Motti Barzilai is the picture of confidence as he strides along the street in Tel Aviv, gently issuing commands in Hebrew to Charlie, a chocolate-colored Labrador retriever.
It’s hard to believe that for 13 years Barzilai never left his Safed home on his own. The fact that he can do so today is all due to Charlie, a graduate of the Israel Guide Dog Center for the Blind.
Until recent years, owning a guide dog was out of the question in Israel. The woman who had once trained them there had died, leaving no successor, so only those with sufficient command of English and financial means could obtain such dogs by traveling to the United States.
Barzilai, visually impaired after a childhood mishap, totally lost his residual vision 17 years ago. He was able to get a guide dog thanks to the tireless efforts of Noach Braun, a young Israeli with plans to become a guide-dog trainer and mobility instructor.
As he sits in the quiet gardens of the training center, located near Rehovot, Braun finds it hard to explain what fired his determination to become a trainer. Having been a dog trainer during his army service and later working at the Hai Bar Nature Preserve, he was simply “looking for an occupation which would combine working with animals and people.”
Braun and his future wife, Orna, whom he had met while living on Kibbutz Kabri, set off for the United States on a quest.
He started volunteering at the Jewish Guild for the Blind in New York, and contacted the Israeli consulate in the hopes of connecting with someone who could help him. This turned out to be Norman Leventhal, formerly involved in the Soviet Jewry Council of Greater Philadelphia.
“The name of the consul was Yershaya Barzel,” Leventhal relates, “and he told me that he had never met anyone so focused on what they wanted to do in life. I told him I had never met a blind person and didn’t have a dog, but I’d be glad to meet the young man and help him if I could.”
Once Leventhal and Braun met in December 1986, their lives changed. Through the combined efforts of the Jewish Guild for the Blind and Lions International, a partnership achieved by Leventhal, Braun was accepted for training at Pilot Dogs in Columbus, Ohio. This included arranging an annual grant for him which would be forgiven, gradually, if and when he returned to Israel and established a training center. Braun’s wife Orna also took a course.
Leventhal arranged for Braun to undergo further training in England, at the Guide Dogs for the Blind Association.
“Noach kept in close contact with me,” says Leventhal, “and I started to learn a little about why it was so important to have a guide dog center in Israel. It didn’t take much convincing to realize the importance of this humanitarian endeavor.”
Leventhal and his wife traveled to Israel, met with guide-dog owners, and learned firsthand the importance of having a guide-dog training school in Israel. “Soon after, I made the decision to create a nonprofit organization so we could raise funds to start the school, as Noach would need funding when he finished his training.”
That’s how the Israel Guide Dog Center for the Blind, a U.S. tax-exempt organization which supports the school and training center, came about. Between Leventhal’s unflagging work in the United States and the dedicated work of Noach and Orna Braun in Israel, the lives of at least 20 blind Israelis and their families change every year.
Center operations are a family affair, with Orna Braun supervising and cleaning the kennels and teaching the dogs discipline, and Noach Braun involved in training the dogs and overseeing a massive volunteer effort. The latter includes a large network of families who take care of puppies for a year, until they are old enough for training.
The center owns seven brood dogs, and each is bred once a year. In addition, suitable puppies — primarily golden retrievers, Labradors and some German shepherds — are sent in from around the world. Veterinary expenses are covered by the center. Pedigree supplies all food to the center and the foster families, where the dogs are visited monthly to monitor progress. After a year, the pups return to the center to commence training.
Once they arrive there, the dogs are evaluated for temperament and other factors. If one is found unsuitable, the foster family is given first-refusal rights for adoption. Dogs judged as good candidates start the six-month training program.
Instructors work with each animal, both in the placid atmosphere of the moshav and in the noise of the city. They ride escalators in busy malls, travel on buses, go out into jostling crowds, banks, restaurants, grocery stores — every conventional, real-life environment where they will be expected to serve their future owners.
The center has living facilities for four people at a time, who spend three weeks with their designated dogs, learning to work as a team. An additional week of instruction takes place in their own homes, with the trainer living in.
This painstaking process yields about 20 successful guide dogs per year. About 80 people are on a waiting list at any one time.
So far about 100 Israelis have been matched with guide dogs.
One such graduate phoned the center following his first week with his dog. Having just returned from a walk in Tel Aviv, he reported, “It was like I was flying. I feel that I’m free as a bird.”