October 3, 2005
Sarah Levy-Tanai, one of Israel’s foremost choreographers and contributors to Israeli cultural life, dies at the age of 94 or 95.
She was born in Jerusalem in 1910 or 1911 (she was never sure which) to Yemeni parents. During a typhus epidemic during World War I, all of her family died except for her and her father. Her father was too poor to care for her, and she was placed in an orphanage, eventually being moved to a children’s home in Meir Shefeyah, near Zichron Yaakov. The children’s home was run by Ashkenazi immigrants, who exposed her and the other children to European music and art.
She began producing small plays. She became a kindergarten teacher and composed songs and dances for her students. During World War II, while her husband was fighting in the Jewish Brigade, she moved to Kibbutz Ramat Hakovesh, where she encountered many of the leading women of the Israeli folk dance movement. After the influx of Yemeni Jews to Israel from 1948 to 1950, she began to seek out her own roots and incorporate Mizrahi and Sephardi culture into her art. In 1949 she founded the Inbal Dance Theater, which she directed until the 1990s. In 1973 she received the Israel Prize in art, music and dance.