Sunday, December 13, 2009

Hanukkah becomes more disability friendly with the THE BRAIDEL® by ART AS RESPONSA®

From the Religion News Service. Watch the Braidel spin here.


LAKE OSWEGO, Ore. (RNS) For centuries of Hanukkah celebrations, the dreidel has served as both children’s toy and religious symbol, marked with Hebrew letters that stand for “a great miracle happened there.”

Artist and Jewish scholar Marsha Plafkin Hurwitz’s version of the four-sided top is more than child’s play. It’s also a conceptual sculpture, disability aid and sensitivity training tool.

She fashioned a metal dreidel featuring raised Braille bumps several years ago. First marketed as modern Judaica, “The Braidel (The Braille Dreidel)” joined the collections of the National Museum of American Jewish History and the Jewish Museum of London. Now, it’s finding fans among disability rights advocates.

Hurwitz, a graduate of New York’s Jewish Theological Seminary, is now spinning it off as a classroom game for all ages, with input from Portland State University’s Project Braille program.

“It’s taken on a life of its own,” Hurwitz said, leafing through a prototype of The Braidel Game manual at the kitchen table of her suburban home south of Portland, Ore. “This is something for Jews, Christians, Muslims, anyone who wants to engage how their tradition has treated disability.”

By making a tradition from the Jewish festival of lights accessible to the visually impaired, Hurwitz has set a much-needed example for the entire community, said Becca Hornstein, executive director of the Arizona-based Council For Jews With Special Needs, who shared the Braidel with the Jewish Special Educators International Consortium earlier this year.

“We’re an old, old religion, but only in the last 25 to 30 years has there been a civil rights movement for people with disabilities,” she said. “Before that, people with certain disabilities were cared for but not really integrated into a lot of Jewish life. Bravo to Marsha for taking a common, everyday item in Jewish life and modifying it so that a person with a visual impairment can play it without thinking about it, without feeling singled out.”

The Braidel appeals to non-Jews as well, said Christine Cornell, an Illinois woman who first bought the toy for her 7-year-old daughter, born legally blind, and has since sold them in fundraisers for medical research for visual impairments.

“Not only does the Braidel have Braille on it, but it is beautiful art—it is nice to look at and wonderful to the touch,” she said.

Hurwitz took some artistic license with her design: the Braidel has a rounded base, rather than a dreidel’s traditional sharp points, to prevent it from creating a safety hazard for blind or blindfolded players. She says she borrowed an abbreviation used on Israeli dreidels for “a great miracle happened here” to show players that miracles can be personal, everyday experiences, not just distant events to occasionally commemorate.

Sales have increased leading up to Hanukkah, which begins this year at sunset on Dec. 11, but Hurwitz said she designed the Braidel for year-round use, both within the Jewish community and beyond.

Rebecca Wanatick, a community coordinator for MetroWest ABLE, a Jewish organization that works for disability inclusion in New Jersey, has taken the Braidel to synagogues, Hebrew schools and youth groups, and plans to incorporate it into February’s National Jewish Disability Awareness curriculum as well as this month’s Hanukkah festivities.

Everyone who plays the game describes the experience, ironically, as eye-opening—especially teenagers, she said.

“Once they put the blindfold on and were feeling the Braidel, they realized that they were really the ones with the disability at that moment, because they didn’t have the knowledge and understanding of what the Braille letters were,” she said. “It was very enlightening for them to have that sense of what it was like, for a brief moment, to not be fully included in a game.”

Sold through Hurwitz’s Web site, Art as Responsa (http://www.art-responsa.com/), the Braidel costs $24; the game, which comes with blindfolds and playing chips, runs from $75 for four players to $375 for a classroom set. Eighteen percent of proceeds—a number that signifies “life” in Hebrew—are donated to Helen Keller International, a nonprofit that works to prevent blindness and reduce malnutrition around the world.