LIVINGSTON, N.J. (Reuters) – Keeping An Eye Out of his workplace window, Rabbi Zalman Grossbaum discovers it difficult to get work done as he enjoys kids taking pleasure in the mini town he constructed for them.
The town of shops inside his enclosed “LifeTown” complex in Livingston, New Jersey, lets children with special needs – “special abilities,” Grossbaum firmly insists – hone their social skills, and he always wants to join them.
” I feel this magnetic pull to come out here and to be with the kids and experience life with the kids, because there’s something absolutely magical for what occurs here,” Grossbaum said standing in the mini town, known as LifeTown Shoppes.
If there is any remaining disappointment over the 7 years it took to convert the 53,000 square-foot (4,924 square-meter) structure into his dream, including a year of building that stretched into three, Grossbaum does disappoint it.
The 48- year-old rabbi with an early salt-and-pepper beard smiles from beneath his silver-frame glasses as he discusses the interactive functions of the complex that invites kids of all faiths, most of whom have physical or intellectual impairments.
And always, he has a story, like when some New York Jets gamers can be found in November to assist inaugurate LifeTown’s football field an