One day I saw an announcement on a bulletin board inviting the public to a lecture on the topic of autistics. I decided to go and hear what they had to say about this. After all, I am a special education teacher. The lecture was held in a packed auditorium, and to my great amazement the lecturer turned out to be an orthodox Rabbi. I was stunned. I had no idea what a Rabbi might have to say about autistics and was about to get up and leave but, to my great fortune, I didn’t. That lecture changed my whole life for the better, thank God. One lecture can turn a person’s whole life around. Amazing!

 

What was it about the lecture that changed my life?

 

Rabbi Yehuda Sarebnik from Jerusalem talked about the fact that it was now possible to communicate with autistics and other brain-damaged people, including those who suffer from severe brain damage, Down’s Syndrome, Cerebral Palsy, severe speech disorders, and even people in deep comas who are classified as vegetables.

 

This communication is possible through a technique called Facilitated Communication (FC), a technique which has been developed to communicate with brain-damaged individuals. This technique was discovered around fourteen years ago simultaneously in a number of countries including Australia, Canada, Denmark, and in four different states of the United States.

 

Here’s a description of how FC works. Because most brain-damaged people are lacking in motor co-ordination, they need help in communicating from someone called a facilitator. While the facilitator supports the child’s hand over an alphabet chart, the child pushes his hand to point out letters, which make up words and sentences. Over time some brain-damaged people are able to communicate by themselves, without any help from a facilitator.

 

Videos have been made of this procedure. In one video which I have, the father of brain-damaged girl in America named Charisa tells how psychologists tested his daughter and found that she had an IQ of 10. In other words she was considered severely mentally retarded since the scale is designed so that the average person’s IQ is between 90 and 110. The father relates that when students offered to come and attempt to communicate with his daughter, he could not believe that they would have any success at all. To his great surprise, however, they discovered that they could communicate with Charissa. By the time of the interview, the father said, Charisa has written 120 poems and numerous stories! Today she can communicate on her own, without any need for a facilitator. This video documents very clearly how she communicates without any assistance.

 

In the course of his lecture, Rabbi Sarebnik showed a film depicting American children, both autistics and those who are severely mentally retarded, who wrote absolutely amazing things by pointing at letters on an alphabet chart. Some of them were discovered to be very gifted and they went on to study mathematics and biology or to write poems and essays.

 

There are hundreds of Internet sites on this phenomenon. The technique is used in thirty-eight American states and millions of dollars are spend annually in developing and using it. At Syracuse University, there are seven doctoral students who communicate only through FC.

 

This phenomenon has been reported on the media all over the world, including such established programs as CBS Evening Report with Dan Rather, on PBS Borderline, Sixty Minutes, as well as others. Newspapers and magazines like the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Post Standard, the Herald Journal and others have also covered it.

 

Presently a number of court systems in the US accept testimony given via FC as admissible evidence in trials. One child in Wichita, Kansas, testified using FC that he had been abused and the offender was convicted and served time in prison as a result of that testimony.

 

There was another case in New York State in which a brain-damaged girl testified via FC that she had been abused and the State Supreme Court ruled that her testimony was admissible as evidence in court. This case was reported in the American press, as well as on the Internet.

 

In the summer of 1998, a research project on the subject was undertaken at Education Department of Bar Ilan University in Israel. Work by Mrs. Chani Chukat, daughter of Professor Simpson, head of the special education section at the university, examined children who had been classified through scientific testing as severely retarded. When follow-up testing was performed after several months of exposure to FC, the same children were found to possess normal intelligence.

 

Rabbi Sarebnik also related that autistics and brain-damaged individuals wrote about who they had been in previous incarnations, and talked about the World to Come, the Heavenly Court, Gan Eden, Gehinnom and similar matters.

 

It seems that such spiritual communications are for the most part peculiar to Israel, although some cases are known elsewhere. In particular, two books have come out in the US over the last few years. Child of Eternity, by Christie Jordy, the mother of a brain-damaged girl, and Memoirs of an Autistic Child.

 

Another book has been published recently in France. I Choose Your Hand to Talk, by a communications specialist named Anne-Marguerite Vexeau, in which she reports on telepathic communications and other supernatural experiences involving FC.

 

In all these books brain-damaged children talk about their previous lives in the world, and describe the existence of a spiritual world after death. They write about God’s existence and the responsibility people have for their actions.

 

In Child of Eternity, the brain-damaged girl writes to her mother that one of the reasons that she came to this world was to bring people to love God. She also writes about the importance of loving our fellow creatures.

 

After Rabbi Sarebnik’s lecture, I approached him and told him that I had a severely brain-damaged daughter and asked him, “Can I communicate with her as well?” He answered that I could, and gave me the telephone number of a facilitator who had learned the technique in the US. I called this woman and made an appointment for her to come and communicate with Galia.