What began as a sixth-grade hobby now allows Hannah Weisman to help connect dozens in the DMV to their Jewish heritage.
“I’m very big into Israeli dance. That’s really the thing that I do,” the Rockville resident said.
Weisman is the director of Rikudei Yachad, an Israeli dance performance troupe for young adults of all experience levels.
Rikudei Yachad — Hebrew for “dancing together” — rehearses twice a month in Rockville, learning one or two original choreographies to perform at festivals and smaller events.
“Not only is it meaningful because we get to spend time together and put art on stage, but these are our friends, and it’s really cool to get to put together art for the stage with our friends over time in the community,” Weisman said.
Weisman and her partner direct and manage the group of 15 to 20 dancers on top of full-time jobs. By day, Weisman works as a senior research coordinator at Kennedy Krieger Institute in Baltimore, running clinical trials for people with rare diseases.
Weisman’s love of dance dates back to her time in Jewish day school, where she was taught by Daniela Tam, one of the founders of Israeli Dance Festival DC and the director of the first Milton Gottesman Jewish Day School groups that performed in the festival.
The young Weisman first got “hooked” at the Israeli Dance Festival DC in 2010 and has performed in every one since then.
Israeli dance differs from traditional dance styles in that it’s not formally classified into distinct levels.
“I think that, as far as the training that one can have in Israeli dance, I think I have quite a substantial amount of training, having started so young at [Milton],” Weisman said. “[Tam] now moved to Israel, but she was a South American Israeli dancer … so as far as the training goes, I think we were all pretty well trained by her for the first year of my formal performance life.”
The training one receives in the Israeli dance world is largely “what’s been passed down to you,” according to Weisman.
Now, she gets to work with the dance directors she once trained under: “I work with them to now train the next group, and I hope one day to have one of them directing with me to train the next set. It’s a lot of fun.”
“I joke the community kind of raised me since I was 12 or 11 — it’s been cool to help give it back,” Weisman said.
In addition to directing Rikudei Yachad, Weisman co-directs Kesem, an Israeli dance troupe for middle schoolers that she helped pioneer as a pre-teen, and Yesodot, the troupe for high school students. She helps run rehearsals and travels with Yesodot to festivals — in March, Weisman took the troupe to Washington, D.C., and New York, then took Rikudei Yachad to Boston. “So it’s a little stressful, but a lot of fun,” she said.
Weisman had a “classic Conservative” Jewish upbringing in Gaithersburg: “Judaism was prominently featured in my house.”
She attended what is now Milton Gottesman Jewish Day School from kindergarten through sixth grade, spent summers at Camp Ramah New England, actively participated in United Synagogue Youth and even sat on the Shaare Torah board of trustees as a teen, the shul she still belongs to today.
After dancing all throughout high school, Weisman joined and led the University of Maryland’s Israeli dance troupe, Avirah, where she formed a tight-knit group of friends. Then, the pandemic hit.
“We went a year and a half or so with no dancing,” she recalled. “I call myself a COVID adult. It was really hard to make friends. It was hard to interact with people in the world.”
So in 2021, Weisman and her partner started their own dance troupe: “Let’s do the thing that we love and know how to do because we ran Avirah together.”
“Honestly, we were looking for a place to dance, but also, we were desperate for friends,” Weisman said.
Over Rikudei Yachad’s five years, the group has seen close to 40 members in total.
“We usually have between 15 and 20 young adults between 18 and 35, just people who come together to dance and to hang out and to have a good time,” Weisman said. “There’s the connection to Judaism, there’s a connection to Israel, and we have so much fun.”
Referencing the unpredictability of the pandemic, which uprooted Weisman from her senior year of college, she said: “You never know what’s going to happen. So to me, it’s just about: what’s the next right thing to do?
“It’ll just be the series of next right things. And hopefully, those next right things take me to the Mexico festival, the Brazil festivals, Carmel, the big Israeli dance festival in Israel,” Weisman said. “We’ll see.”
