Dames of the World: Unite, and DANCE!

Yom revi'i, 25 Shevat 5774.

I live in a remarkable part of the world, in a remarkable country, in a remarkable community, surrounded by remarkable women. And some of the most fun I've had with these dedicated, generous (in time and money), totally joy-filled and life-embracing women has been around a wonderful project called "Dames of the Dance."

To quote my friend Varda Epstein, who wrote about Dames of the Dance for the Times of Israel last year, "Dames of the Dance was born in 2007, as a remedy to local poverty. As Sharon Katz, founder ... and producer of Dames put it, 'We give women a safe environment in which they can try their wings, expand their creativity and express themselves freely.'

"Katz had learned that contrary to the stereotyped image of Efrat and Gush Etzion as wealthy communities, there were some 360 resident families living below the poverty line. It was unacceptable to Sharon that people in her neighborhood would go without while she did nothing. She thought about all the talented women in her regular dance class and knew that her 'sistahs' would be glad for the chance to do a good deed."

Dames of the Dance programs are always entertaining and lively, with varied styles of dance, beautifully choreographed and danced by talented women and girls of all ages. The emcees balance humor gracefully with message. I have rarely missed the yearly adventure, as it is a highlight of my year -- and I look forward to seeing dear friends on stage, and in attendance.

Here's the info on "DAMES of the DANCE 7 - CELEBRATION", an evening dedicated to TZEDAKAH and filled with fantastic dance troupes. See you there!

** Tickets - http://tinyurl.com/buyDames7Tickets 
Checks should be made out to the Gush Etzion Foundation

** Thursday, February 27, 27 Adar A, 8:15 PM, Matnas Gush Etzion
** Monday, March 3, 1 Adar B, MATINEE, 5:00 PM, Matnas Efrat
** Thursday, March 6, 4 Adar B, 8:15 PM, Matnas Gush Etzion

** For fun, here's a DAMES parody I think you will enjoy. Dames of the world -- UNITE and DANCE!

Ulpan Drama: Playing's the thing.

Yom chamishi, 1 Iyar 5771.

Two of my Raise Your Spirits heroines, Avital Macales and Yael Valier, are the talented Ulpan Drama instructors.

Let's see now...  A chance to work closely with two of my "stage idols"...  An opportunity to learn Hebrew in the form of play...   A once-a-week requirement to hang out with ladies I like.  That sounded like a great plan.  So I signed up for eight weeks of Ulpan Drama, yet another brainchild of Dena Lehrman of Efrat.

Dena opened her home for our Ulpan Drama session.

Dena is an occupational therapist who for the past five years has worked with teachers, students and their parents to improve organizational and learning skills.

 I was privileged to encounter Dena shortly after my family's aliyah.  She arranged for the talented Yaron Shane to teach our children a thing or two about film-making.  It was a great introduction for then-15-year-old Stunt Man to the world of Hebrew, and a pretty good outlet for his creative talents.

I asked Dena what inspired her to come up with the Ulpan Drama concept.

"The past two years I've been running a workshop getting students ready for high school," she said.  "We noticed that even [many of] the kids who had been in Israel for a while and 'spoke Hebrew'...had a weak vocabulary and had a hard time expressing themselves."

I asked her how she came up with the idea.  "I try to be an out-of-the-box thinker and approach students with my 'hands on' style as an OT. Ulpan Drama seemed like a natural offshoot.

"We started brainstorming about how we could use drama and role playing to facilitate Hebrew development. I thought of 'playback theater,' which really forces the participants to reinact real life situations. From all the research on language development, it seems that there is a greater chance to remember and file away new words more efficiently if they are learned in a real, experiential way. It also helps to decrease some of the stress and tension when learning by acting, as opposed to more traditional frontal learning."

 This sounded like a perfect venue for me to try to improve my Hebrew.  Even though I am terrified to be "on stage," I found this technique to be much more fun than it was threatening, mostly due to the small group size, the warmth and patience of the instructors, and the support of my fellow players.

Did we have fun, or what?!  Avital and Yael gave us many and varied opportunities to practice thinking on our feet in Hebrew during each session.

They would give us a tzena -- a scene -- to play out, with some key word or phrase that must be incorporated.  For example, two of us played trainees to a third's surgeon.  We learned many new words, and practiced inserting those we already knew into unlikely moments.  (How many times could one say "I've never done that before" in an inappropriate place during an autopsy to elicit laughter, especially when her partner kept asking "When do we eat?")

Another scene should have been perfectly ordinary: how to ask an exterminator to help rid the house of cockroaches and ants.  We learned many useful words -- but we also learned of a creative approach to natural extermination, as Heather had us doing a "La Kukarača" tap-dance to help her crush the little buggers...

Our teachers would give us objects to describe -- and none of us could resist offering completely new uses for household items.

Try describing your unique use for disposable plastic gloves in Hebrew.

Some of the ideas for using a towel were pretty creative -- and funny.

What you see as a rug beater became a fly-swatter for mutant flies, or a piece of jewelry, or...

If we didn't know the word for "fly-swatter" in Hebrew, our fearless leaders did, and taught us.  They gave us characters to portray, sometimes in scenes with others, sometimes with secret character traits for the others to guess at.

I didn't get pictures, but one of my favorite exercises caused me to end up doing a Broadway musical with Sandra.  We were quite smashing.  And ridiculous.  :-)

What an actress!  When Hannah Sara is sad, the whole world cries with her.

One of my deepest and most annoying roles was as "kinim" -- lice -- which were invited (?) to a Pesach Seder.  "Yecch!" was the classic review of my performance.  Score!!!

The body language delighted me as much as the dialog.

Yael and Avital asked us to describe objects or events so that the supportive audience -- hey, they were going to be "on stage" next! -- could guess.

Each time we learned new words, Avital or Yael would dutifully mark them on a whiteboard; and we would get an email with all of our new words, and their translations.

My pile of flashcards grew...

...and GREW...

...and GREW!  By the time the eight weeks ended, I really had learned a lot of words...  because I lived them.

These ladies were so talented, it did not surprise me to learn that most of them involve themselves in Raise Your Spirits, or in Dames of the Dance.  By the time our classes ended, I wanted everyone's autograph!

Dena sums up Ulpan Drama:  "Baruch Hashem it's been a wonderful experience both for the participants as well as for the three of us running the project. It's been great to see how the participants gained confidence and started to integrate new words into their everyday lives. As you know, it was also a lot of fun!"

Thanks Dena, Yael, and Avital.  Thanks Sandra and Heather and Meira and Hannah Sara and Shimona and Zahava.  I had a great time!

More sessions of Ulpan Drama are coming up or are in progress.  Contact Dena at 054 942 5600 or at tfosdena@gmail.com  for more information about classes with Yael and Avital for women and girls, or to register.

Yael Valier received her BA in Psychology from YU, and her MSW from Bryn Mawr's Clinical Social Work program. She has further professional training in grief counseling through Nechama Counseling. Yael has experience teaching stage skills, interview skills and public speaking to teenagers and adults. She acts with the Raise Your Spirits Theater, for whom she has also written, and has also acted with two Playback theater companies – the Hebrew-speaking Dance-Playback group Na'na for women, and the English-speaking Playback Hamra. Yael has enjoyed the challenge of translating songs from Hebrew to English for bilingual movies. She currently works in voice-overs and sells her educational science album on her website Tremendous Earth when she isn't working at her day-job doing background searches in patents. Yael has six sons who keep her amused.


Avital Macales studied Hebrew Language at Bar Ilan University and is currently completing an advanced editing course at Efrata College. She is an experienced actress and singer, including playing the lead role in Sandcastles, a feature film which was screened all over Israel in 2009. A resident of Efrat, Avital recently appeared in her third Raise Your Spirits production, Judge!, as the bold heroine Yael. Avital did her national service in Tehilla, the aliyah organization, helping English-speaking children acquire Hebrew in fun and creative ways. Avital made aliya from California when she was two years old. She has six sisters and therefore has a soft-spot for young girls, enjoying having fun with them and teaching them important skills painlessly through the things she does best.

Remember, remember, the month of November...

Yom sheni, 13 Kislev 5770.

Well, it's been a busy month at Beit Mizrachi.

Let's see...

First, the less-than-a-year-old Sephardi shul invited the community to hear the Friday night bakashot.

I strongly recommend to my Ashkenazi friends that you wrangle an invitation, at least once in your life, to hear the bakashot.  Meaning "requests," the recitation of the little book of bakashot used to be done (and perhaps still is in a few communities) in the middle of the night on Friday night.  Now it seems to be offered, when you can find it, at a more reasonable hour.  The singing is haunting, lovely, complicated.  The best part is that while one person may be the leader, everyone who wants to participates.  The intricate nigunim have choruses for the group, and yet allow some showy vocal gymnastics for talented soloists.  The participants range in age from young bar mitzvah boys to elderly men.  There is something very sweet about watching a father or grandfather hold his child's face tenderly as the boy takes on the challenge of learning his first public solo.  The weaving of the bakashot tapestry can cause the soul to soar.  Just close your eyes, and follow the golden road to Samarkand...

Jews of Samarkand, circa 1915.

And then I danced my heart out with 250 of my best girlfriends.  "Dames of the Dance," one of Efrat-based Sharon Katz's many efforts to raise the spirits of women throughout Israel, decided to make its annual tryouts into a big dance fest for anyone (female) who wanted to attend. 

There were several talented dance instructors on hand to give a sample of their various styles, and great dance music that spanned several decades.  It reminded me of a high-school sock hop, without the complication of boys.  I lost a couple of pounds, and almost cracked my face in half from smiling and laughing for so many hours.

After that adventure came the holiday of Sigd, which commemorates the longing of Ethiopian Jews for Jerusalem and Zion.  I did not actually merit to attend any Sigd festivities this year; but there is a very special joy in bringing smiles to sweet brown faces by saying "Mel'kam Sigd" to every Ethiopian one meets.  I wish I had more pictures for you of these smiles that fairly glowed; but I was so busy enjoying the meetings and short conversations that I didn't think to bring out my camera. 

Anyway, if you happen to be in Yerushalayim seven weeks after Yom Kippur, give yourself the gift of making someone else feel accepted and acknowledged.  Those two words -- wishing a joyful Sigd in Amharic -- caused me much more happiness than the twenty or so people to whom I said them.

In the midst of happy days, we have had some sad ones, as we listened to friends who have suffered great difficulties and tragedies.  We have mourned again Mumbai, and have vicariously felt personal loss.  We Jews cannot prevent the sorrows of others, but we can try to share them.  We do not rush people back into the tumult of jobs and life.  Rather, we encourage them to immerse in the sense of loss for a short time, because this is also from Hashem.

No one has to go through it alone, if she doesn't want to.  It reminds me of how fortunate I am to be part of a peoplehood, a nation that looks after its own.


During this month, we have had the pleasure of visits from friends, some of whom we have not seen in twenty years, since we were stationed in Germany.  Some of them shared with us that they were on pilot trips to plan their future lives in Israel! 

And then we had the pleasure of our first train trip in Israel to meet friends who made aliyah, later sharing our Shabbat with them, and a visit to the Kotel.

All of these great adventures have been surrounded by conversations with my sons, as they explore who they are becoming and their personal directions in life -- musical, religious, philosophical, political...

I have decided that my greatest joy in life is seeing other people happy.

As tomorrow is the last day of November, we are scrounging around the house for enough agarot to buy a few peppers to enhance the stir-fry for dinner.  Our very dear Shulamit, who graciously accepts our baggie of change, teaches us an important survival tool for the day before payday in Israel.

For your information, 400 grams of ten-agarah matba'ot (coins) equal ten shekels.  Trust me, when you have lived here a while, you will find this knowledge invaluable.