“At the age of eight weeks, we discovered that our daughter was visually impaired. “
Friday morning with Galit and Yoav || Posted 02/10/20 10:40 PM
Barak Peretzman competed in “Ninja Israel 2021” and embarked on the challenging track for which he trained a lot, but in his personal life, the new father faces a much larger and more complex challenge.
His infant daughter was diagnosed shortly after birth with coloboma which severely impairs her eyesight. “Until she speaks we will not know exactly what she is seeing, but the clinical results herald very bad.”In the second episode of Ninja Israel 2020 (Channel 12), new contestants and promises that we have not yet met have reached the ninja trajectory, including the architect Barak Peretzman. Peretzman has been following the program for many, many years, even before it came to Israel, and from the moment it is here he dreams of overcoming the ninja challenge and clicking on the buzzer.Beyond the desire to cross the track, he comes to raise awareness of the issue of visual impairments, which his little daughter Koren has been dealing with for the past year, Galit and Yoav told this morning (Friday). When Koren was eight weeks old, Barak and his partner discovered that she was visually impaired. “We discovered it through her left pupil which did not close to the end, it has the shape of a drop,” Told Peretzman. Because of the different shape of the pupil, the father and his partner went through extensive tests to understand what it was all about. “We went to a lot of doctors and places, and the most important place we came to was the ELIA Association for the Advancement of Blind and Visually Impaired Children which operates kindergartens across the country. This is a whole shell of people who help Koren every day, from the kindergarten teachers, assistants and vision instructors. I do not know if Koren would have reached its development if not for this place, “Peretzman shared.
To continue reading the article and the full interview video
For the full episode of Ninja Israel, click here
Letter from Hadassah, mother of Zviki from the Jerusalem branch, August 2019
“Dear Tova, the principal who is winning this wonderful garden ….. With a full and full heart I decided not to let another moment like this pass without writing down for you and the team a little of what I feel about you every day..
Where in the world do you see a garden that when you come to pick up the child, you feel such a strong love in the air ????
Well say it’s just the gardeners, well say it’s a glow I would only travel to Argentina for (and you know I can …) how much glow power flowed throughout our family this year …. she’s far beyond the gardener.
אבל זה All the whole team that shares this love!…
Secretary Ayala who brings her heart, the sharing … (It seems to me that she is a covert parent supporter …)
Hannah the soul !!! No one in the world will understand what she did for us … except someone who once tried a ketogenic diet ….
Have you ever seen a “cook” who came to tell a mother about her child’s amazing development ????? That a gourmet dish is packaged, for a long trip north? …..
Paige who accompanies with the heart Gold !!
High-professional service girls !!!!
The wild medical team is so amazing …
Reut the social worker who made me a remedial experience for all the prejudices and black jokes I had about social facts …
The helpers and all the dedicated staff, and I can not help but mention the day I had to travel and I had no one to take care of Zviki … and I received hot calls, with full heart and a real desire … to keep Zviki well beyond the hours of kindergarten. .. every time I remember it I get chills ….
And on Fridays, the hot calls from her lover who tells me what a great privilege she has to be with Tzviki ..
I do not understand you … do not understand … What material are you made of? How do you continue to dedicate yourself like this? With all the complexity .. the days with the scary seizures, the smell that wafted from the whole mix of drugs, oil and do not ask me what else … the days that he had to shower and wash his clothes because ….
And even after long days of not seeing results and no progress.
And today spring suddenly struck us.
And today all of a sudden with tears in my eyes I look at the boy, yes the boy who arrived a baby disappointed from the world, drenched in himself … this boy who told me he probably would not go ….
Going alone, alone alone …… …… …… …… ……
He walked around the house with confidence … did not want another hand !!! And went and was happy and went ……
“And we were like dreamers ……”
This walk, the confidence, the presence that there is someone who understands him and that there are tools to reach his magical world.
It’s a miracle, it’s just a miracle.
We won and it was worth everything to us.
Thank God for every day.
Hadassah, Zviki’s mother. “
Letters of thanks from parents, Jerusalem branch 2018
Letter of thanks from parents, Rehovot 2018 branch
Letter from parents, summer camp 2018
Shira’s parents tell …
Tiny Shira Shilon bursts out laughing. On the ground, next to her, sit her parents, Ziv (28) and Adi (27) Shilon, shining happily. “She is our treasure,” says Adi, and Ziv adds: “Poetry is the most beautiful gift we have ever received.”
By the time they reached this pleasant family moment, they both knew many not-so-simple moments. Ziv, a former lieutenant colonel in the Givati Brigade, was seriously injured in October 2012, near Operation Pillar of Cloud in Gaza. His left hand was amputated and his right hand is barely functioning.
He and Adi went through three years of difficult and daily struggles, and then their eldest daughter Shira was born, a Lebanese who hardly sees, and since then another struggle has been added to life, “but today we no longer see the difficulty, only the challenge. “She does not see? So she will be helped by other senses. We know what awaits us and know it will be good,” they are sure.
Adi: “In September, Shira entered the ELI kindergarten for the visually impaired. It’s an amazing place, but when she’s three I’m going to incorporate it into a regular kindergarten. There is no reason for her to feel different from other children. “
What she gets in the visually impaired kindergarten?
“Tools to deal with real life. There’s, for example, a darkroom where the kids learn to exercise all the senses, and there’s physical therapy, hydrotherapy and occupational therapy. There I learned to put white food on a dark plate so she could see it.”
Continue reading http://xnet.ynet.co.il/articles/0,7340,L-4873069,00.html
Letter of farewell from parents, January 2015
The story of Hadas
Letter from Amani’s mother
Good morning everyone!
How good and pleasant it was for me yesterday to see you and meet you. I have no words for how to tell about my feelings towards you and how you relate to parents. I enjoyed it so much and was very excited. I wish I had known you a long time ago. Now I count the days for the next meeting and do not hesitate, maybe you will suddenly see me at your door because I have no patience to wait until next time and again if I say thank you it will not be enough for what you give and do.
So thank you endlessly for the word from the bottom of my heart and hope everyone appreciates what you do.
Thanks Navar.
The story of Liraz and Noam
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On August 25, 2009, in a natural, quick birth – (in just 15 minutes) and easy, even without an epidural, a second daughter was born to a family in Jerusalem named Noam.
We are, says the mother, the most planned family in the world. We brought a pacifier and boiled it in the delivery room. I knew there was no way I would be breastfeeding from the day I got pregnant and even when our first daughter Liraz was born, even then I knew that when Liraz would be a year old, I would get pregnant and expect another birth. Children are the love of our lives.Everything was perfect and planned for 2.5 weeks and then I started to notice small jumps in Noam’s eyes – up and down, from time to time. I was not stressed – I am not a stressed mother. I said we had a drop of milk in a few days and I would ask “Malina” – the nurse. Malina also saw these jumps and gave me a referral to a poor clinic in Ein Kerem. The result of the assessment was unequivocal. The girl has nystagmus. It was an obscure word for me and my husband. What is???
No treatment? Is there no surgery? We’re in 2010, what do we do. How do you cope? A million unanswered questions at that critical stage.Everyone tried to reassure me. Refer me to MRI You can only think and imagine what and how I felt until the test results that ruled out a brain tumor and from that moment we started with a long and painful test mask, but is always optimistic and everything went well. The latest test ERG gave Noam a “title” with a complicated name called Cone Dystrophy – a difficult and decisive meaning. Lack of vision cells responsible for color focus and general inability to see in daylight.
I could not even pronounce it. The first time we collapsed – I barely ate, I could not get out of bed, I had a stone in my throat … I wish a stone, a rock … Endless pain during the days and nights.Two days later my brother got married. Should rejoice, but tears were in my eyes every time someone came to hug me, or I would see my amazing big daughter Liraz, running laughing and handing the wedding rings to my brother and sister-in-law. There were such beautiful and large soap bubbles that are only made at weddings, or in the children’s bath. I burst into tears, my husband hugged me and asked him –
How will Noam miss it, she will not be able to see colors, sights, animals and all the riches of nature and the world … we cried together,
But we promised that we would be strong and from that moment everything would be done, but everything so that Noam would be the girl who would surprise everyone. point.
The year has been extremely difficult, but we have always invested in our children and this year mostly in pleasantness. We ran almost 6 days a week: pool, physiotherapy twice a week, acupuncture, vision teacher and lots of tests.
In the meantime, we thought with Dr. Yahalom, our ophthalmologist, about a solution for Noam Kindergarten. She straight away recommended – Gan Elia – a special kindergarten for children with visual impairments. It was indeed a wonderful solution. Very quickly they entered a charming kindergarten located in Jerusalem – Gan Elia and on further thought we decided to send our daughter Liraz, who does not suffer from vision problems at all, to the combined class. It was a night full of hesitation. Should Liraz feel and experience other people’s problems at such a young age? She herself is only a 3-year-old girl. What about her and the blind / visually impaired?You have to see to understand how proud I am of Liraz’s behavior, how she helps visually impaired kindergarten children, (no longer use the word blind), how she talks to Noam and explains the situation to her: “Touch touch you see that there is nothing left in the bag” On the colors, shows her the way, plays in the playground with Noam and protects her
God forbid no one will step on her, hurt her or make her laugh.
The happiest of all was immediately proven: Liraz was the first Noam began to respond to. Liraz’s sixth sense, she understood the essence of the situation almost more than the adults. Elia’s kindergarten teachers educated her to different understandings, that such a small girl should not focus on difficulties.Thank God my daughters asked and that it was just a visual impairment and nothing more – thank God for letting me understand that he is planning life and not us. Thank God my husband was always by my side and there was not a single test I went through alone and thank God for directing me to get to Elia Kindergarten and send my two daughters there.
Linoy.
The story of Inbal and Yossi
We (Yossi and Inbal), a married couple from Jerusalem and the parents of a 3-year-old child, wanted to tell about the perhaps most important decision we have made so far regarding our young son, when we decided to enroll him in an integration kindergarten belonging to Elia, which works to promote blind and visually impaired children.
About two years ago, we came across an ad by Elia on the university bulletin board, announcing the opening of an experimental program in the association’s kindergarten in Jerusalem, to integrate neighborhood children with blind children and the visually impaired.
For us it was love at first sight. The way we saw the ad and even before we made the first inquiry, we knew we wanted to send our child to this place.Although we are not religious people, we strongly believe in the basic concept of human creation that God created all human beings in His image. Behind this humble sentence hides a world and its fullness is extremely important, which we sometimes tend to forget. Even if we are born different from each other, we are still all created in the image of God, we are all sons of God and we all deserve to realize equally the same primary potential nucleus that is within us that God has bequeathed to us.
This is of course not just a religious or moral conception it is also the most basic duty of any society, to take care to provide equal opportunity to all, certainly also to the exception and language within it.As someone who has this worldview, we were very happy that it gave us an opportunity not only to educate our tender child from a very young age in accordance with these perceptions, but to actually transfer it from the level of principle to actual practice.
We believe that education for equality and acceptance of difference should begin as early as possible in the child’s development. A child who from the beginning of his life grew up with children different from him, whether due to physical or mental disabilities or whether due to any other life circumstance he will learn over time to accept them as they are, will learn not to shy away from them and become a better and more patient person.In this sense our son’s garden is an excellent habitat for this. The kindergarten is special not only because it combines children with disabilities together with children without disabilities, but also because of the very diverse demographic composition of the children included in it which is a kind of microcosm of Israeli society, which is due in part to the kindergarten for children with special needs. Together with our son, kindergarteners come from kindergartens belonging to the ultra-Orthodox sector, along with Arab and secular children, as well as religious children, all in addition to the physical limitations for some of them. In this state of affairs our son’s dealing with the different of course takes on a very special validity and meaning.
We feel that already after a year and a half in kindergarten our son has learned to be very patient and considerate of the other children. He learns to recognize their physical limitations and tries to help them within his capabilities. In addition, since it is a kindergarten that has children with disabilities, the kindergarten staff shows zero tolerance for any manifestation of “violence” or “aggression”, even one that is typical of children their age, and as a result all kindergarten children learn to be very polite and gentle. A foreigner who finds himself in this kindergarten will have a hard time believing that this is a kindergarten in Israel in 2010.Today in retrospect of afterthought wisdom, we know we have made the right move and reality has even exceeded all our expectations.
Of course all this would not have been a concept without the very great dedication and immense warmth given to our child by the professional staff of the kindergarten and the many volunteers who visit him from time to time and on this occasion we would like to thank each and every one of them.
If we end with what might have been right to start with, our dream is that one day when a parent tells his immediate environment that he sent his child to a kindergarten that includes children with disabilities alongside neighborhood children, they will not look at him with a glazed and merciful look and say “well done” and what courage “As has happened to us, but it will be perceived as the most ordinary and natural thing that will not provoke any reaction.
Yossi and Inbal
Raphael’s story – how it all started
On a cool evening in mid-September 2006 while planning the big trip of our lives we discovered to our surprise that I was pregnant, we were very happy and realized that it is very difficult to plan the future to come and the big trip became a small and romantic trip in Italy.
Everything was perfect. I felt wonderful, visited my doctor for routine checkups and everything was fine until the 12 week checkup where it was revealed to our amazement that I was carrying twin uterus. We were in shock, but of course we rejoiced to heaven. I was sent for another examination by a specialist and there the picture was less happy and more frightening. Pregnancy is rare and with risks. We debated hard and with a lot of faith we decided to continue with the pregnancy.
The next few weeks were just tests …….. tests ……. tests and lots of rest. At week 23 a routine examination revealed a problem – small hinges, a shortened cervix and umbilical cords tied around the babies, which endangered their lives greatly and that day I was hospitalized in close supervision.
Lying in the hospital takes care of the future of the twins, undergoes tests every day and maintains great hope in the heart that everything will be fine and we will go through everything in peace.
But unfortunately, in week 25 on Saturday 11/2/07 it was all over. That night terrible abdominal pains and pressure started and at the end the water went down. That I felt from the unknown – what will happen to me and what will be the fate of my children.
The story of David
