Yanky Kaufman uses his own past experiences and therapy attempts to help hundreds of stutterers
One participant is roleplaying the gabbai, eyeballing the crowd, hastily asking people for their names, purposely pronouncing them half wrong so they are forced to correct him, and urging the “honorees” up to the bimah to recite the brachos. On cue, and with the hearty, drawn out “amee-en,” a pseudo baal korei belts out the Rosh Chodesh Krias HaTorah, relishing every nuance of the trop. A jovial Mi Shebeirach follows, and the scene plays itself all over again, with different participants playing the various roles that the assembled men have been denied all their lives — until now.
While the group seems varied, explains Yanky Kaufman, who’s brought the men together, their common denominator is the stuttering impediment they all suffered from before joining his program. Their stutters caused them to doggedly avoid any public speaking opportunity, including a lifelong evasion of being honored with an aliyah or davening from the amud. For one particular participant sporting a flowing rebbi’s beard, it meant passing up a much-coveted position at a prestigious yeshivah.
Now, thanks to his innovative stuttering therapy program, these men are speaking fluently and confidently, and at the last, culminating session of his methodical regimen, they practice their newly acquired skills in front of the entire group. As a 45-year-old participant who’s never davened from the amud in his life recites Kaddish at Maariv, to the group’s resounding amen, Yanky is beaming.
As the men mill around engaging easily in small talk — another daily life activity they struggled with until now — we sit down in an inconspicuous corner of the shul to talk about the program, his brainchild, borne out of his own lifelong speech struggle and eventual success.
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