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Introduction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 July 2014

Judith Brin Ingber
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Extract

The most exuberant example of dance among the Jews is the dance at weddings. For this rejoicing, Jews have paid the most attention to how they danced in order to celebrate the new couple and also to enhance many different aspects of the marriage process. Written sources have recorded examples of wooing and wedding dances from the biblical period through all the vagaries of more than two thousand years of Jewish life. Today countless examples of wedding dances of the Jews still exist, but relatively little scholarship has focused on them.

Outstanding is the remarkable variety of all these dances and the paradoxical fact that they are all unified by the single Jewish phenomenon of a mitzvah. A mitzvah is a commandment of Jewish life; one of these is the commandment that one must dance at a Jewish wedding. This commandment has been honored through the centuries in all the diverse places Jews have been forced to live—the ghettoes, the Pale of Settlement, the mellah, imposed exile or changes through immigration and through choice.

Type
Dancing into Marriage: Collected Papers on Jewish Wedding Dances
Information
Dance Research Journal , Volume 17 , Issue 2 , Fall 1985 , pp. 49 - 53
Copyright
Copyright © Congress on Research in Dance 1985

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References

NOTES

1. Babylonian Talmud, tractate ketubot 17a.

2. The conference was held June 27 and 28, 1982, produced by the Dance Committee and Cultural Arts staff of the Jewish Community Center of Minneapolis, Minnesota, and sponsored by the Congress on Research in Dance. CORD Chairperson was Joyce Malm, and CORD Regional Conference Committee was chaired by Elizabeth Burtner. The overall conference director was Judith Brin Ingber. Others involved were RuthAnn Isaacson, director of the J.C.C. Cultural Arts Department; Alice Bloch, Penny Galinson, Hannah Cooper, Mahryam Alyeshmerni, Nicki Cohen-Cliffer, Sherrie Virsen and Judith Brin Ingber of the JCC Dance Committee. Financial support was provided by the National Foundation for Jewish Culture, the Phillips Foundation, the Gelco Foundation, Brin Foundation, Artist in Residence Endowment Fund of the J.C.C. and individuals including: Monsoor and Mahryam Alyeshmerni, Hadassah Bacaner, Elliot and Laurie Badzin, Roz Baker, J.E. Brill, Parrell Caplan, Mr. and Mrs. Leonard Daniels, Mr. and Mrs. Herb Freedland, Mr. and Mrs. Marvin Graybow, Leo Gross, Jerome Ingber, Charlotte Karlen, Rhoda Lewin, Gertrude Lippincott, Dr. and Mrs. Harold Londer, Mr. and Mrs. Mark Mandel, Marion Schneck, Florence Schoff, Mel Siegel, Beverly Smerling, Ben and Estelle Sommers, Dr. Joyce Warshawky, Dr. George and Professor Lillian Werner.

A videotape of the dance workshops Yemenite, Hasidic, Eastern European and Persian Jewish wedding dances at the conference is available from the J.C.C. Dance Dept., 4330 So. Cedar Lake Road, Minneapolis, Minn. 55416.

3. Films were shown at the conference that aided in the understanding and discussion including: Gurit Kadman's film Dances of Israeli Ethnic Group: Yemenite Jews, Jews from Atlas Mountains, Jews from Libyan Desert (1951–1962). 19 min., sound, color (cinematographers Ami Kravchevsky and Amiram Arev; music consultation Esther Gerson-Kivi), and Yemenite Wedding, a black-and-white sound film of the dance by Sarah Levi-Tanai, performed by Inbal Dance Theater, made in the late 1950s by Australian television. Field films of Shalom Staub's from Israel were also shown, as were videotapes of Jill Gellerman's from Hasidic weddings in Brooklyn.

4. Jeremiah 31:22.

5. For a report on Jill Gellerman's research, see her “The Mayim Pattern as an Indicator of Cultural Attitudes in Three American Hasidic Communities: A Comparative Approach Based on Labananalysis.” Essays in Dance Research, Dance Research Annual 9 (New York: CORD, 1978) pp. 111–144Google Scholar.

6. The idea of the return to Zion is central to Judaism, found in texts as early as Ezra and Nehemia from the exile to Babylon in the sixth century BCE, in religious liturgy, secular texts, and later in the Zionist movement, beginning in the nineteenth century, whose goal was the return of the Jewish people to the land of Israel. Encyclopaedia Judaica, 1972 ed., “Zionism.”