April 20: Rabbi to the Deaf

Albert Jean Amateau, the first rabbi to head a congregation for the deaf and conduct services in sign language, was born in Turkey on this date in 1889. He came to the U.S. in 1910 and worked for Society for the Welfare of the Jewish Deaf until 1925. By then he had fought in World War I, earned an MSW from Columbia, and been ordained a rabbi by the Jewish Theological Seminary. In the 1930s, he became a lawyer and active in electoral politics; in 1941, he founded a successful business in Los Angeles that provided translators for lip-sync dubbing for foreign films. Amateau was married to the niece of the chief rabbi of the Ottoman Empire and was a strong advocate for Turkish-American friendship -- and a strong denier of the Armenian genocide. Prior to World War II, as head of the American Interracial Council, he attended meetings in Geneva aimed at improving Arab-Jewish relations in Palestine. He lived to 106.

“One and a half million Armenians are claimed to have been massacred. The avowals of their leaders prior to and after the First World War prove that there had been no massacre -- their leaders would have referred to it or claimed it as their calamity, or at least as their contribution to the Allied cause.” --Albert Jean Amateau, 1992