For special-needs kids, New Jersey rabbi offers chance of a 'LifeTown'

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LIVINGSTON, N.J. (Reuters) - Looking out of his office window, Rabbi Zalman Grossbaum finds it hard to get work done as he watches kids enjoying the miniature town he built for them.

Co-founder and CEO of LifeTown Rabbi Zalman Grossbaum reacts in front of a sign displayed in a kitchen in LifeTown, a 53,000-square-foot center dedicated to teaching life skills to children and adults with special needs, in Livingston, New Jersey, U.S. March 2, 2020. REUTERS/Roselle Chen
The village of storefronts inside his enclosed “LifeTown” complex in Livingston, New Jersey, lets children with special needs - “special abilities,” Grossbaum 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 happens here,” Grossbaum said standing in the miniature town, known as LifeTown Shoppes.

If there is any lingering frustration over the seven years it took to convert the 53,000 square-foot (4,924 square-meter) building into his dream, including a year of construction that stretched into three, Grossbaum does not show it.

The 48-year-old rabbi with an early salt-and-pepper beard smiles from beneath his silver-frame glasses as he explains the interactive features of the complex that welcomes children of all faiths, most of whom have physical or intellectual disabilities.

And always, he has a story, like when some New York Jets players came in November to help inaugurate LifeTown’s football field and he saw “their whole demeanor changes” as they threw balls and ran plays with kids with autism.

“It was equally an opportunity for these players to have that experience as it was for these kids to be playing with NFL players,” he said.

Autism is one of the most common conditions for children who visit LifeTown on school trips or with their parents, Grossbaum said.

In fact, New Jersey has the country’s highest rate of autism spectrum disorder, with one child in 34 diagnosed with the condition, compared with the national rate of one in 59, according to nonprofit support agency Autism New Jersey.