Liat You Belong To Me

By Chana Ben Yochanan

Not all of the news from Judea is disheartening. 

This story about a remarkable adoption highlights a Hebron couple who live each day in the compassionate spirit of Torah.

Across the street, near the Kiryat Arba bus stop, two people sit companionably on a stone park bench.  The bearded poet leans back in loosely-sweatered contentment.  The youngster beside him is lithely bent double, her dark curly-haired head resting on her corduroy-covered knees.  Her face is turned to catch the soft sunlight.  It’s half-past three and the healing rays soak up the exhaustion from her tired shoulders.

Her day began early.  First, a long bus journey jouncing through the Judean mountains from her Hebron hills home, village by village to Jerusalem.  Then the long, hard-working grind of physical therapy, and finally, the last long bus trip home.

He was waiting for her, and climbed aboard the bus to lift her from the seat supports and gently maneuver her down the steps to their familiar park bench resting place.  She is nearly 20 years old, his next-to-youngest child of eight others.  His eyes are softly intense and probing.  She, she has no eyes at all and the eyelids of her suntanned face are tightly closed over their emptiness.  In an age-old gesture of child-like fatigue, she sucks her first two fingers, humming a bit and rubbing with a wandering hand the textures of fabric and stone which connect her with her world.

He, the abba, knows about quiet contact with his unique half-grown child.  Softly he taps a slow rhythmic cadence on her back with the heel of his hand.  His name is Moshe.  Her name is Liat.  The Hebrew name Liat means, “you belong to me.”

“There they are! There they are!” greets Chaviva, smiling broadly as she emerges from the wooded path across the way, four of us visitors in tow.  We’ve just come from her project building site where foundation work progresses, and before that, from the used-clothing store Chaviva operates to help fund a treatment center and provide sheltered work for these special young people.  Before that, we observed the professional therapists helping the younger children at the Kiryat Arba community house treatment center founded by this dynamic woman.

Liat’s mother, Chaviva, is the heart and pulse energizing a broad range of services so essential to 60 special children from the populous cluster of Jewish towns in Judea.  Chaviva stops at the edge of the footpath, gazing across at her husband and daughter.

“I feel today that Liat was a messenger to me.  I have a mission.  She was the vehicle, the vessel.  You see, I am really a homebody.  I like everything at home.  I like being home.  It’s just my personality.

“Liat made me build what I was meant to build.  She grasps the essential within me.  She maximizes my potential.  She pushes me.”

This child, the “little pusher,” this “mighty potentializer,” came into their lives at a time when most of us would have considered our potential already pushed past optimum.  Moshe and Chaviva Tzachor were one of the founding families of Kiryat Arba.  Moshe established a factory, and together they helped create the flourishing community.

Liat’s journey to Kiryat Arba began in July 1975.  Chaviva was eight months pregnant with her eighth child when, as she tells the story, one morning a newspaper notice caught her heart.  A Tel Aviv hospital appealed for help for a Yemenite couple and their child.  The baby was seven months old, blind, terribly brain-damaged, possibly deaf and very, very ill.  The parents, grieving, poor and confused were simply unable to care for her.

“I had a feeling in my heart,” Chaviva remembers.  “How is it for such a blind, sick child?  I said to myself.  Where can she go?  Who can be there for her?  Like Helen Keller, I thought.  But I have a large family already, perhaps I am foolish.”  She put the newspaper article facing up beside her husband’s lunch plate.

Seeing it, Moshe responded immediately.  “Chaviva, look!  A blind child needs a home.  What can we do?  If she needs us, we can help.  Call, Chaviva.  Call!  Ask!”

Chaviva called the number in the newspaper.  The Ministry of Social Welfare.  No answer.  Again and again and again and no answer.  Finally a maintenance person picked up the phone.

“Ah, yes, yes, you want that poor child,” the worker gasped.

“I don’t know.  I don’t know.  Just tell me about her,” Chaviva responded.

“Please,” the maintenance worker pleaded, “I want to know your number.  Tell me.  I don’t know how to write, but tell me and I will remember.”

At nine o’clock that night, a social worker called and they talked.  Moshe and Chaviva were on the early morning bus to Tel Aviv.

“At the hospital they asked us, ‘Do you know how to care for a blind child?  Her parents can’t do it.  Why do you want her?’ the authorities pressed.

‘I don’t know,’ I insisted, ‘I just want her.  Let me see her.’

“The nurses dressed her up nicely and the doctor brought her in to us.  He held her up against his chest, her face turned away against his shoulder.  I only saw the form of the tiny body wrapped in blankets.  She was so sick and I was so pregnant.  They did not want me to see her face.  Moshe took her in his arms.

‘What can we do?’ he murmured.

“She was so jaundiced, her skin broken and ugly.  I can’t even like her, I thought, but I knew I could help.  Help, that’s all, help to save a soul.

‘Now.  We will take her with us.  Now.’

‘Now? But, first you must go to the social worker, fill out forms, have psychological tests, to see if you have a proper adoptive home.’

“Moshe explained.  Kiryat Arba is a long way from Tel Aviv.  There is one bus in the morning to Tel Aviv and one bus back again in the evening.  We wanted to take her now.

“They told us that if we wanted to adopt a baby, good.  There was a boy who needed a home; one-and-a-half years old, very intelligent, he walks, he speaks.  Why not take him?

‘No, just this child,’ Moshe repeated.  ‘We want just this child.  We will fill out the forms, we will go home and wait.  In three days we will come back to take her.'”

Chaviva continues, remembering, “We returned home.  Moshe went off and bought everything new for her — like a newborn child to us.  The children named her Liat because we all wanted her to be ours, for our very own.

“Three days later, on Friday morning, we borrowed a car to go to Tel Aviv to bring her back.  All the children waited at home.  They prepared the Shabbat all alone.  When we came with her there were flowers and cakes from the neighbors.  We made Kiddush with our new daughter, Liat Yael.

“She was so sick, so very, very sick.  Seven months old and she didn’t even cry.  She didn’t really eat either.  The doctors said everything was OK, as good as possible.  But the congenital damage was so great.

“She was all dried out.  Her natural bodily functions were blocked and when they would finally move, she writhed painfully like a tiny shriveled woman in labor.  There was no emotional response from her.  She was all sealed off and oh, so sick.

“Six weeks later, I gave birth.  Now we had one healthy, thriving baby and our silent, sickly, still one.

“In the mornings I would go to her and try to sense when she was awake.  ‘Boker Tov, Liat.  Good morning.’  I touched her softly, pouring out my warm love all over her.  There was nothing, it seemed.  I was overwhelmed with doubts.

“After three months her skin healed.  I began to give her baths.  I thought the feel of the soft warm water would please her.  Still no reaction.

“Every ten minutes I gave her a thimbleful of grape juice, a natural treatment from Dr. Strauss.  After two weeks, her bodily functions began to behave normally and without pain.

“One day, I put her in the bath and suddenly I could sense her enjoying it.  I felt her whole body responding.  She made little moves in the water and I knew it felt good to her.  I waited and waited, letting her waken to the gentle feeling.  After a while I lifted her out, wrapped her up in a warm towel and held her to me.  For the first time, she rested her tiny head on my shoulder.  I could feel her want me.

“I was so filled with gratitude that I began to cry.  Then she cried also.  The very first time she cried, we cried together. She cried and cried with me.  My neighbor rushed in.

‘What’s happening?  Such a noise of crying!’

“Sobbing, I told her and she cried also.  I called my husband at the factory.  I called the school to tell all the children.

“This day was the real birth time of Liat.  She was ten months old.

“Still, we did not know what to do about her food.  She is a Yemenite child, I thought, so I’ll ask my Teimani neighbors.  They gave me spices and special cheese like they feed their babies.  They taught me to cook for a Yemenite child and Liat began to eat.”

All through the years, people have been drawn to Liat and they have participated in her growth and care in remarkable ways.  Doctors assessing and treating her frequently call the home in the evenings to see how she is progressing.  Friends sent pretty clothes and neighbors save the nicest dresses from their children’s outgrown things.  They all agreed that Liat ought to be dressed especially nicely, beautifully, but she ruined her clothes — constantly mouthing or rubbing and pulling the fabrics in her fingers, her eyes and ears on the world.  As she gained health, her family began building a life for her day by day in her Kiryat Arba community.

Chaviva sought out other families with special children, formed playgroups, information evenings and support groups.  Dreams for their future, a future in which these children could flourish began to occupy more and more of Chaviva’s time.  She taught herself English in order to read information, speak with professionals, friends and parents in other countries.  She wrote grants, haunted government offices and researched facilities.

She observes, “I have visited centers all over Israel to see what place there is for special adults who want to be in an observant Jewish environment.  There are many fine facilities, some even non-Jewish, but none close by, where the ways of our observant Jewish families can be fulfilled.  So I work to fulfill my own dream.  I dream of building group homes for our Orthodox Jewish young adults to live their lives meaningfully, joyfully.  I want them to engage in contributive work in a sheltered environment among us here at home, in the region of Kiryat Arba.”  So far, Chaviva has been able to successfully lay the groundwork for her dream as a simple mobile home cluster community begins to function.

Somehow, here in the Judean hills where Liat has been the messenger, one is reminded that restoring Eretz Yisrael extends to the deepest dimensions.  The orchards are planted in the cleared swampland, and towns flourish again.  The nation is stretched to its limit just surviving and welcoming home the Jews of many lands outside.  Still, we are challenged continually to sink our lives ever more deeply into Israel’s sacred soil, ensuring that every Jewish child may thrive, reaching his or her fullest potential as a Torah-observing Jew, as a person created in the image of God according to a Divine Plan, and as a full partner in rebuilding the Homeland.  Liat, you belong to all of us.

Chana Ben Yochanan is a freelance writer living in Shiloh, Israel.  She is the author of A United Jerusalem: The Story of Ateret Cohanim and was the subject of an interview in the Winter 1993-94 issue of Jewish Action.