We will dance again

A tattoo about resilience

Rebecca is a dancer in New York.

After October 7, she stopped dancing. “Every step I make, every movement that’s not entirely functional makes me think of those massacred at Nova,” she wrote. She felt paralysed. Rehearsals became impossible to follow, and not long after, she was back at her parents’ house on Long Island—kicked out of her dance company.

When we first spoke, she hadn’t danced in 4 months and was desperately looking for an anchor point, for ground under her feet. In our conversations, she often spoke about her grandmother. Her bubbe, a survivor who had made it from Auschwitz to the U.S., used to say, “My grandchildren are my revenge to Hitler.”

Mir veln zey iberlebn—we will outlive them. Not with force, not with violence, not with vengeance, but through stubbornness and an unshakable insistence on life.

“I would sometimes love to be more like her,” Rebecca said more than once. When asked what that would mean, she didn’t hesitate: it would mean dancing again.

Dancing through the rage. Dancing past the fear. Dancing out of the prison of despair and through the pain of grief. It would mean finding that flow again—that flow where everything else disappears, where helplessness dissolves in movement, where shame and numbness turn into space that longs to be filled with her body.

To be dancing again.

That became our wording:

עוד נחזור לרקוד

We will dance again.

We will dance again and outlive them.

Rebecca was back on stage on June 17, 2025.