She is the inspiration and chief visionary officer of Aviva Productions, but 12-year-old Aviva Krainess can barely see. A bubbly sixth grader from Ramat Beit Shemesh, Aviva came to Israel seven years ago as a healthy and precocious child, described by her father, Leib, as “the light of our life,” but soon thereafter began to fall increasingly ill.While her condition remains unknown, she was at first diagnosed with lupus and began to exhibit symptoms of arthritis several months after making aliya. Several strokes later, she can barely walk, seeing only what she describes as a “pinpoint,” and keeps going through sheer pluck and grit.Despite her handicaps, she continues to attend school, where her father, a former administrator at the haredi outreach yeshiva Aish Hatorah, says she does quite well.She loves school,” Leib says.Aviva, he adds, doesn’t let her pain “affect her life for the most part. She used to be a lefty and made herself into a righty,” since losing much of her fine motor control on her left side.Leib, sitting with his daughter around their dining room table, noted that she cannot even read Braille due to the deterioration in her condition, “because the lupus has affected her fingers. The dots hurt her fingers.”It is on the strength of Aviva’s effusive personality and contagious excitement that the company that her father founded to aid the blind, especially in the Orthodox community, has taken off.A video featuring Aviva promoting the Krainesses’ concept of mind theater, the revival, and 21st-century update of the radio teleplays of the 1940s, recently brought in over $20,000 on the Jewish crowdfunding website Mercava.Two hundred and sixty-five backers donated money for the company’s first production, The Emperor’s Secret.Listening to the trailer for the feature with Aviva and her father, as Aviva played on an iPad donated by one of the throngs of well-wishers looking to ease her burdens, this reporter got the sense of a professionally made cinema feature – but without any of the visuals.While Leib says that the intention was initially to provide wholesome entertainment for the “frum [Orthodox] world,” he is now aiming at a broader audience that can appreciate the morality of Judaism without necessarily wanting the religious trappings.He explains that he was inspired by his daughter and “when she was going blind we said okay, let’s at least get her some entertainment.”“Watching a movie,” he says, “wasn’t so easy. She couldn’t read anymore; she couldn’t see pictures. I said let’s get some stories on tape or something.”However, Leib discovered that there was almost “nothing” in either the Orthodox or secular worlds that was suitable.“We even started looking – maybe there are books on tape, maybe it’s not a production but at least someone is reading,” he says. Suddenly, Aviva looks up and interrupts.“Oh my God,” she says. “So boring.How long can you listen to one person talking?” Leib decided to create what he would eventually term Mind Theater, a modern take on the 1940s radio teleplay.Move over Flash Gordon and the Shadow.“At the time, four years ago, I figured how long could it take? You get a program on your computer to record, you get some people to volunteer.We had a lot of people that wanted to record something.”However, the work was tougher than he imagined, and Leib and Aviva decided to hold off for a while.“It was kind of a lot,” he says, “so we shelved the project.” Soon after, Leib met Yehuda Moshe, another haredi man who lives on his street and who runs Mercava, described by Leib as a cross between Kickstarter and a “startup accelerator for the nonprofit world.”“Mercava helps other organizations and people who have project ideas for the greater Jewish world, that he feels will make a great impact on the Jewish world and the world as a whole.”Moshe and Leib began finding volunteers and, together with input from Aviva, whom Leib describes as having taken on a real role in putting the project together from a creative perspective, began “unleashing the power of imagination with a Cinematic Audio Experience,” as their website puts it.A video of Aviva was placed online and money began coming in, as volunteers from across the Jewish world donated their time, funds and talents to create a visual-less movie.After a short while on the project, Leib and Yehuda realized there are more children in the world, beyond those who are either Jewish or handicapped, who would benefit from educational entertainment with a Jewish moral center.“If we were going to do it and put the energy into it, it could be a lot bigger,” Leib recalls, “than just a nice little production or just a production for visually impaired kids. We got to thinking there are a lot of kids who would listen to audio productions.”“Children, even in our iPod generation, cannot sit in front of screens all day. We were trying to go for visually impaired kids obviously, but there are those families who don’t want a television at home, as much for educational reasons as religious.”Listening to the trailer for The Emperor’s Secret, which was adapted from the book Don’t Look Down! by Libby Lazewnik and is about “a spoiled emperor, who always gets whatever he wants, whenever he wants it, and a stranger with a special gift for the emperor,” one gets the feeling of listening to a modified trailer for a Disney or Pixar film. All of the wacky character types are represented and the trailer pulses with action.“Look,” Leib says, “if we could create or recreate a movie, but instead of having the visuals use audio, sound effects, music, and pay attention to narration, with actors, instead of using hand gestures or body language, doing it with their voice, we figured if we paid a lot of attention to that and wrote a script with that in mind, that we could do even better than the oldtime radio, especially with today’s technology.”He certainly seems to have done that, at least if you go by the teleplay’s trailer.Aviva is already brimming with ideas for the next production, she says.Asks what she wanted to do with her life, she replies that she wants to inspire others to do well and push forward. As Aviva says this, her father smiles and says that she had already received her first offer – of a pulpit, as a motivational speaker. •
