Lina Goncharsky

The Jerusalem Ballet offers a searing chronicle of the demise—and immortality—of Franceska Mann It happened on the eve ofYom Kippur, in the tranquil environs of northern Tel Aviv: a performance of Nadya Timofeyeva’s ballet Memento for a hall filled with high school students preparing for their pilgrimage through the former Nazi death camps in Poland. Tomorrow, these boys and girls will stand before the barracks, the chimneys of the crematoria, and the mountains of discarded suitcases and...

How the Jerusalem Ballet transforms historical trauma into a choreography of survival There are moments when all you can do is reach for a pen and let it spill.If ballet criticism has its own black square, Nadya Timofeyeva has drawn it here with the bodies of her dancers, inscribing it onto a tiny patch of studio space where the distance between the spectator and the abyss collapses to the length of an outstretched arm. You find yourself in tears—out of wonder, out of a stunned disbelief that...

A conversation with Dr. Ayelet Giladi, Chairwoman of The Jerusalem Ballet, about the surprising connections between violence prevention and choreography—and why, today, ballet can speak to the world in ways words cannot. Sometimes life brings you into a completely unexpected world—and that encounter turns out to be transformative for both sides. That’s exactly what happened to her: an outstanding scholar who spent three decades combating sexual violence against children and developing unique...