(Jewish Group) Girl debuts new way for blind Jews to take part in bat mitzvah

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When 12-year-old Batya Sperling Milner stood before her community at her bat mitzvah, a key coming-of-age ritual for Jews, she read from the Torah, just like any other Jewish kid. At the same time, the Saturday service at Ohev Sholom synagogue on a Sabbath morning was absolutely unique to the little girl.

The third of four children in a devout Modern Orthodox family, the daughter of a mother who is a Jewish educator and a father who is a lay cantor, Milner never considered she'd not have a bat mitzvah, the ceremony marking the time when a Jew becomes responsible for keeping Jewish law.

For Milner, who is blind, and her family, it was just a question of how it would all happen.

It turned out that reading Torah in a service — and reading from the holy book for your community is a central ritual of a bat mitzvah — presents challenges for a blind person. The family thought innovations might be needed, so they went on a journey to find them. By the end, Milner's mother, Aliza Sperling, wound up writing a 40-page paper that made the case for blind Torah readers and lectured from it in synagogue, launching a new conversation in the Washington area's Modern Orthodox community. And a software engineer created encoding and a computer program that may wind up transforming the Torah-reading experience for visually-impaired people.

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