[nabs-l] Turning a Page for the Blind

[Robert William Kingett]

JBI International’s Braille materials and audiobooks help blind Jews 
stay connected to the community

Yael Korc, age 10 and a half, has been blind since birth. Retinopathy of 
prematurity robbed her of sight, but her parents, Rebecca and Marcelo 
Korc of El Paso, Texas, are determined not to let this slow her down. 
Yael studies karate and loves to swim. And, thanks to Braille, she is 
also a voracious reader—her favorite books include the Nancy Drew and 
Boxcar Children mysteries and the Ramona stories by Beverly Cleary.

“She adores reading,” Rebecca said. “Anything in Braille, even if it’s 
just an elevator sign, helps her feel included.”

The same holds true for Jewish texts, as Yael attends Hebrew school and 
starts to prepare for her bat mitzvah. Here, too, Braille helps her feel 
included. “Her Sunday school materials help her feel like any other 
member of her class,” said Rebecca. “She reads books in English and 
Jewish texts in Hebrew, and because Marcelo works for the World Health 
Organization and we used to be stationed in Bogota, she can read Braille 
in Spanish, too.”

Many of Yael’s books come from JBI International (established in 1931 as 
the Jewish Braille Institute), which has provided her with books in all 
three languages. “She flew through the entire beginning Hebrew primer,” 
her mom said proudly. “It took all of eight weeks. Now she keeps up with 
her class; she just learned Ein Keloheinu—she’s unstoppable!”

If Yael wished to study Jewish subjects in Russian, Yiddish, Hungarian, 
or Romanian, she could do that through JBI, too. The organization serves 
over 35,000 blind or vision-impaired clients around the globe; it has 
translated prayer books for all Jewish denominations into Braille, 
distributed free large-print Haggadot at Passover, and recorded over 
13,000 audiobooks of Jewish interest. Thirty-five years ago, it 
established a vision clinic in Tel Aviv that now serves 6,000 people a 
year, from blinded Israeli soldiers to Arab infants to homeless folks in 
shelters to seniors in assisted-living facilities.

How does the organization decide which books to record or to translate 
into Braille? “It’s hard to learn Braille after childhood, so most of 
our Braille materials are songbooks for camps, specific requests for 
children going to Hebrew school, and liturgical and scholarly 
materials,” said Ellen Isler, CEO of JBI. “As for audiobooks, I read 
Publishers Weekly, The [London] Times Literary Supplement, and the 
Jewish Review of Books to help identify books that will be of interest 
to our clientele. Then we check to see if they’ve already been recorded 
by the Library of Congress or by a commercial audiobook publisher like 
Audible.com, in which case we won’t do them. We have a reciprocal 
relationship with the Royal Institute for the Blind in London; The 
Central Library for the Blind, Visually Impaired and Handicapped in 
Israel; and the CNIB Library in Canada—we’ll share materials.”

JBI is part of a program called the National Library Service for the 
Blind and Visually Handicapped, which the Library of Congress 
established in 1931. Then in 1996, Rhode Island Sen. John Chafee 
sponsored legislation that exempted materials for the blind from 
copyright strictures, which let authorized entities like JBI record and 
distribute audiobooks free of charge. Back in prehistoric times, those 
books were on phonograph records the National Library Service sent to 
its clients. Eventually records gave way to cassette recorders, and then 
cassette recorders begat the Digital Talking Book Machine (DTBM), an 
easy-to-use little gadget that even the most technophobic can operate. 
Audiobooks are stored on flash drives (with a thumb-shaped indentation 
on top so they can’t be inserted upside down or backward), and the 
drives and machines are provided free to anyone with visual impairments. 
Mailing the drives back and forth to the library is also free—there are 
no postage costs to the library or the book-lover. (That’s especially 
nice for the seniors enrolled in one of JBI’s hundreds of Talking Book 
Clubs in South Florida, held at JCCs, senior centers, and communities 
like Century Village. Book Club members get three months of digitized 
books at a time, as well as a socializing opportunity, a chance to share 
the pleasures of reading with others, and the incentive to get out of 
their rooms.)

I asked Isler which books are popular with JBI clients. “Anecdotally, 
they love biographies and mysteries,” she said. Some specific titles 
currently in heavy circulation are A Tale of Love and Darkness, by Amos 
Oz; The Fortune Teller’s Kiss, by Brenda Serotte; The Conversion, by 
Aharon Appelfeld; and Daughter’s Keeper, by Ayelet Waldman. “And, of 
course, people always request classics such as those by Sholem Aleichem 
and I.B. Singer,” said Beth Rudich, the organization’s director of 
development.

One of JBI’s most ambitious projects was a collaborative effort with the 
Jewish Publication Society: recording the entire Hebrew Bible. Completed 
in 2010, it took 13 readers—including actors Theodore Bikel and Tovah 
Feldshuh—12 months to do.

***

I’d originally heard about JBI from one of my friends inside the 
computer, Elizabeth Burns, who consults for an NLS library and wrote a 
fine article about talking-book machines in The Horn Book, a journal of 
children’s literature. I called JBI hoping to audition as a reader 
myself. Hey, I read to my kids every night! I acted in college plays!

But after seeing JBI’s recording studio, I felt out of my league. The 
studio is totally slick, with six soundproof booths and a schmancy audio 
system. I’d expected a homey little operation; indeed, back in the day, 
the earliest recordings were done at home by Sisterhood members of 
various temples, as a mitzvah. “In the summer you could hear the traffic 
of Queens Boulevard through the open windows, and you could just imagine 
these lovely women sitting at a boomerang table in someone’s kitchen,” 
reminisced Jane Blecher, the manager of audio production. But today, 
prospective readers have to audition, and many are working New York City 
actors. (Authors whose works are selected by JBI are also welcome to 
come in and read their own works. Leonard Cohen, Blake Eskin, Francine 
Klagsbrun, Cynthia Ozick, Oliver Sacks, Anne Roiphe, and Hilma Wolitzer 
have all availed themselves of the opportunity.)