Page 18 - Ebook hey-vav part 1 140118 HTML5

P. 18

whomever is not standard. School did not give tools to Noa and
there were not a few hair-rising stories, in my opinion."

- For example?
"For example, when one of the teachers yelled at her one day,
"Don't you hear me? Open your ears!" When Noa told her she
was deaf, the teacher told her that if she would be rude she
would go straight to the principal. After that, when we came to
speak with the teacher, she barked at us that with forty children
in the class, she cannot remember the problems of each one."

- Was there an attempt to deal with her learning disabilities?
"In the younger grades there was no professional dealing with it.
Each time we raised it, they said to us that they cannot deal with
it. To our sorrow, sometimes the educational system is more
limited than the student. Until this year Noa didn't like the
system very much, and that's an understatement. Now she is in
an external high school and she is flourishing."

In Kluger's karate school, Noa is not the only one that finds in
martial arts strength and healing. "Not a few of the students got
to us through referrals of therapists and doctors, for reasons of
physical and mental health," Kluger tells. "There are people with
asthma here, people with orthopedic problems, even people ill
with nerve deterioration. Karate doesn't heal illnesses, but it
does enable these people to rehabilitate their body, to improve
their quality of life and their self-confidence."
Among those training by Kluger are also deaf children and
adults. Lately Noa gave a model lesson in the "Shema" center
for the deaf, and Kluger has given in the past workshops on self-
defense for deaf women. Karate also helps in rehabilitation of
problems like low self-image, ADD, and communication
problems.
"I have here children that I classify as victims of the educational
system," Kluger says, "like those that experienced violence and

13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23