How does he do that?
Dani Shachar from the Jewish Institute for the Blind shows what he can do
Many of us can play guitar and bass and piano and organ, among other instruments, but by far most of us can’t.
Most of us can’t play a guitar behind our back.
Most of us can’t tune a piano, or string a guitar, much less repair them.
Most of us can’t repair a bicycle; those of us who can most likely can’t also play and repair all those instruments.
Almost none of us can put together an Ikea kitchen (although many of us can understand wanting to throw some of the 10,000 oddly named parts out the kitchen window).
And just about none of us can do any of those things blind.
Dani Shachar, who is now in North Jersey talking to middle-school children as a representative of the Jewish Institute for the Blind in Jerusalem, can do all those things, and more. He has honed his senses of hearing and touch and smell to the point where he can do all sorts of things that most of us who are lucky enough to have all our senses can’t do.
The reason for his tour is twofold. One reason, of course, is to call attention to the JIB, to the good work it does, and to the support it needs. That’s a good reason. But the deeper reason for the visit is the pure inspiration it gives.
Dani — that’s the name he goes by, not the more formal Mr. Shachar — has a long silver ponytail and an entirely straightforward manner. He’s entirely comfortable talking about his life — and that’s in English; most likely when he talks about it in Hebrew he’s even more unreserved — and he has overcome challenges all his life.
Dani was born in Morocco in 1955 — that makes him 70 now. He was one of nine children; as he explained it, the Jewish community was being urged to emigrate, but two solutions were being pushed. The one that Zionist groups advocated was to make aliyah to Israel. The other, advanced by non-Zionists, was to send children to yeshivot in France or Canada. (Morocco, remember, is French-speaking; most likely the yeshivot were in Montreal.)
“My parents decided to send four of us to the yeshiva, and the others to Israel.”
Eventually Dani, one of his sisters, and two of his brothers were sent to study in France. The two oldest siblings were 13 and 15, the brother closest to him in age was 6, and Dani was 5. “I was on my own pretty much since then,” he said.
Dani became blind as a result of retinal detachment when he was 10 — he’s the only one of his siblings who’s not sighted. That year, his parents decided to go to Israel. “My mother told my father that she didn’t want to stay in Morocco,” he said. “My father wanted to stay, but she pressed him to come. I think it was one of the best decisions she ever made.”
The family moved to Ashdod. “I lived with them for maybe one month, and then I went to the Institute for the Blind,” Dani said. The family had heard about it from a visiting social worker.
“That’s where I started to learn Braille, and Hebrew, and everything else in my life.”
The Institute’s school was residential then; now its dorm is used by students who’ve graduated from the school and are learning the life skills they need to transition to life on their own.
It was easy for Dani to live in a dorm, without his parents, even though he was in a new country and just 10 years old. He’d done that once already, literally half his life ago. So, like just about everything else he’s encountered, it was a challenge — but really no big deal.
“Sometimes when we had a vacation in school, when I could stay in the Institute or go to my parents, I preferred to stay in the Institute, because it was more comfortable for me,” Dani said. “It’s not that my parents were bad. They weren’t! They were good people. Simple people. But they had nine children, and they didn’t have much money, and it was hard for them to give everyone enough love and care.”
Some of his siblings joined the IDF, Dani said. Two made the army their careers; one rose to the rank of lieutenant and the other was an airplane mechanic.
Dani has five children and 10 grandchildren; the family — the nine siblings and their descendants — “are about 70 or 80 people, something like that,” he said.
But back to young Dani.
He was old enough when he lost his vision to remember what things look like, he said. “When you talk about vision, I understand what you’re talking about.” But he relies on his other senses — “I try to hear better. I try to touch. I think that I just switched my eyes to my fingers.”
When he first got to the JIB, Dani recalls, “they wanted me to jump up and down in the same place. They didn’t want me to run around, because maybe I’d fall. So I answered them by asking a teacher to bring me roller skates. Other kids, from outside the school, were running around, and I wanted to do that too. One of the teachers brought me skates — yes, really she did — and put them on over my shoes.
“From that time on I would go skating, even if I was by myself. Everyone around me was very surprised.”
Once he graduated from the JIB’s school — it goes from kindergarten through 12th grade — “I finished college and then went to a music academy.” He earned a living as a piano tuner, and he fixed pianos too.
“I can also play guitar and electric guitar and bass guitar, cello, and all kinds of string instruments,” he said. “I also play the oud and the bouzouki. When I was in Greece, and I played there, everyone thought that I was Greek. And when I played the oud, Arabic people were excited because they said that I sounded like a famous oud player.
“I also play piano and organ and flute.
“I really love playing music. I can read music, but it is very tiring to be blind and read music, because in Braille you can read only two bars at a time, and then you play those two bars. You can’t read it and play at the same time. That’s why my hearing is so good — I have to listen to someone else play it and then play it myself.
“Because of that, I am very good at hearing chords and telling you what notes they are.” Children like testing him by bringing him songs and asking him to tell them what notes are in it, and even musicians at times ask him to detangle and identify the notes in a chord, when they’re stumped.”
Dani presides over a bicycle workshop at JIB. “We repair them in Jerusalem,” he said. The Institute has more than 20 tandem bikes; they’re available to anyone who is blind or visually impaired, along with a sighted person, most of the time. And then on Tuesdays, “everyone comes to ride with us. We make a big tour around Jerusalem. It’s about 30 to 40 kilometers.” It’s also very hilly, Dani, isn’t it? Yes, it is, he acknowledges, completely unfazed.
A sighted person has to be in the front seat on the tandem bike, he said, but the back seat goes to someone visually impaired. “If the leader is a little bit weak, the blind person must work more. I am proud that I am 70 years old and the leaders can be 20 or 30 and I am a really hard rider. I do the work. I am glad to be able to do it.
“I tell the blind riders that they should do sports. They should take physical lessons. They should be strong. We don’t want the riders to feel that they have to do all the work.”
He talked about his visits to two Bergen County shops, Lark Street Music in Teaneck and the Cosmic Wheel, a bicycle store in Ridgefield Park. He loved being in both stores, touching the equipment, playing the instruments, talking to the owners; in fact, he had to be tugged out of both of them, Robert Katz said.
Both stores loaned him the equipment that he used during his stay in New Jersey.
Mr. Katz, who lives in Teaneck, has spent 35 years working in the Jewish nonprofit world. He’s JIB’s executive director; the job officially is part time, but his passion for it is constant. He’s functioned as Dani’s sherpa on this trip, scheduling, organizing, connecting, introducing, driving, and just generally presiding over the visit.
He talked about the JIB. “It offers pretty individualized programs, and it’s highly sensitive to students and their families,” he said. Educational leaders assess each student’s physical and emotional condition, as well as his or her family’s, as they decide whether the child would be better off in its school or mainstreamed.” Some students have other disabilities, some do not. “You might have heard of the Shalva Band,” he said. “That’s a band for kids with disabilities. It was founded by disgruntled parents of a student in the Jewish Institute for the Blind who had a son who was blind and also had multiple special needs, so they opened up a school for special needs that became Shalva. And they created a band for kids with disabilities that performed around the world.
“Two of those musicians were blind.”
During the year, JIB’s school is for students who are completely blind, but during the summer it runs a camp for anyone who has any level of visual impairment. “We have 700 kids in summer programs,” Mr. Katz said. “The camp is inclusive and the kids are diverse — from Arab kids to charedi kids.”
The school also offers such things as audiobooks, in both English and Hebrew; it records some of them on campus. One of the amazing feats it accomplishes, Mr. Katz said, is that when there is a recording session going on, the only sighted person there is the reader. Everyone else, including the engineers and other technicians, are blind.
So far, Dani’s been to middle schools in Bergen County — the Moriah School, the Yavneh Academy, Yeshivat He’Atid and Yeshivat Noam — and at the end of the week he’s scheduled to visit Schechter Bergen and then go to Essex County’s Golda Och Academy. Other visits might be planned as well. He’s also going to speak at some middle schools in Florida.
He speaks to students in Israel often, but this is the first time he’s been on a speaking tour in the United States.
“I came here to make a name for the Jewish Institute for the Blind,” Dani said. “I got very important things in my life from them, and I want to give back.”
One of the students at a Bergen County school asked Dani a question that he thinks many of the students had been wondering but weren’t brave enough to ask, Mr. Katz said. “The question was, ‘If you could have the choice of getting your eyesight back or keeping yourself as you are now, what would you do?’
“And the answer was, ‘I want to stay as I am.’”
Talk about inspiration.
The Jewish Institute for the Blind’s website, www.jewishblind.org, includes a video of Dani fixing a bike. Watch it and marvel — and then check out the rest of the site.
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