Hadassah

Hadassah Spira Epstein was born in Jerusalem in 1909 into a religious Jewish family whose worship practices—Hebrew chant, cantillation, ceremonial movement—shaped her artistic vision for decades to come. Her family's journey through Vienna and Constantinople before arriving in the United States in 1924 began a migration that would define her identity as a Jerusalem-born American artist. In New York, Hadassah pursued intensive dance study with Ruth St. Denis, Jack Cole, La Meri and Nala Najan, while also learning Javanese court-dance material from performers at the 1939 New York World's Fair and Japanese expressive dance with Kenji Hinoki. After marrying artist and bookseller Milton Epstein in 1933, she developed a distinctive approach: studying movement across Asian traditions not to claim mastery of each, but to build a personal theatrical language rooted in Jewish spiritual experience.

Hadassah's professional career began in 1938 with the Kenji Hinoki Japanese Dance Company and deepened with her solo debut at Town Hall in 1945, where she presented the Javanese court-dance work *Golek*. But her signature achievement came in 1947 with *Shuvi Nafshi*, a solo based on Psalm 116 and performed to a cantorial recording by Leibele Waldman. The work premiered at the 92nd Street Y and became the emblem of her method: a spiritual stage work where Jewish prayer imagery coexisted with gestures and dynamic ideas she associated with Indian, Sufi and other movement traditions. The work joined upward reach, weighted pauses, hand gestures near the face, and the active manipulation of a prayer-shawl-inspired costume into an arc of ecstasy, restraint and return.

Her performing career flourished alongside growing institutional influence. She participated in the first Congress on Jewish Dance in New York in 1949 and presented the first programme by Hadassah and Company at the 92nd Street Y in 1950. Jacob's Pillow records her among its performers in the 1950s and 1961, preserving costumes and accessories that trace her circulation through both Jewish cultural networks and major American concert-dance institutions. In 1959–60, a Rockefeller Brothers Fund grant supported travel and research in India and Israel. There she studied with Ritha Devi in Manipuri, Damayanti Joshi in Kathak, and Raghavan Nair and Ram Gopal in Bharatanatyam, while also researching Jewish communities across the subcontinent. The experience informed works including the 1961 *Tagore Suite*. In 1969, for the Gandhi centenary, Hadassah created a dance-theatre work using Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech, linking Gandhi's influence on King to her own longtime engagement with spiritual and ethical themes.

Hadassah continued performing into the mid-1970s and teaching into the 1980s. At the New Dance Group, she served as faculty member, board member and chair of the Ethnic Division, helping sustain dance traditions then marginalized by mainstream American concert programming. Her last documented performance of *Shuvi Nafshi* came in 1974 for the 92nd Street Y's centenary. She died in New York in 1992. Her papers, covering 1938–88, are held by the Jerome Robbins Dance Division of the New York Public Library, while surviving costumes are preserved at Jacob's Pillow.