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Mata Barack Jaffe / Helping disabled children was her lifelong specialty
Thursday, July 12, 2001 By Cristina Rouvalis, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
Mata Barack Jaffe, 65, a noted speech pathologist who spent three years traveling to remote areas of southwestern Pennsylvania to track down severely disabled children who had been neglected, died Sunday of ovarian cancer at her home in Boca Raton, Fla.
Mrs. Jaffe spent about 17 years at the Home for Crippled Children, the Squirrel Hill facility now called the Children's Institute of Pittsburgh.
One of her most rewarding projects there was administering "Project Thousand Kids," an Appalachian Commission grant. From 1982 to 1984, she traveled to rural areas in nine counties, finding and helping disabled children 6 years old and younger who had fallen through the cracks of the system.
"They were very sad cases," said her husband, Arthur H. Jaffe. "Some of these children were actually hidden. This was a very poor and uneducated population where appearances [were] all they had to go by. Some had never taken the kids to the doctor. Her job was to say to them, 'Your children can be helped. We have free programs for them.' "
Some parents resented an outsider's interference. But Mrs. Jaffe had a delicate touch that would often win them over. "Her voice was very soft and very youthful and very melodious," Arthur said. "It never indicated anything threatening. It was a voice that [said], 'I can help you.' "
Mrs. Jaffe set up clinics for the children, recalled John A. Wilson, president and chief executive officer of the Children's Institute of Pittsburgh. Roads were so bad in some cases that families could not always get their children to the clinics.
Though Mrs. Jaffe was eventually named assistant director of the speech-language therapy department at the Home for Crippled Children, she was also a clinician who worked with children with cerebral palsy, autism, severe head trauma and other problems.
"Working one-on-one with kids -- that is what she got a thrill out of," said her son, Steven Loevner of Indiana Township.
Loevner remembers picking up his mother at the facility as a teen-ager, and seeing the children with multiple handicaps.
"Isn't it depressing for you to do this?" he asked her.
"No," she replied. "It is really rewarding. I am making things a little better."
"She would come home triumphant if she got a child to say a word after six months of training," Arthur said.
She also helped develop an eye-tracking communications system for nonverbal children suffering from cerebral palsy.
Mrs. Jaffe grew up in Squirrel Hill and graduated from Allderdice High School in 1953.
She received her bachelor of science, master of science and doctor of philosophy degrees from the University of Pittsburgh in speech-language pathology.
She and her husband moved to Florida 17 years ago. She became the coordinator of the Communications Disorder Center Clinic in Nova Southeastern University and then the director of the Speech Pathology and Audiology Department at West Boca Hospital.
She was the author of more than 70 papers on speech and communications disorders.
After retiring from speech therapy, she helped catalog her husband's collection of rare books. The couple donated the 3,000-volume collection to the Florida Atlantic University Library in Boca Raton.
In addition to her husband and son, she is survived by a daughter, Peggy Loevner-Sloane of Philadelphia; two stepdaughters, Jeanne Jaffe of Philadelphia and Julie Jaffe Bradrick of Seattle; two stepsons, Jonathan Jaffe of San Francisco and Joel Jaffe of Houston; a brother, Joseph Barack of Chattanooga, Tenn.; and six grandchildren.
Services will be held 1 p.m. today at Ralph Schugar Chapel, 5509 Centre Ave., Shadyside. Interment will be at Congregation B'nai Abraham Cemetery in Butler.
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