Beit Oved, Israel (special) -- The Israel Guide Dog Center for the Blind had given the name of "George" to the Labrador Retriever it trained for Binyamin Kapag, but the 69-year-old Kapag is toying with renaming his companion "Shadchan"-- meaning "Matchmaker."

Blind for six years, Kapag credits George not only with changing his life, but also with introducing him to Miriam, a 62-year-old sighted woman to whom Kapag recently became engaged to marry.

Kapag felt his way into a chair, told George to lie at his feet, and, through interpreters, related his bittersweet story to a group of 30 Canadians who were touring Israel on a mission sponsored by the UJ Federation of Greater Toronto, 

He said that for most of his life he had enough sight to be able to own and operate a homewares store in Rehovot. Doctors believed that a cornea transplant could greatly improve his sight in one eye, and at first "the transplantation caused a lot of improvement--but then my antibodies started rejecting the cornea. They operated six times, and every time it became worse and worse until I lost my sight completely."

While he was having his last surgery, his wife died, "and for four years I was in grief and I didn't want to leave home." After giving up his store, he did nothing but listen to the radio -- which one day carried a story about Israel's Guide Dog Center for the Blind.

Kapag telephoned Noach Braun, the center's founder and director, who sent some application forms. Kapag filled them out with the help of the daughter who at that time had lived with him along with her three children.

About a week later, "Noach came to my home. He asked me questions and then he tested me how I walk with a cane. My problem is that I walk fast. Because I walk too fast, when I touch the obstacle with a cane it is too late, and I hit the obstacle with my body. So Noach brought out a harness. He held the harness and I held he harness and he did all kinds of maneuvers with me (with Braun playing the part of a guide dog). Turn around. Stop. Upstairs. Noach said I was suitable for a guide dog, and then he put me on the waiting list.

"Two weeks later, I called and Noach said, 'You don't have patience?' and I said 'No," so they put me in the first course. It was three weeks living here at the center and then one week at home."

With George "I go to the central bus station in Tel Aviv, where even a sighted man can get lost, and I have taught George how to get to the elevator at the bus station. When I get off the bus, I say 'take me to elevator.' We go to the elevator, and turn left to go to Bat Yam, or right to Ramat Gan or Petach Tikvah. The dog knows where to go. The same thing for back home. I say 'take me home" and he takes me to the bus station for Rehovot. 

"I am free to go wherever I want. It is exceptional freedom." 

On one occasion, Kapag rode a bus to an eye clinic, then strode up the steps with George. A woman who was following him asked, "how come you are allowed to take a dog into the clinic?" Kapag replied that George is not just any dog, he is a guide dog. "I can't see," Kapag told the woman. "That is not true," replied the woman, Miriam. "You walk normally."

Kapag and Miriam began talking. She told him that she had a spot, like a fly, in her eye. "I said don't worry about it; it is only the beginning of cataracts. You will be able to see for ten years at least. If you see haziness, then they will do cataract surgery. So she went to see the doctor, and the doctor said exactly what I said. She came outside and asked 'how did you diagnose it? How did you know what it was -- without education, without anything?' We kept talking. She asked, 'who helps you, how do you live?' I said 'I have a home, a dog, but I am lonely.' She said 'I am lonely too.' All of a sudden the doctor called me, so I gave her a card. I said, if you want to keep talking to me, please call me. Two days later she called me.

"We started talking and I was going to visit my daughter in Nes Ziona and she lives in Nes Ziona, so we met there -- it's about two miles east of Rehovot. Now we are living together. And it is all thanks to George. George is my matchmaker."

His family has become fond of Miriam, telling Kapag that his fiancee "looks much younger than 62, and that she cleans well and does the house well and that she is great," Kapag said. "She is like a 40 year old!" 

He laughed aloud, then felt compelled to explain: "For four years I was crying, now it's time to laugh."

* * *

Kapag and George are one set of 100 dog-blind person partners who have been trained by the Israel Guide Dog Center for the Blind since Braun fulfilled his dream and began the center in 1991 in his family's four bedroom rented home in Kfar Yedidya.

By 1995, the center had raised enough funds to purchase an acre and a half of land at Beit Oved, on which it has built or has under construction housing for the blind, kennels and a clinic for the guide dogs, as well as an obstacle course to train the dog and person partners. 

Braun and his wife, Ona, who supervises the dog breeding program, moved into a house that was already standing on the center's property, which is located a few miles north of Yavne, the town famed for keeping Torah scholarship alive after the Romans burned the Second Temple and sacked Jerusalem in 70 CE.

Braun had worked with animals most of his life. He had milked the cows at Kabri, his kibbutz near Nahariya close to the Lebanese border. As a paratrooper in the Israel Defense Forces, he had trained dogs to sniff out terrorists or bombs. And after completing his active duty, he had gone to work as a ranger for Israel's Nature Authority, helping to return animals mentioned in the Bible to the Arava. But his experience sending dogs into danger in the military haunted him; he had used animals for war; he decided he would find a way to work with animals to benefit mankind.

After learning that blind Israelis who wanted guide dogs were required to go to England or to the United States for them -- and that blind Israelis who couldn't speak English were at a decided disadvantage -- Braun had found his cause. The question was, with no particular financial means, how could he learn enough about guide dog centers to start one in Israel?

In 1985 Braun went to New York, hoping he could interest philanthropic organizations in Israel's guide dog needs. Supporting himself at various jobs -- including a stint with Moshe's Moving Company -- he volunteered with the Jewish Guild for the Blind, which later offered to sponsor him as a student at any of ten Guide Dog Centers for the Blind in various parts of the United States. But every one of those centers declined to take Braun as a student. Why? Braun believes they feared that another center, even in far off Israel, would be competition.

Eventually, Braun met Norman Leventhal of Warrington, Pa, a man who had won a reputation for effectiveness as an activist in the movement to free Soviet Jewry. A member of the Lions Club, which dedicates much of its philanthropy towards the blind, Leventhal was angered by the way Braun had been rebuffed. He took on Braun's education as a cause, and eventually succeeded in getting him enrolled in a two-year program at Columbus, Ohio.

At the same time, Leventhal formed in the United States the non-profit Israel Guide Dog Center for the Blind, which received contributions to defray the cost of Braun's education and the eventual establishment of the center in Israel.

After completing that course, Braun was persuaded by Tamar Perkins, a blind woman who headed an association of Israeli guide dog users, to spend three more years in England in order to learn more about dogs and the needs of the blind. In England, the British Friends of the Israel Guide Dog Centre for the Blind was established, with Lady Elizabeth Kaye and Lady Armelie Jakobovits becoming patronesses of the center.

Once the center was established in Israel, Braun developed programs both for the blind people and for the dogs who would serve them.

As in the case of Kapag, Braun meets with applicants at their homes after they have filled out a personal history form. At these meetings, which take about three hours, "a few things should happen," Braun said. "One is that the person should have all the information about what a guide dog really is. Maybe he heard from a friend that a guide dog can read traffic lights, which is not true. We explain some of the important information. Second, we check the practical abilities -- the person's speed, orientation, mobility abilities, balance, and so forth -- so that we can make a decision if the person is suitable for a guide dog. Sometimes, people are not. For example, we had someone who applied who was an alcoholic. If he is not responsible for himself, why should we give him a guide dog? Another example is that there are some people who have residual vision and want to lead the dog, rather than to follow it. This is a barrier, but it can be improved upon."

Braun said generally it is not a good idea to link a person who has just become blind with a dog. There needs first to be a period of adjustment to the blindness, even an acceptance, Braun said. Newly blinded people can have a lot of anger, and resentment, and sometimes such negative emotions can be vented on the dog. Even if a person doesn't abuse a dog directly, he might do so indirectly -- for example, by feeling self-pity and refusing to get up in the morning, thereby not taking the dog out to relieve itself.

After being accepted, a blind person comes to live in a dormitory at the Guide Dog Center for three weeks. "We have to show them how to behave with a guide dog; how to treat the dog as an animal, how to walk with a guide dog," Braun said. "It takes three weeks just to give him all the basics. Then during the fourth week, we the instructors take the person and the dog to their home environment and help them to get adjusted. When before they had to go to America and get a dog, when they came back here, there was nobody to help them; they came back to deep water."

There are numerous follow up calls after the four-week course is completed. "It takes a month to three months, it is not automatic, not like a machine we operate," Braun cautions. "It takes time. But even in the class we see a change -- a change in the body language, in the confidence. The blind people smile; you see it in the way they move, the muscles of their body. .... If I only give Mr. Cohen a dog, we haven't done our job; we have only done a part of it. We have to make certain that he and the dog are okay, and that for 8-10 years they can function together as a walking team."

Raising and training the dogs are other preoccupations at the center.
"We start with a very good breeding stock which takes years and years until you have a good pool of genes," Braun said.

He said the guide dog center prefers to use Labrador Retrievers because they take change well. A puppy is weaned from its mother at between three and four weeks, then raised at the center for several weeks before being sent to a foster home like that in Hod Hasharon of Jane Klapper, a former resident of Middlesborough in North Yorkshire, England. When the dogs are a year old, they are returned to the center to learn walking commands, then are introduced to their eventual partners.

While German Shepherds are talented dogs, Braun said, they do not adapt as well to such change as do Labrador Retrievers. Some dogs are quite sensitive, like a Porsche, he said, and really need to be handled by experts; other dogs are more like Suburus, which can do well no matter who handles them. Labradors are the Suburus of Canine-dom, Braun said.

Klapper, who made aliyah to Israel in 1959, is typical of the "foster owners" who raise the animals. "It was something I always had in my mind ever since I was a child because we used to have a blind workshop in my home town," she recalled. "They made basketwork and I used to have a basket on my bicycle, which was made by the blind. That was sort of my first connection with the blind. In addition, I've always been an animal lover and a dog lover, and I was sort of drawn to guide dogs."

As a foster owner, "the idea is to get the dogs used to living in a normal home... You have to expose them to everything, such as going in lifts, going up stairs, going on escalators. You teach them to walk a certain way, a little bit in front, and you teach them to sit. The basics. You've got to housebreak them, that's the first thing, and give them lots of love. We get a lot of guidance from the center."

Everybody asks how she can adjust to having to give the dog back to the center when it's a year old. "It is hard," she admits. "But I have two other dogs in the house which make it much easier. " When one guide dog named Sandy was "graduating" the center to go home to Netanya with a blind man named Mir, "it was a very good feeling -- it makes me cry when I tell it -- because you feel that you have helped to give a pair of eyes to someone, almost. And so that compensates."

Not all dogs turn out to have the temperament to be guide dogs, and foster families are given first pick of these dogs who, in this age of political correctness, are never called "rejects." Instead they are known as "career change" dogs.

The dogs that do go through training must learn "to be obedient; they should listen to commands," Braun said. "They have to learn (in Hebrew), 'go ahead'; 'go right'; 'go left'; 'sit down'; all kinds of commands. They have to have good concentration, listen and know what to do. They have to find destinations that they have been to already; they have to stay on the sidewalk, or pavement; maneuver around obstacles, and stop at the down curb and wait for directions.

"Some kids ask me, show me what the dog can do; they want it to jump through a hoop with fire. I tell the kids, 'shut your eyes. Now will it be easy to go from your class here to the toilet without help?' They tell me, 'no, we cannot do it.' I say this is what a guide dog does for a person. Imagine a blind person wants to go from his home to the post office, to visit somebody, or to go to the shop to buy milk, or go to his office. The dog is the one who gives him the ability, the confidence. "

* * *

Sometimes when Braun remembers working in New York for Moshe the Mover and wondering whether his dream of creating a guide dog center in Israel would ever become a reality, he thinks of the six dunam property, or the certification the center has received from the International Federation of Guide Dog Centers, or looks at the kennels being renovated with a grant by Andrea and Charles Bronfman, and knows his dream has been established and is well on its way.

Dr. Yonatan Peres, former director of the teaching hospital at Hebrew University's School of Veterinary Medicine, for many years volunteered the medical care for the center's dogs. Now Peres--son of Israel's former Prime Minister Shimon Peres--is on the staff not only as the veterinarian but as the center's full time fundraiser, and Braun feels his goal of assuring the center's future is being met.

But, for all that, nothing satisfies Braun more than stories like those of Kapag and George the 'Shadchan' or of Moti Barzalai and his companion Charlie.

A resident of the Galilean city of Safed, Barzalai used to have to walk with his hand on the shoulder of his wife or his children. After he and George were united, he learned to get around so well, and so quickly, that he became something of a legend in Israel's blind community. He became an officer of the Guide Dog Users Association, which occasionally has to remind taxicab drivers and restaurant owners that Israeli law requires them to serve a blind person and guide dog.

Barzalai says his relationship with Charlie is not that of a man and a Labrador Retriever-- but more like that of two family members. "Every morning about 6 o'clock someone comes to my bed and sniffs, and when I am sleeping he comes and catches my ear. And if I don't wake up, he jumps on my bed. And then I give him his food, and take him out to the toilet, and I touch him to make sure that everything is okay. (Peres teaches the blind how to give their dogs examinations)."

"When Charlie feels that I am not concentrating, he comes to me with his head by my hand, as if to ask, 'mister what is the matter with you?'" 

Charlie also is a favorite with other members of the Barzalai family. "You know," Barzalai says, "if it is a rainy day, and I am in Tel Aviv, and I call home, my wife doesn't ask me how are you; she asks how is Charlie."

Barzalai's 22-year-old son, Yoav, jokes that Charlie is "like a little brother -- quite annoying sometimes -- but just great." The difference in the family's life before and after Charlie is "like earth and sky," he said. "My dad is now totally independent. When he first came with Charlie, I used to walk behind them to make sure that everything is okay.

"In the beginning, I couldn't put all my trust in Charlie, because it was very strange for me to see my dad walk all alone," Yoav said. "And now I can close my eyes walking along with both of them and I know that we will all get there safely."