, “the social situation was very complex in the beginning.”
With time the differences melted into familiarity and, in most cases, affection, said Lt. Batchen, who deferred her acceptance to the Technion Israel Institute of Technology by two years in order to command the program.
She said that she has worked consistently with the officers, too, in acclimatizing them to the soldiers from the Roim Rachok program. There are, for example, those who are extremely sensitive to the flicker of certain lights or to, say, the drone of an air conditioning unit; others require periodic calisthenics in order to remain at ease by working off steam in the unit’s halls.
Chen Eden, the program’s emotional therapist, recalled a case in which a Roim Rachok soldier was unable to keep up with the assignments handed down by an officer on an operational desk. She suggested dividing the undertaking into smaller chores, with more proximate deadlines, and said the officer today considers that particular decipherer his best.
Professionally, Lt. Batchen said, there are program graduates who are “among the very best decipherers I have ever seen,” and there are others who “are standard. It’s hard for me to say that the autistic decipherer is the ideal decipherer.”
She said that some are particularly aware of details and that, “taken as a whole, which is difficult, because all of them are different, their motivation and desire means that they sit and work at a pace that not all decipherers could maintain.”
A satellite image of Iran’s Fordo uranium enrichment facility (photo credit: AP/DigitalGlobe)
The soldiers themselves seemed very much at ease at the college – where there is a course currently ongoing aimed at integrating a group of 12 boys into Military Intelligence’s software quality assurance and big data information processing departments – and, understandably less so, at the Military Intelligence base, with their commanders in the room.
At the college, the group of boys – autism is far more prevalent in males – opted, by way of a vote, to speak in English to this reporter. Some spoke flawlessly. And it seemed that all spoke with an unusual candor. One, asked about motivation to join the army, said that there were “nine patriots and three opportunists, including me, in the room.”
Interestingly, in a sort of roundtable discussion that touched on the lack of alternatives for young adults diagnosed with high-functioning autism, every single person mentioned the relief of living out of the proverbial closet. “I used to have to try to pass all the time,” said one volunteer. “Here’s it’s different. We’re all autistic.”
Another, like the rest on the far end of the high-functioning side of the spectrum, said he was “so used to passing that I didn’t how this would be.” He found that the group was “more accepting of quirks” than any he had previously been a part of.
At the Military Intelligence base, two soldiers, summoned from their operational desks for a short conversation, were ill at ease. They spoke haltingly but also, it seemed, with candor. One, a resident of Maccabim-Reut near Modiin, said he joined the army “to make my parents happy.”
But the soldier, Cpl. Guy, signed on an extra year, he said, because “I knew they needed me.”
The other soldier, Cpl. Nadav, from Haifa, said he felt appreciated on the operational desk and proud of the fact that he was “able to acquire friends.”
At an evening for parents and teens who are considering the expanding Roim Rachok program, Cpl. Nadav spoke before a packed room. He mentioned that the program had won a prize for its work within Military Intelligence and strongly encouraged the prospective volunteers in the room to apply for the program. The speaking seemed difficult for him and the address was brief, but L said later that the idea of him addressing a roomful of adults when he first joined the program would have been preposterous. “The difference is day and night,” she said.
Cpl. Guy’s father, the former F-16 air force pilot, later offered a personal perspective. He said he and his wife had tried to have kids for more than a decade. They suffered through a series of miscarriages. As a senior IAF officer, the brass agreed to move him to Fort Worth, Texas, for a job with the American General Dynamics company that built the F-16, so that he and his wife could pursue surrogacy, which was illegal in Israel at the time.
On New Year’s Day 1992, the surrogate gave birth to twins. Back home, his air force friends threw them a party. “Very joyous,” he said softly, speaking outside a café near the Latrun monastery in Israel.
Slowly he and his wife understood that something was wrong. The boys would engage in repetitive tasks and avoid looking other people in the eye. The diagnosis – that one twin was largely nonverbal and low functioning and the other, the one who was eventually drafted, toward the other end of the autistic spectrum – “hit us like a hammer blow,” he said.
At age 5, the child that later volunteered for the army taught himself to read and to do arithmetic before he ever spoke. He went to a regular class but didn’t really have any friends. He spent most of his time alone with his computer and hardly had a bond with his brother.
At age 18, when his peers went off to the army, he was still very childish, his father said, unable to decide things for himself or to adequately express what he wants. After an additional year of school, his parents sent him to a center where an array of slightly disabled young adults were taught life skills and readied for simple work. His son didn’t like the program but finished the year out and then returned home. He was still dangling between school and life, the father said, and not yet ready to be sent out into the world.
That’s when L called and told him that the Roim Rachok program was up and running and accepting applications. For him, the opportunity for his son to serve in the army was significant. “All of the years, a parent with a special needs child, even though he knows it can’t be, he wants them to be like his peers. To get married. To have kids. And yes, to serve in the army. That was very important to me,” he said.
The service has advanced his son to the point that the parental dread, rising with each passing year, has appreciably subsided. “You constantly wonder what will be in five,10, 20, 30 years,” he said, “constantly looking for solutions and looking for ways to advance them and secure their future. Because in the end, their lifespan is normal and when we are not here, they still will be, and someone needs to care for them.”
