Dance

Berta Yampolsky

Berta Yampolsky was dancer, choreographer, and artistic director. With her husband Hillel Markman, she founded the Israel Ballet.

From childhood, Cilli Wang was known as the “Pavlova of Parody” for her experimentation with movement based on spoken word. Even when the Anschluss forced her to flee her home country of Austria, she continued developing dance and speech performances in the Netherlands.

Margarethe Wallmann

Although trained in classical ballet, Margarethe Wallmann chose to study and teach Middle-European Expressionist dance. She continued to create award-winning works that explored Austrian culture until Nazi occupation ousted her from her position and she was forced to Buenos Aires and later Milan, where she continued to create acclaimed ballet and opera productions.

Rivka Sturman

Rivka Sturman was a pioneer in creating Israeli folk dance and established the style and character of the genre. Her goal was to culturally unite the immigrants who had come to Palestine but had retained the dances of their old nations. For forty years she choreographed the development of Israeli folk dance and spearheaded programs to help it become a part of Israel’s national identity.

Phyllis Spira

As a young dancer at the Royal Ballet School in London, Phyllis Spira was on the brink of a successful career abroad, but in 1965 she returned to her home in South Africa and became the country's prima ballerina. Spira was awarded the Nederburg Prize for ballet in 1972 and 1979. Her most notable achievement was perhaps leading “Dance For All,” a program to provide disadvantaged students opportunities to dance.

Eva Sopher

Eva Sopher was a Brazilian-Jewish theater manager and cultural entrepreneur in Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, where she worked for 41 years. Sopher is recognized for her leadership in the renovation of the world-renowned São Pedro Theatre and her contributions to Brazilian theater, art, and culture.

Mirali Sharon

Mirali Sharon was one of Israel’s most important choreographers in the 1970s and 1980s. Her work is characterized by organic integration of music, costume, and décor, with the dance being the outcome of the composer-designer-scenarist-choreographer composite as one fertile, creative team.

Rina Schenfeld

Rina Schenfeld is an Israeli dancer and choreographer who uses objects of daily life to build a world of poetry and dance. She was a principal dancer in Batsheva Dance Company in the 1960s and 1970s and later established the Rina Schenfeld Dance Theater.

Angiola Sartorio

Angiola Sartorio was a prolific dancer, teacher, and choreographer who subverted fascism in her artistic choices. Sartorio had a company and school, and her company was widely well-received in Italy until it performed for Hitler in Vienna and she had to flee to the United States.

Ida Rubinstein

From an early age Ida Rubinstein studied dance and provoked scandal by pushing the boundaries of sexuality and respectability. Although she was a controversial figure, her prolific career in French ballet and as a patron of French music make her a significant pioneer of the early twentieth-century French dance scene.

Bethsabée Rothschild

Bethsabée (Hebrew: Batsheva) de Rothschild, the scion of a well-known philanthropic family, helped support numerous activities in the United States and Israel, especially dance, music, and science.She created the Batsheva and Bat-Dor dance companies and was awarded the Israel Prize in 1989 for her special contribution to Israeli society.

Norma Rosen

Born in Brooklyn in 1925 to secular and assimilated parents, Norma Rosen was an American-Jewish novelist, essayist, educator, editor, and professor. Rosen’s exploration of Jewish history and religion in her writings contributed to questions surrounding Jewish theology and Jewish feminism in the second half of the twentieth century.

Marie Rambert

Influenced by Isadora Duncan, Emile Jacques-Dalcroze, and Vaslav Nijinsky, Marie Rambert became known as one of the “Mothers” of English ballet. Her passion for and devotion to dance allowed her to become a talented choreographer and cultivator of talent, and her contributions to the art form earned her many honors.

Linda Rabin

Linda Rabins’s education and career as a dancer, teacher, and choreographer was global and eclectic, making her a unique dance artist. She has studied dance, healing arts, and somatic education all over the world from Israel, Japan, to Canada. She is known for co-founding and co-directing the Linda Rabin Danse Moderne in Montréal, which evolved into Les Ateliers de Danse Moderne de Montréal (LADMMI).

Maya Plisetskaya

Maya Plisetskaya was one of the legendary ballerinas of her generation. Her aunt and uncle, Sulamif and Asaf Messerer, helped to guide her into the ballet world, despite the persecution they faced during World War II. In 1943 she joined the Bolshoi and remained a principal dancer well into the 1960s.

Paula Padani

Paula Padani was an influential choreographer, performer, and teacher who explored Jewish themes in her work as she danced throughout Israel, the United States, and Europe. Her work was inspired by the landscapes of Israel and biblical themes, and she was celebrated in post World War Two Paris for her talent and vitality as a Jewish artist.

Yehudit Ornstein

Dancer and choreographer Yehudit Ornstein followed her mother, Israeli dance pioneer Margalit Ornstein, in expanding Israeli modern and folk dance. Known for her dance duo with her twin sister, Ornstein was a prolific choreographer and dance teacher and was among the founders of the Dancers Union.

Shoshana Ornstein

After emigrating to Palestine with her mother and twin sister at the age of ten, the Ornstein sisters formed a celebrated dancing duo. In addition to years of performing dances in the style of German “Free Dance” and influenced by her pioneer status in Erez Israel, she taught for sixty years at the Ornstein Studio in Tel Aviv, one of Israel’s most prominent schools.

Margalit Ornstein

Choreographer and dance teacher Margalit Ornstein is perceived as the “founding mother” of Israeli dance and a pioneer of modern dance in Erez Israel. In 1922, she founded the first Israeli dance school in Tel Aviv and helped create two important dance theaters in the 1920s.

Rina Nikova

Rina Nikova, a pioneer of classical and biblical ballet in Palestine, distinguished herself mostly in character dances, which had a nationalist style influenced by ethnic folklore. Nikova established the first school for classical ballet in Tel Aviv and founded the Biblical Ballet, which was based on Yemenite folklore and focused on Biblical subjects.

Meredith Monk

An innovator in mixed-media forms, Meredith Monk uses music, dance, drama, and film in her theater pieces. Acting as composer, choreographer, librettist, and performer, Monk creates diverse works that have been widely exhibited and have received many awards and honors.

Sulamif Messerer

Sulamif Messerer was an influential ballerina who taught a generation of dancers globally. After swimming in the 1928 Soviet Olympiada, she became a prima ballerina in the Bolshoi Ballet Company. She had a long dance career and then became a renowned teacher in Russia, Japan, New York, and London.

Alicia Markova

Dame Alicia Markova, Britain’s first and the first Jewish prima ballerina, combined amazing technique and personal strength with tremendous artistry to become one of the finest classical dancers of her generation. Through her touring and early recognition of the power of mass media, she was also one of ballet’s greatest ambassadors in the mid-twentieth century. Markova extended her legacy through choreography, teaching, and commitment to coaching the next generation of dancers.

Bella Lewitzky

Bella Lewitzky, a maverick in the world of modern dance, distinguished herself as a preeminent performer, choreographer, artistic director, educator, public speaker, and civic activist. Defying norms that posited New York City as the center of American dance, she maintained the Lewitzky Dance Company in Los Angeles. She was known for two highly publicized encounters with the federal government and risking professional ostracism to stand upon principle.

Hassia Levy-Agron

According to the judges who in 1998 awarded her the Israel Prize in the field of dance, Professor Hassia Levy-Agron was remarkable for her artistic and educational contributions over the previous fifty years, as a dancer, choreographer, teacher, and educator who produced many generations of dancers, creators of dance, and dance teachers.

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