You can hear the wind rustling through the fruit trees outside of Shoshana Wege’s home on Moshav Mattisyahu located midway betweenJerusalemand Tel Aviv. In the right season you might catch bees buzzing between the roses and petunias in her garden. In one corner water streams from an earthenware vase into a large pond teeming with plump goldfish. Further on two aviaries are filled with the flutter and song of budgies lovebirds cockatiels and parakeets.

Shoshana invites me into her living room which is refreshingly cool and settles me on a beige couch. She shuts her dark lively eyes momentarily and then starts to tell me her story.

“I heard perfectly well until I was 16” begins Shoshana who spent her childhood inNew York. Her voice is softly modulated and yet I detect a gentle strength and tenacity. “Then I started to have difficulty hearing clearly. After testing I was diagnosed with sensorineural hearing loss which is usually caused by damage to the hair cells in the cochlea. In my case the loss was degenerative meaning that I could expect the loss to become more severe as I aged.”

The prognosis didn’t prevent Shoshana from studying at a business school and earning an executive secretarial diploma after which she worked for three years in two different law firms in the Wall Street area as a legal secretary. By the time she moved toIsraelin 1992 and started learning at Neve Yerushalayim she had significant hearing loss. Still she was able to participate in most lectures quite easily. “Low deep voices are the easiest to tune into ” she explains “so I was able to hear most of the rabbis. Socially I was already having trouble hearing in situations which involved more than one or two people but I somehow managed because my main focus was learning Torah.”

When she entered shidduchim a well-meaning roommate told Shoshana that her hearing would probably be an issue. “I wasn’t hurt by her words because I knew she was concerned and not trying to be mean” says Shoshana. “Yet since my hearing loss had never been an issue I wasn’t particularly worried.” 

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