Gurit Kadman (1897-1987) was a dancer, choreographer, and dance teacher, and is widely considered the dean and mother of Israel’s folk dancing scene. Born Gertrude Loewenstein in Leipzig, Germany, Kadman studied philosophy and psychology at university before moving to Palestine in 1920 with her husband, Leo Kaufman and their eldest son. At the end of the 1940s she decided to trade in ‘Gertrude Kaufman’ for a more Hebrew-sounding name and became Gurit Kadman.
Kadman worked at the Ben Shemen youth village from 1929-1931. There, she starting organising folk dance festivals that were a huge hit. In 1944 (and onwards) she came on board as a planning and organising partner of Kibbutz Dalia’s Dance and Folk Dancing conferences. All the while, she was also launching and spearheading training courses for folk dance instructors and even founded the Folk Dancing Commission.
In the fifties, Kadman, across a series of shorts, started documenting the many diverse dance styles brought to Israel along with the huge waves of migration into the nascent country. Highlights of her film credits include Dances of Yemenite Jews (1951), Let us Sing a Hebrew Song: Shir HaBotzrim (1953), Traditional Dances of Kurdistan Jews (1954), Khabanim: 2eme Partie (1956), and Mount Atlas, Morocco, Libyan Desert Jews Dances (1962).
Kadman wrote and published numerous articles on folklore and dance, dance instruction and documentation workbooks, and two books: A People Dance (‘am roked’) and Ethnic Dance in Israel.
In 1981 Kadman was awarded the Israel Prize for Culture and Dance.
