The small living room in the modest apartment on Basel Street in Jerusalem’s Kiryat Moshe neighborhood looked like it would burst if one more person entered. But like the heart of its owner — Professor Reuven Feuerstein z”l — it seemed to be ever-expandable as the stream of visitors kept pouring in to pay their respects to the man who so profoundly changed their lives.

Parents of high-achieving children with learning disabilities who were written off as permanent failures, the mother of a hopelessly autistic boy who began to talk in coherent sentences, a gainfully employed Downs syndrome young adult who was once advised to be institutionalized, an elderly man whose future would have been doomed had the professor not smoothed out his aliyah in the 1950s — all told their stories during the recent shivah of the visionary who changed the way the world looks at intelligence and cognition, and who showed how even the weakest people can shine.

“Human beings,” Professor Feuerstein told me in a wide-ranging interview several years ago, “have the unique characteristic of being able to modify themselves no matter how they’ve started out. A person can overcome even inborn barriers and traumas.” And indeed, Professor Feuerstein — who passed away last month at 93 — proved thousands of times over that although special children need more input than others, even those classified as hopeless can reach surprising levels of achievement.

For more than half a century, and in over 80 countries, Professor Feuerstein’s theories and applied systems have been implemented in both clinical and classroom settings, and his theory on the malleability of intelligence has led to over 2,000 research studies. In simple terms, it means figuring out what in the brain is blocking a child (or an adult) from learning, and looking for a pathway, a way to explain things so that the brain begins to open and understand.

Brainwashed

When I met with Professor Feuerstein, he was still riding a wave of publicity over an incident within the upper crust of British society from a few years previously, when he became the unintended hero of a scandal involving former cabinet minister Lord Cecil Parkinson and his abandoned, handicapped daughter, whom Feuerstein was treating at his Jerusalem center.

The child, who had developed an acute form of epilepsy as a baby, underwent brain surgery to control the seizures, which left her with severe learning disabilities and an IQ of 48. Psychiatrists in England wrote her off as uneducable and incapable of social integration .

Yet a British television documentary crew tracked her down in Jerusalem, where over a period of three months Professor Feuerstein transformed the girl from a child who could not sit still for more than 30 seconds, who could not concentrate and could not listen, into a child who loved to study and was able to sit quietly and pay attention. Lord Parkinson, who wanted to save face over the embarrassment of abandoning responsibility for his daughter, petitioned the High Court to have the film censored, claiming that publicity would be detrimental to the girl.

In the end the film never aired, but the unwitting winner was Professor Feuerstein. During the legal haggling (which was itself fodder for paparazzi), censorship rules required that the girl be identified only as “Child Z” — while Feuerstein was lauded as the child’s miracle worker in every report.

Feuerstein’s International Center for the Enhancement of Learning Potential in Jerusalem (commonly known as the “Feuerstein Institute”) had been attracting families — and not only Jewish ones — from around the world since its inception. Children with autism, Down syndrome, and other types of mental retardation, brain injuries, and other neurological conditions were finding that they could indeed learn, communicate, and learn to live independently. So when Mrs. Oliver — a British mother who had been following the censorship intrigue in the British media — contacted the Jerusalem center to see if her own son Alex could have a chance at a normal life, Professor Feuerstein graciously invited them for an evaluation.

Feuerstein kept 16-year-old Alex Oliver under his wing for several years, where his progress defied the medical community’s dismal diagnosis. Alex had been born with a disorder of the blood vessels in his brain which caused chronic seizures, and like “Child Z”, he too underwent surgery to remove the damaged left half of his brain in the hope that the right brain would begin to function, and to wean him off zombie-like inducing medications. Still, doctors didn’t think he would ever achieve mental acuity; even after years in a special school, Alex still couldn’t read, write, or do arithmetic.

Under Professor Feuerstein’s wing, it took less than a year for Alex to defy the odds and learn to read and write, all the more surprising since the left brain — the part Alex was missing — is thought to be responsible for language acquisition.

“He achieved what everyone said was impossible,” the professor told me at the time. “He can add four-digit numbers, he can read by phonetically decoding words, and he can write beautifully.”

It’s Always Possible

Reuven Feuerstein called the system he began to develop more than half a century ago “cognitive modifiability.” He would begin with tests designed to identify the source of the child’s intellectual deficit, and then impose a rigorous regime of cognitive exercises, designed to gradually build up some of those deficiencies. The Feuerstein Theory (technically called Structural Cognitive Modifiability and Mediated Learning Experience) and the Feuerstein Method (called Instrumental Enrichment) are founded on the premise that intelligence is not a fixed quantity, determined at birth by one’s genes. Rather, it is a variable that can be developed at every stage of life.

“I’ve always believed people can be changed for the better, no matter what their handicap,” he said.

The Orthodox Jewish professor, who was readily identifiable by his trademark black beret and flowing white beard — a combination that made him look like a cross between a Biblical prophet and a 19^th-century French artist — wasn’t kidding. He was just eight years old in his hometown of Botoshan, Romania, when he had his first experience with the power of transformation. Little Reuven, who learned to read at age two and was reading his mother’s Tzeinah U’reinah by age three, was tapped by the elderly, frail father of the town troublemaker, a 15-year-old boy who never learned to read. Perhaps Reuven could teach the boy — his only son — how to say Kaddish?

“To help the father die happily, I took on the challenge,” Professor Feuerstein told me. “I found the key to unlock the boy’s intellect. Today he’s an old man, with a gaggle of grandchildren and great-grandchildren.”

When the war came to Romania, Feuerstein was studying psychology in Bucharest and teaching in a school for children whose parents had been apprehended by the Nazis.

“Afterward, I heard that the school director told some of the staff, ‘Reuven has a good heart, but he’s stupid. Why is he teaching these poor children to sing, to think, and to express themselves? He should be teaching them how to use a hammer and nails. That’s what they need to know.’ ”

On Erev Purim in 1944, Feuerstein was arrested by an undercover policeman after emerging from a clandestine meeting of Resistance activists. On the way to the precinct, with Reuven in tow, the officer arrested another four drunkards — which turned out to be Reuven’s salvation. Convincing the officer to stop off for something to eat and drink before the interrogation, Reuven brought the entire entourage to the home of Rav Yitzchok Friedman, the Bohusher Rebbe ztz”l. When the Rebbetzin opened the door and saw Reuven flanked by an armed officer and four drunks, she immediately grasped the situation, seated the motley group, and plied them with liquor until they were out cold. Reuven was soon out the back door with an ample supply of hamantaschen, and several days later made his way onto a ship sailing for Palestine.

Feuerstein remained close to the Bohusher Rebbe, who escaped Romania and settled in Tel Aviv. And it was the Rebbe who gave Feuerstein a blessing for success as he embarked on his career in Israel. “I always felt that the Rebbe’s blessing meant my work was not just a choice, but a duty,” he said.

Upon arrival in the Holy Land, Feuerstein joined a religious kibbutz, studied in a teachers’ seminary, and began working with traumatized Holocaust survivors. In 1948, with the outbreak of the War of Independence, he contracted tuberculosis and was sent to Switzerland to recuperate. But that, too, proved Providential; he was soon serving as director of psychological services for youth aliyah in Europe and helping spearhead French and North African immigration to the fledgling state — and it was there that he began to formulate methods for helping people reach their potential, even if their situation looked hopeless.

He knew that if he mentioned a mental handicap in an intake report, he would be burying that person’s hopes of aliyah, and so he looked for ways to make them shine. One day, in the pre-immigration holding camp in France where he was stationed, Feuerstein met a 12-year-old Moroccan boy who had hit rock-bottom. Orphaned as an infant, he had lived like an alley cat in the open markets of Marrakesh. He was violent and had no apparent ability to learn. He also suffered from ringworm, so none of the other youngsters would get near him. Since there was nowhere else for him to sleep, the boy wound up in Feuerstein’s bunk — giving the bereted director an opportunity to put his ideas to the test.

Feuerstein took him to Paris to clear up his skin condition, and then began teaching him to read and write. Underneath all that pain, trauma, and dysfunction, he found a boy of extraordinary intelligence. The boy was sent to Israel, where he excelled in his studies and moved up in the ranks of the IDF. Years later, Professor Feuerstein was lecturing at an army base when a handsome officer ran up to him, threw his arms around his neck and cried, “Abba!” It was the Moroccan boy.

Beyond Smarter

During his stay in Europe, Feuerstein studied clinical and educational psychology under behaviorists Carl Jung and Jean Piaget, returning to Israel in 1955 with advanced degrees (he later completed his doctorate at the Sorbonne in Paris), a great deal of theoretical knowledge, and some novel ideas about how to help the disadvantaged youth of the young country. He established two pioneer youth villages that served as a model for his ideas and which attracted educators and psychologists from all over the world, and he developed new methods of evaluation and teaching tools that would search for cognitive flexibility — finding the key that would provide the ability to learn — and build on those abilities.

In 1964 he founded the Institute for the Enhancement of Learning Potential as a research institute; it became a treatment center for children and young adults in 1989. In 1992 Professor Feuerstein received the esteemed Israel Prize in Education, which he simply added to dozens of other international awards he’d collected over the years. In 2012 — at age 91 and still publishing, lecturing, and conducting private evaluations — he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

But he didn’t keep his ideas to himself. Over the years, he wrote 16 books, the most recent of which is Beyond Smarter: Mediated Learning and the Brain’s Capacity for Change, which he wrote when he was already 89, together with his son and Center administrator Rabbi Refael (Rafi) Feuerstein. The book is the most up-to-date summary of his thinking, and includes accessible descriptions of his tools and methods for cognitive modifiability and mediated learning.

Feuerstein never believed in IQ tests, which he said indicate what the child has learned, but not what he’s capable of learning.

“Our methods are based on the idea that every person has a healthy part,” he explained, proving for years what the medical community is finally discovering — that the human brain is flexible and can regenerate, at any age, in any condition. “We are not looking for the pathological part, the weakness, but the strength. We believe in reshaping the person through accessing his healthy part. The Torah teaches that people can be changed, can grow and become more like G-d, in Whose image we are all made.”

The list of the professor’s successes stretch across countries, social groups, and all sectors of the Jewish world: the chareidi Down syndrome girl who graduated with her regular Beis Yaakov class; the mentally impaired girl from Holland who finished high school, was editor of her yearbook, and went on to become a parachutist; the young boy who was brought to him with an IQ of 60, learned to play five instruments and went on to become a successful drama teacher; the Israeli bochur whose skull and brain were smashed in a terrorist ambush of a youth group, who, despite the doctors’ dire predictions that he’d remain a vegetable if he survived, today works in computers. Then there is Jason Kingsley, who as a young man with Down syndrome wrote the book Count Us In, an eloquent and inspirational account of his challenges.

At the funeral last month, Jerusalem mayor Nir Barkat echoed the feelings of thousands when he said, “Professor Feuerstein completely changed my worldview.”

We Became Better

Of course, not every story is a “miracle” story, and not everyone who suffers from mental impairment has the potential to become a rocket scientist. But Professor Feuerstein also taught another invaluable lesson. He taught parents how to grow with and through their children’s challenges, how to look at their children through different eyes.

“Professor Feuerstein taught us how to develop ourselves along with our son, how to accept him for who he is on the one hand, and how to help him maximize on the other,” says Yanki Brezel of Jerusalem. “But most important, he made us better people.”

The Brezels — who never considered themselves especially spontaneous — picked themselves up from Brooklyn and moved to Jerusalem 16 years ago, after reading an article in a magazine about the Feuerstein method and thinking it could be a life preserver for their mentally-impaired son Yitzchok, who had aged out of his special-needs preschool program and was to be enrolled in public school.

“Professor Feuerstein happened to be in the US for a lecture tour just at that time, and we contacted him for an evaluation,” recalls Faigie Brezel. “He was so loving and warm to Yitzchok, so confident that his center could help our son, and the next thing we knew, we’d packed up our house and enrolled our other boys in a Jerusalem cheder. Actually, we planned to come for one year, but we’re still here. We came for our son, but we stayed for ourselves.”

The Brezels admit that Yitzchok never did learn to read, but he did learn to think and to communicate on an advanced level, and to take care of himself. Today he’s a confident, well-groomed young man who lives in a group home affiliated with Seeach Sod.

“You never really know if you’ve done enough for your child, but when I get to the Beis Din shel Maalah, I want to know I did the best I could for the neshamah Hashem sent me,” Reb Brezel admits. “Professor Feuerstein’s motto [and the title of one of his books] was ‘Don’t accept me as I am.’ His premise is that we aren’t limited — not us and not our son. We owe him, for making us who we are today and for teaching us the tools to grow our son to be his best self.”

No Limits

Professor Feuerstein felt a special connection to children with Down syndrome, moving hundreds of them into regular schools and helping them reach a moderate level of self-sufficiency. The institute opened a program to train young adults with DS to be caretakers for the elderly, a profession for which Feuerstein believed they were optimally suited. In addition, Feuerstein, together with top Israeli and European plastic surgeons, pioneered the somewhat controversial use of reconstructive surgery to improve articulation and appearance.

“When a distraught couple comes to me after having a Down’s baby, I can’t give any limiting predictions,” the professor said. “Neither I nor they have any idea how far their child may go. One thing I tell them is to start preparing a dowry. Today many of my students are able to get married.”

“For many mental disabilities, my father’s detractors — and there were many — would claim that either the disability was misdiagnosed, or it wasn’t really so severe, and that’s why the child was able to advance,” says the professor’s oldest son Rabbi Rafi Feuerstein, vice chairman of the Feuerstein Institute and rabbi of the dati-leumi shul in Jerusalem’s Har Nof neighborhood. “But Down syndrome is genetic, and genes don’t change. Still, Abba proved that even chromosomes aren’t the last word.”

The Test

And then it happened. Rabbi Rafi’s own son Elchanan was born with Down syndrome.

“I had often wondered how I would react to such an event,” Professor Feuerstein confided to me. “I had told numerous parents that the birth of a Down’s baby is not a cause for sadness, but for joy. Then it happened to us. But I have to tell you, I passed the test.”

When Elchanan was born 25 years ago, Rafi, who at the time was rabbi of Kibbutz Ein Tzurim, began studying his father’s methods and was so enthused by his son’s progress that he went on to complete his own master’s degree in cognitive psychology.

“I’ll never forget how, two days after Elchanan was born — I had no idea how to break the news to friends, how to prepare for the bris, how to integrate this huge tragedy — Abba said to me, ‘We’re going to yet marry off this child.’ I couldn’t even wrap my brain around a bris, and he’s talking about a wedding?”

But Professor Feuerstein wasn’t about to give up. When he was just a few weeks old, his grandfather gave him the basis of speech. He would repeat a syllable hundreds of times, and slowly, eventually, Elchanan would move his lips, trying to imitate. Before he could even utter a word, he learned the precondition of imitation, so that by age two, he already had a vocabulary of hundreds of words. With time, Professor Feuertsein taught Elchanan to eat, to read, to daven, to learn Torah. Little Elchanan was able to keep up with his class in elementary school.

“I know Elchanan is slower, so I have to talk to him more slowly, and repeat things more times until he understands,” the professor said when Elchanan was a child. “He also has a hard time focusing, which is one of his barriers and one of the conditions for learning. Because we understand the barriers, we work with his limits.”

A few months before Elchanan was born, an elderly couple came to meet with the professor. Their grandchild was born with Down’s and the parents refused to take her home.

“They begged Father to convince the parents otherwise,” says Rabbi Feuerstein. “Abba was an extremely persuasive and charismatic man, but he couldn’t budge them. Then, after Elchanan’s bris, the couple contacted Father again. ‘We heard about your grandson, and how happy you are with him, so we’ve decided to be happy with our baby too.’ That child died before her ninth birthday, but for those few years she was surrounded by a loving family.

“During the shivah, Elchanan told me, ‘Saba loved me best,’ ” continues Rabbi Feuerstein. “So I asked him, ‘Don’t you think he loved the other grandchildren?’ and Elchanan responded, ‘Yes, but he turned me into who I am.’ ”

Room in the Heart

Professor Feuerstein was an educator and a visionary who ran an educational empire, but there was another side to him: At home, he was like a rebbe (he once referred to his beret as a “shtreimel that lost its tails”), presiding over a varied Shabbos table that would often include visiting professors from abroad, students from the institute, parents, and an assortment of others.

“Ima would always say that she never knew how many people Abba would bring home for Shabbos,” says Rabbi Feuerstein of his mother Bertha, who passed away in 2003. “But somehow there was always enough food and enough room. Abba would tell us, ‘I came from the little Romania town of Botoshan, where we slept three to a bed and there was room for everyone. In our house there shouldn’t be room?’”

There was always room at home, because there was always room in his heart, says Rabbi Rafi. Because his huge heart was part of the method, the key to his success. One of his basic tenets was that there must be a warm, trusting relationship between the therapist and the client, and he managed to connect to everyone on the level of the soul, without barriers or handicaps.

“That’s how he kept going until 93,” says his son. “Because behind the black beret and the white beard, all those thousands of people he helped knew he loved them. His love for humanity was infinite.”

No Reservations

For over 30 years, Professor Feuerstein maintained a close relationship with the Lubavitcher Rebbe ztz”l, who often referred people to him for assessment and assistance.

During one of his visits to the US, Feuerstein was invited by a congressional team to examine the high suicide rate of young Native Americans living on reservations. Professor Feuerstein always believed that tradition — regardless of religion or nationality — is an essential part of a person’s mental health, and he discovered that the young people on the reservations were missing the link to their tradition, while the pervading American culture didn’t offer them a meaningful alternative. And so, Feuerstein set up a program together with the Indian chiefs to help instill cultural pride in the youth.

After spending time on the reservations, the professor returned to Crown Heights to spend Shabbos with the Rebbe. “During the farbrengen,” Professor Feuerstein recalled in our conversation, “the Rebbe talked about the need to teach the Noachide Laws to non-Jews, emphasizing that one aspect of this mission is to help humanity in need, whoever they may be. This was fascinating to me, because I was having mixed feelings about all the time I had spent helping the Indians on the reservation, but the Rebbe took away all my hesitations. Several times during his talk, he turned directly to me and acknowledged me with a l’chayim.

“Since then I have emphasized tradition with all my clients. If you can activate the internal Jewish spark, you can see amazing transformations.”

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 511)