Department Manager:
Itzhak Vinokur
The music department for people with special needs is a unique, pioneering program that was initiated at the Conservatory of the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance in 2020. Our department offers music lessons with focuses on various musical instruments, among them piano, drums, voice, and different wind instruments. Our students are children and adolescents with diverse kinds of disabilities such as autism, CP, ADHD, Asperger and blindness. The department collaborates with special education schools, both religious and secular and which are located both in Western and Eastern Jerusalem, as well as with a school for blind children (Beit Chinuch Ivrim). The rationale behind this unique program is to provide musically talented children and adolescents with different disabilities with the opportunity to develop their talent and to give them an introduction to the beautiful and evocative world of music.
The uniqueness of the department is not only in offering instrument lessons but also in promoting music making along with other pupils of the conservatory, and thus to create shared ensembles in which music acts as a common language for special pupils and so-called regular pupils rehearsing and performing together. During the rehearsals, our regular students learn to communicate and understand students with special needs. In that way, our conservatory becomes a place for every human being who feels that music is his form of expression.
