JERUSALEM — When Jerusalem-born identical twins Dana and Tamar Tal-El, 19, were diagnosed with profound hearing impairment at the age of two, doctors said they would never be able to speak normally.

Dana, left and Tamar Tal-El

Doctors also said they would never be able to learn normally and that they would most certainly never serve in the Israel Defence Forces (IDF).

But Dana and Tamar learned to speak almost flawlessly, and the pair went to regular kindergarten, elementary and high schools. The dynamic duo this week again proved the doctors’ wrong as they commenced their service with the IDF.

Last Thursday, the girls attended their first day of service, completing the necessary administrative tasks and picking up their uniforms. Dana begins her military service as a photographer for the air force, and Tamar begins her service as a soldier-teacher for children with difficult home lives in one of Israel’s development towns. “I’m really excited – I can’t wait to start,” says Dana.

“Me, too,” chimes in Tamar. “It’s really exciting!”

When the girls were called by the IDF for their initial assessment in 11th grade, they were both given a “ptor,” or “release,” due to their hearing impairment. But, like most other challenges with which they have been presented, the girls, both with double cochlear implants, refused to take no for an answer.

“A lot of people in my class said they were envious and that they wanted a ptor to get out of going to the army, too,” says Dana, who graduated with a photography speciality from the Jerusalem High School for the Arts. “But for me, it was very hard to be rejected this way. I don’t consider myself disabled, and I certainly don’t feel that I should be prevented from serving in the army. Everyone goes to the army, and now it’s my turn.”

Tamar adds: “I have lived in this country, under the protection of its army, for the last 19 years. I want to give something back to Israel from me. I want to feel like I have done something for Israel, something significant. This is very important to me.”

And so, after a struggle that lasted several months and entailed many phone calls and visits to IDF offices and doctors, the girls settled on the only option available to them – volunteering. “They [the IDF] didn’t make it easy,” says the girls’ mother, Elaine Matlow Tal-El, who is originally from Toronto.

For her, the girls’ dealings with the IDF are reminiscent of her own contact with the state’s social institutions charged with caring for the hearing impaired, she said. When the girls were diagnosed as babies, there was an organization that fit them with hearing aids and another to help admit them into special education facilities.

“That is how they prepared us to raise children with hearing loss – they told us that they would be special needs, and need special education, and they would never be like everybody else,” says Matlow Tal-El. “I thought, no. We can do better.”

She and her Israel-born husband, Eli, along with another couple who made aliyah from Toronto, Jozie and Nathan Eisner (who also have two hearing-impaired children), put their heads together and, in 1995, non-profit organization A.V. Israel was born.

With offices in Ra’anana and Jerusalem, A.V. Israel is dedicated to helping deaf children and their parents by providing audiological testing and diagnostic assessments; state-of-the-art technology, including cochlear implants, digital hearing aids and assistive FM devices; auditory-verbal (A.V.) education and speech therapy, as well as counselling and professional training, with the ultimate goal of teaching deaf children to “listen” and speak, so that they could integrate into mainstream schools and the culture of the hearing world.

While the current standard for teaching language and speech to the hearing impaired relies on vision – lip reading and sign language – A.V. therapy advocates teaching these skills the natural way, auditorily.

In most cases of hearing impairment, the auditory nerve is still intact, and although it doesn’t function on its own, it is possible to stimulate this nerve with electronic impulses, such as those produced by a cochlear implant or other advanced hearing device. Although the sound that is produced by this stimulation is not identical to that produced in a normally functioning auditory system, it is a sound that the brain can translates into meaningful speech and language.

The benefits of this approach are manifold: first, the normal physiological stimulation of the brain enables subjects to learn speech and language naturally, through listening, the way hearing people do; secondly, it is not necessary for individuals with a cochlear implant to see other people when they speak; and thirdly, the sound of the speech if the hearing impaired is much more proximate to normal speech. So much so that Dana says sometimes when she speaks, people sometimes ask her if she has a foreign accent, rather than a hearing impairment.

“Sometimes, I tell them it’s because my mom is from Canada,” she says with a smile.

“This technology and therapeutic approach is the miracle of the 20th century. It essentially eradicates deafness,” says Matlow Tal-El. “There is no reason why a child with hearing loss today can’t function in normal society.”

Today, A.V. Israel serves more than 200 families across Israel, providing therapy to some 50 children. The centre is also involved in a cochlear implant mapping (fine-tuning) project at Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem and in opening a cochlear implant department at Jerusalem’s Shaare Zedek Medical Center. “When we decided to bring this approach to Israel, it was like reinventing the wheel. There were no professionals here, and no infrastructure,” says Matlow Tal-El.

The progress of the field in Israel can be mapped by her own daughters, the centre’s first “graduates.” Dana and Tamar had to go to New York for their first cochlear implants at age three, and by the time they were ready for their second implants, at age 14, they were able to have the surgery in Israel.

“This is a major achievement,” says Matlow Tal-El. “We are very happy to be able to offer the opportunity to hear, to other children in Israel.”

As for her girls, she says, “I couldn’t be prouder of them and the progress they have made. Especially this week, with them going off to serve in the army… I am just beside myself.”