At the Gorur Losen Shula in Berlin, which still exists today under another name in another building in the same neighborhood, there has been since 1985 a classroom named after Hildigard Weiss.

On the wall of that [music] classroom hangs a small plaque quoting the words she spoke in Jerusalem in 1957.

The part [music] about the difference between not being seen and not being looked at, translated into [music] German and into German sign language in a visual transliteration that students can decipher if they know the language.

Every year on the first day of class, the teacher who uses that classroom writes the same vocabulary on the blackboard for the first lesson.

the basic vocabulary of sign language, the words for the world’s most [music] fundamental concepts.

Name, family, home, friend, help, thank you.

And then she [music] explains to her students that in that very same space decades earlier, a deaf teacher had shown that language, any language, any way human beings have of telling each other things can under certain circumstances be the difference between living and not living.

That words matter.

That the way they are said matters.

And that sometimes the most powerful words are the ones no one else can

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