Silent Prayer

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Eyal Sherman a special bar mitzvah boy.

God reads the lips of the silent worshiper every day.

Nearly 1,000 people emulated Him in a Syracuse synagogue last week.

They crowded into the sanctuary of Temple Adath Yeshurun on a recent Saturday morning for the bar mitzvah of Eyal David Sherman, the 13-year-old son of the congregation's spiritual leader, Rabbi Charles Sherman.

Eyal, a quadriplegic who breathes with the aid of a respirator, marked his religious coming of age by silently mouthing words of prayer while his face and the text he was reading were projected on a large screen near the bimah.

The rabbi, who has served the Conservative synagogue for 18 years, ruled that the high-tech video equipment, usually banned on the Sabbath, was permissible to "amplify" his son's only means of communication - the movement of his voiceless lips. The technology was comparable to the microphones used by other bar and bat mitzvah children in his synagogue, Rabbi Sherman said. "The screen became [Eyal's] microphone."

"You could read his lips. You could read his face," Rabbi Sherman said in a telephone interview.

Eyal, who suffered an incapacitating stroke after a lifesaving operation on a brain stem tumor nine years ago, insisted on "a regular bar mitzvah" instead of a private ceremony at mincha services on Saturday afternoon, Rabbi Sherman said. "Eyal doesn't see himself as a special kid."

As part of his bar mitzvah. duties, Eyal made the standard Hebrew blessings, led worship services, chanted the maftir and Haftarah, and delivered a small speech he had typed himself on a computer with a mouth stick. "It took him weeks," Rabbi Sherman said.

"Even though my bar mitzvah is different or awesome or radical, being high-tech, I never thought about that," Eyal said in his speech. "I just always knew that when I reached age 13, I'd be up here on the bimah and have a bar mitzvah just like any other kid."

"Intellectually, he's intact. He's very, very bright." Rabbi Sherman said of Eyal, who lives at home, is driven to public school by his mother, Leah, and plays third base on a baseball team for the disabled.

The standing-room crowd during shacharit services included Eyal's teachers and nurses, and Dr. Fred Epstein, the New York University surgeon who performed the life-saving operation on Eyal.

"At times you heard tears. At times you heard laughter," Rabbi Sherman said. "It alternated. I have never experienced such an electrifying moment." After Eyal made kiddush for the congregation at the end of services, "everyone stood up and started to applaud."

Steve Lipman