Loud and Clear By Eran Feintuch | January 13, 2021 As the Chabad shaliach to the global deaf community, Rabbi Yehoshua Soudakoff sounds the call of Torah for those who could never before hear it Photos: Ezra Trabelsi You know those inspiring stories about someone who overcomes enormous challenges to accomplish the impossible? Well, that’s the kind of story I planned on writing about Rabbi Yehoshua Soudakoff. Rabbi Soudakoff, deaf from birth, left the LA public school system for yeshivah, eventually earned semichah despite being unable to hear the shiurim, and at the young age of 20, had already become a leader of the Jewish deaf in America. But Rabbi Soudakoff essentially waves all that away, because his new frontier is so much larger than his own personal victories. In his new role as the Chabad shaliach to the global deaf community, he’s bridging the chasm that often separates deaf Jews from normative Jewish life and bringing Yiddishkeit to those who felt they were the Torah’s outcasts. And that story has only just begun.