A Taste of Culture in the English Mama Loshen
English-language theater holds a special place in the hearts of Israeli Anglos and visitors to Israel. by MICHELE CHABIN
I
t was a bitingly cold night, but that didn’t stop the Raise Your Spirits Theatre from filling almost every seat at the Gerard Behar Theater in downtown Jerusalem. And all these seats were filled with women. The audience waited patiently for the start of the revival of Esther and the Secrets in the King’s Court, one of the troupe’s original musicals. The show is a lighthearted retelling of the Book of Esther, set in the 1920s. The cast is also femaleonly, about 100 Modern Orthodox girls and women.
As is the troupe’s custom prior to performances, the youngest member of the cast stood on the stage and read a psalm for the well-being of Israel’s soldiers. And at the end of the lively show, the cast and mostly religious audience members sang “Hatikva” and “Ani Ma’amin” (I Believe). Raise Your Spirits was created in 2001 by a handful of English-speaking women living in the West Bank settlement bloc of Gush Etzion. “Here in the Gush, people were hardly leaving their homes” due to the second Palestinian uprising that began in late 2000, says Toby Klein Greenwald,
Theater in the Rough performs Much Ado About Nothing. Photo by Yishay Sklare
SUMMER 2013
Na’amat Woman
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