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Saul Rosen

Saul Rosen was a Deaf Polish Ashkenazi Jewish Holocaust child survivor and retired printer. He attended the New York School for the Deaf, where he met Miri Rosen, and they later raised their daughter, Annie, in a Deaf, ASL-using Jewish household in Baltimore.

Early Life and Resettlement

Saul was born profoundly Deaf in October 1944 while his Jewish family was in hiding in occupied Warsaw. His birth parents did not survive the war, and their names were lost from the records that followed him. He was rescued as an infant with assistance from the Żegota network, spent time in a Jewish children’s home in Łódź, and passed through postwar Jewish resettlement agencies before traveling to the United States in 1948 at approximately three and a half.

Saul entered the New York home of surviving relatives from his birth mother’s extended family. They gave him the Rosen surname, a stable Jewish household, and material care, but they did not know how to give a Deaf child an accessible language. A social worker eventually connected the family with the New York School for the Deaf.

Education and Communication

Saul entered the New York School for the Deaf, also known as Fanwood, at approximately age five without a full language. ASL became his first full language there, and he used written English. His adoptive household remained hearing and relied on the school to provide the linguistic access it had not known how to create at home. He met Miri while they were students.

Saul was an expressive ASL user known within his family for humor. He learned braille-based access as his vision narrowed, began using a white cane outdoors in his late seventies, and learned Protactile in his eighties alongside Miri and RJ.

Career and Community

After graduating from Fanwood in 1962, Saul entered a union printing apprenticeship in New York. He transferred into a Baltimore union printing position when he and Miri moved there in 1966 and retired in 2010 after a forty-four-year Baltimore printing career. Printing was a longstanding trade within twentieth-century Deaf employment, and Saul’s career connected him to that occupational history.

After moving to Baltimore, Saul participated in the city’s Jewish Deaf community.

Marriage and Family

Main article: Saul and Miri Rosen

Saul and Miri married and raised Annie as their only child. They remained closely involved with Annie and Robbie and with their grandchildren, Lindsay, Leslie, and RJ.

Saul gave Lindsay the family epithet “the one with the laugh” and Leslie “the one with the stare.” Later in life, Saul and Miri moved into Annie and Robbie’s home.

Cultural and Religious Life

The Rosen household maintained Jewish practices including Shabbat dinners, high-holiday observance, and yahrzeit remembrance. Saul’s Polish Ashkenazi Jewish heritage, Deaf family life, and Holocaust-survivor history remained parts of the family’s intergenerational identity.

Health and Access

Saul was congenitally profoundly Deaf and had mild lifelong vestibular dysfunction. Retinitis pigmentosa began affecting his night vision and peripheral field in his thirties, although the narrowing became more functionally significant through his fifties and sixties. A Baltimore ophthalmologist diagnosed retinitis pigmentosa in the 1980s without connecting it to his Deafness. Genetic testing after RJ’s 2012 infant diagnosis confirmed USH1F Usher syndrome.

By his seventies, Saul had advanced tunnel vision. He adopted a white cane outdoors in his late seventies and learned Protactile in his eighties as both his own access needs and RJ’s communication needs changed. He continued to identify culturally as Deaf.

Saul survived a mild heart attack in 1998 and broke his hip in 2018. Miri, Annie, and the rest of the family supported his recovery from both events.

Death

Saul died in his sleep at the Whitaker-Rosen Family Home in October 2044 at approximately one hundred years old, only hours after making Miri laugh with one last filthy joke. Miri remained with the family for approximately thirty-six hours and then died in her sleep while holding Saul’s pocket watch.

The Jewish Deaf Society of Baltimore held a joint memorial for them. Approximately three hundred people attended, and the eulogies lasted three hours.

Family Relationships

Miriam Rosen

Saul met Miri at the New York School for the Deaf. They built a long marriage and a shared ASL-using household in Baltimore.

Annie Whitaker

Main article: Annie Whitaker and Her Parents

Saul and Miri raised Annie in a Deaf household and remained close to her through adulthood. Their survival histories and Annie’s childhood interpreting responsibilities later informed parts of her work as a trauma therapist.

Lindsay, Leslie, and RJ Whitaker

Saul was an involved grandfather to Lindsay, Leslie, and RJ. The family’s shared use of ASL supported communication across generations, while Saul’s later tactile access practices connected with RJ’s deafblind experience.

Memorable Quotes

No verified exact quotation is currently available.

Characters Supporting Characters Deceased Characters Deaf Characters DeafBlind Characters Jewish Characters Ashkenazi Characters Polish Characters Disabled Characters ASL Users