A fine feeling for harmony

By Barbara Sofer
July. 24, 2003

A recent phone call from pianist and piano teacher Deborah Schramm jibed with the tentative feelings of hopefulness here in the city of Jerusalem.

It's end-of-the year recital time at the Jerusalem Conservatory of Music, also known as the Sadna, on Rehov Emek Refaim. Such performances are usually of most interest to parents, grandparents, and aunts of music students. Every parent knows why.

But in this case, among Schramm's students would be Ra'asha, an unusual young woman whom I first met more than a decade ago, when she was just a girl. What makes Ra'asha different from most of the piano students is that she's blind. She's an orphan. She's Muslim. And she's Palestinian.

Ra'asha's story is interwoven with that of a highly esteemed Dutch couple, the late Helen Volbehr of blessed memory and her husband, Edward. A car accident in her youth left Helen unable to have children. Edward, whom she met at a Christian organization on a university campus in Holland, married her knowing they would never have their own family.

In 1981 Helen and Edward spotted a newspaper advertisement for a director of a Christian home for blind children in Bethlehem. The couple felt close to Israel because of their Christian roots, and because Helen's parents had hidden Jews from the Nazis in World War II. They applied for the job and were accepted. But on arriving in Bethlehem they discovered there was no job. Five months after their arrival in Bethlehem, the old director still had not relinquished the post they had been hired to fill.

"My way of coping with disappointment is to think of something more grandiose," Helen told me. They learned there was a shortage of qualified people to work with severely retarded children from Bethlehem and the surrounding Arab villages. The Volbehrs wanted to help bring up these needy children - the family they couldn't have. They convinced friends and relatives back in Holland to raise the seed money for the children's home that's now called Yemima. While the funds were being collected, the first of many children were referred by social workers. They included two sisters, Ra'asha, then four, and her sister Nadia, then five, from Jenin. The Volbehrs were shocked when they saw the two little girls, who crawled on their behinds and used their feet like hands. Their hands were knotted up in fists and they kept poking at their eyes. Both girls were blind and considered retarded. Nadia was also deaf. The girls' ashamed teenage parents had locked them away.

Helen and Edward taught the girls to eat and walk. They dressed them in long shirts and sewed up the sleeves so they wouldn't abuse their eyes. It took a year to toilet-train them. One evening Helen quieted their growing group of children by playing a new cassette of choral music. When the tape finished, Helen sang a bar of the music. Only Ra'asha sang back the harmony. They'd gotten through to her at last.

Money was tight, but the Volbehrs splurged on a piano. Lessons did not go well at first. Ra'asha clenched her hands whenever Auntie Helen tried to teach her the notes. After six months of horrendous banging, Ra'asha played her first melody. When the children in Bethlehem sang hymns, Ra'asha accompanied them on the piano.

But Helen believed Rasaha's talent outstripped her own piano-teaching abilities. She drove Ra'asha to the Jerusalem Conservatory for Music in Jerusalem. Deborah Schramm was assigned by the Conservatory to teach Ra'asha. Helen sat near them, translating from Dutch and Arabic to English, as teacher Schramm sought her own innovative ways to get through to Ra'asha, who had never mastered Braille. There was a famous breakthrough when Schramm assigned each finger a number. Ra'asha suddenly caught on and could play in a more professional way.

The lessons have continued for 12 years, even through the past three years of violence, often with interruptions. Schramm lives in Gilo; the children's home is in Bethlehem, and from the beginning of the intifada they have exchanged anecdotes about facing up to the shelling.

Funds are tighter than ever. When Helen died from cancer, Edward moved back to Holland. The directors of Yemima are concerned that they are being unfair to other needy children by lavishing music lessons and transportation on Ra'asha.

Schramm has gone to bat for Ra'asha, hoping, through the parents of a former student, now back at Princeton, to help get her a scholarship to the conservatory.

"Without music, she has nothing," said Schramm. Indeed, although she can play Beethoven's "Rage over a Lost Penny," and Bach cantatas, Ra'asha can't read or write.

Most of her students - a mix of Israelis from young to middle aged - take Ra'asha's presence as a matter of course. There are sometimes a few raised eyebrows over Schramm's interest in this student, a Palestinian, by an Orthodox Jewish piano teacher whose own four daughters are growing up in Jerusalem, the city that has been hardest hit by terror.

"The Temple will be rebuilt because of love with no reason," she tells them. She believes that God is giving her a message my providing this mission with one little girl. Her hope for peace is that these modest efforts will one day join together like the different voices in a chorus. She likes the idea of people meeting in music.

In the meantime, dressed in a black jumper and white blouse, Ra'asha leans over the keys and ends the recital with her favorite piece: Chopin's etude in E-Major, opus 10, number 3. It starts off tranquilly, moves to dissonance and becomes serene at the end. "She has a fine feeling for harmony," smiles Ra'asha's teacher.

Ra'asha, now 26, is a real young woman, not just a paradigm. Still, I can't help thinking of the forces that combined to bring her here. The Volbehrs represented the best of Christian Europe, yet are from a country that has discontinued social security payments to Jewish retirees who live beyond the Green Line.

Ra'asha hails from the infamous Jenin, where tens of millions of euros were wasted on an armed terrorist camp while not purchasing one swing or slide.

Deborah Schramm represents the best of Israel and the unlimited desire to nurture.

This is a story about untapped possibilities and about the power of compassion. All we're missing is a fine feeling for harmony.