A Catholic Priest Returns

His parents named him Sheftil Binyamin. He was born deaf and attended a Catholic school for children with special needs. In his early twenties he converted to Catholicism and was ordained. Father Cyril Bernhard Axelrod became a Catholic priest of the Redemptorist Order, known for his work with deaf and deafblind people. 

He worked to improve the lives of people with disabilities, founding centers and institutions for deaf people in South Africa, the United Kingdom, Hong Kong, and Macau. Even after he lost his vision to Usher Syndrome, a rare genetic condition, he communicated using a Braille keyboard and finger signing. Cyril was the first deafblind person to become an Officer of the Order of the British Empire.

He still remembered the Kiddush his father would make on Friday night, the challah his mother would bake. But he had journeyed far. Then one day in December 2024, Rabbi Yehoshua Soudakoff—who was born deaf and is the Chabad rep to the deaf community in Israel—met up with Cyril in England. Together with the rabbi, Cyril wrapped tefillin.

Now eighty-three, Cyril lives in Macau, in a center he founded some twenty-five years ago. Rabbi Mendy Rabinowitz of Chabad of Hong Kong reached out, and Cyril visited the Chabad House. Cyril donned tefillin again, the words of Shema rising unbidden to his lips, recalled from his youth many decades before. Tracing letters on his palm, Rabinowitz welcomed him home. And then Cyril asked the rabbi to come to his home and install a mezuzah on his door.