{"id":241384,"date":"2026-08-08T22:21:09","date_gmt":"2026-08-08T22:21:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/241384\/"},"modified":"2026-08-08T22:21:09","modified_gmt":"2026-08-08T22:21:09","slug":"how-dancing-at-70-helped-a-bereaved-israeli-mother-find-joy-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/241384\/","title":{"rendered":"How dancing at 70 helped a bereaved Israeli mother find joy again"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m 70 years old, and I am about to perform in my first dance recital, in a retirement home in Jerusalem<\/a>.<\/p>\n

A dance recital was definitely not on my bucket list. In fact, I don\u2019t have a bucket list.<\/p>\n

So why would I dance?<\/p>\n

One reason is because of my doctor. He told me that I had to do things that would make me happy.<\/p>\n

My son Koby was murdered 25 years ago on May 8, 2001, in Israel by Palestinian terrorists<\/a>. Of course, our lives were shattered. Of course, I wanted to die. Of course, after that, happiness was a foreign country whose language I had no hope or desire to speak.<\/p>\n

\"AA dancer preparing for a recital. (credit: Marco Longari\/AFP via Getty Images)Life heals all wounds<\/p>\n

But life seeps in. We needed to parent our other children. I wrote a book, The Blessing of a Broken Heart, which served as my personal process of bibliotherapy. We founded the Koby Mandell Foundation and through the years have worked with thousands of bereaved families.<\/p>\n

And when, after many years, I landed in the hospital for an operation on my colon, my doctor said, \u201cNo more grief. You need to do things that are fun.\u201d<\/p>\n

I started to take a Broadway Jazz dance<\/a> class once a week with a bunch of amateurs between the ages of 50 and 75. We were supposed to be a performance troupe that would perform in nursing homes.<\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t want to perform. For me, the goal of dancing was happiness, to enjoy movement. We danced to classics like \u201cFly Me to the Moon,\u201d \u201cOn the Sunny Side of the Street,\u201d and \u201cSteam Heat\u201d\u2013 music that made me happy. Dancing made me happy. That was enough for me.<\/p>\n

Year one through three with the class, I didn\u2019t perform. But this year, when the other students and my teacher, Michelle Gordon, asked me, I relented. Mainly because I was 70. And with age it\u2019s good to try new things.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the advice, isn\u2019t it?<\/p>\n

Don\u2019t get stuck. Keep going. Keep moving.<\/p>\n

Still, I was uncertain about performing. Why would I want to perform at an old age home?<\/p>\n

I\u2019d seen my mother-in-law\u2019s nursing home in Massachusetts. Although it looked like a ski lodge, when my mother-in-law was forced to move from independent living to a real nursing home where she was with the real old and the sick \u2013 people drooling in their wheelchairs, staring vacantly, slumped over \u2013 I was shocked by the fate of old people like my mother-in-law. To live a whole vibrant life and then reduce it to a square of sickness was painful.<\/p>\n

My moment to dance<\/p>\n

But this was my moment to dance. If not now, when? I decided to chance it and give it go. But I didn\u2019t know why old people would want to watch amateurs dance.<\/p>\n

As we drove to the nursing home, I asked my fellow dancer Linda, who is in her fifties, \u201cI don\u2019t understand. Why do you like to perform?\u201d<\/p>\n

She said, \u201cI like giving people pleasure.\u201d<\/p>\n

I laughed. It seemed a little, shall we say, titillating. I wasn\u2019t convinced. I still didn\u2019t know why I had agreed to dance at an old age home.<\/p>\n

We arrived. The nursing home looked a bit like a hotel, a huge lobby with a big beautiful fish tank. People in the lobby smiled at us.<\/p>\n

When we finally got on stage, I decided to enjoy it all, to give the audience pleasure. As I danced, I smiled and looked out at the small crowd, some in wheelchairs, some with walkers parked next to them, some with aides at their side. I didn\u2019t worry about screwing up. What difference would it make? This wasn\u2019t Lincoln Center. Besides, the audience probably had poor vision \u2013 at least some of them \u2013 and wouldn\u2019t be able to tell.<\/p>\n

The audience smiled at us. They clapped. They laughed. And I did see pleasure.<\/p>\n

And then, at the end of our dance, the music kept playing. The audience was invited to join us dancing on the improvised stage. Some got up or tottered up or rolled up and joined us.<\/p>\n

Some were dancing with one hand on their walkers, some were swaying in their wheelchairs, and some were singing along.<\/p>\n

The differences between us faded. We were all there to dance<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The writer co-founded the Koby Mandell Foundation. Her latest book is The Kabbalah of Writing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I\u2019m 70 years old, and I am about to perform in my first dance recital, in a retirement…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":241385,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[33],"tags":[461,20578,15557,18115,5652,37,503,52132],"class_list":["post-241384","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-israel","tag-culture","tag-culture-in-israel","tag-dance","tag-elderly","tag-health","tag-israel","tag-magazine","tag-senior-citizen"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@iran\/117062224230726138","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/241384","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=241384"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/241384\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/241385"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=241384"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=241384"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=241384"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}