Adam: Dancing with Beethoven

Adam Greenfeld—a wheelchair user, IDF veteran, and winner of numerous international dance competitions—shared his experience of performing in Memento, a ballet by Nadya Timofeyeva

Adam has danced all his life—folk dance, ballroom, you name it. His body knew rhythm and the joy of movement—until tragedy struck. While serving in the army, he fell from a watchtower and sustained a severe spinal injury. The wheelchair became part of him, an extension of his being. Yet his dance career didn’t end there—as Adam says, “It wasn’t the end. It was a new beginning.”

After the accident, dance took on a new meaning. He wasn’t looking for pity—he was searching for beauty, for aesthetics. He sought a way to tell a story through movement, even without rising from his chair. For years, he searched for a choreographer who would see the wheelchair not as a limitation, but as a language.

And so he arrived at Jerusalem Ballet, led by Nadya Timofeyeva.

“I contacted her a year before we actually met. She told me she didn’t have any ideas at the time, maybe later. A year passed, I called again. A week later, she got back to me: ‘I’ve had a completely outrageous idea.’ I said, ‘If it’s outrageous—I’m in.’”

Nadya invited Adam to join a production about the Holocaust. The result was Memento—a choreographic tale about ballerina Franciszka Mann, who performed her final dance inside a gas chamber.

At the time, Nadya didn’t know that almost all of Adam Greenfeld’s family had perished at Auschwitz. Nor that each letter of his name was a tribute to those who had been lost.

“My name, Adam, is an acronym. A for Avraham—both my paternal and maternal grandfathers were named Avraham. D for David, my mother’s brother. M for Minek, short for Binyaminek, her other brother. All of them were murdered in the Holocaust.”

“It felt as though the heavens themselves had ordained that I should be part of a piece like Memento. There's even a scene in the ballet where the Mann family undergoes selection at a concentration camp—my mother went through that. She was separated from her own mother. My mother survived Auschwitz—she was already in the gas chamber, but they ran out of gas for her group. My father was in another camp—he too survived by miracle. After that, commemorating the Holocaust became my father’s life mission. A few years ago, when the previous Pope visited Israel, he invited six Holocaust survivors to meet him. My father was among them. The photograph of the Pope kissing my father's hand went around the world—that man was my father.”

Adam has been dancing in a wheelchair for thirty-three years. “I believe to dance is to belong, to remember, to live.”

He never wonders why it happened to him. He thinks instead about what can be created from what happened.

Adam Greenfeld was born in 1954 in Łódź, Poland—a grim, industrial city where days merged into a gray, monotonous blur. When he was three, his family immigrated to Israel. They first lived in Givat Olga, eventually settling in Holon. That’s where he grew up, came of age, and joined HaShomer HaTzair, like many sons of immigrants in search of a new identity.

In the army, he served in the Nahal brigade, and during the Yom Kippur War, he was sent to the Golan Heights. There he quickly rose to the rank of tank commander. After his discharge, he studied behavioral sciences at Ben-Gurion University in Be’er Sheva. During that time, he met Bruria—“Buki,” as she was affectionately called. They married and had two daughters. Adam worked at a branch of Bank Igud. The years passed. The family moved to Herzliya, and Adam, always one to take initiative, founded a new branch of the bank in Ra’anana.

And that’s when it happened: one day, a customer asked him, “Why do you sit in a chair all day? Go dance.”

And Adam began to dance folk dances with his wife. But Buki’s romance with dance was short-lived—born in the moshav Kfar Vitkin, she once declared that she felt “like a sack of potatoes in the town square,” and told him to carry on without her.

And so he did. Along the way, he earned a master’s degree, left banking, and began working at the Israeli branch of Pioneer Concrete Ltd.

Then came the tragedy. While on reserve duty near Ramallah, Adam climbed a watchtower with his sleeping bag. He tossed the bag inside, lost his balance, and fell backward.

“A close friend of mine, a professor of mathematics, once told me: people close their eyes when they don’t want to see reality,” Adam says. “But I looked. And I saw stars.”

When he tried to move his legs, he felt nothing. His first thought wasn’t about work, or his mortgage, or even his family. It was this: How will I dance now?

To this day, he asks himself why he dances. Maybe only his body knows the answer. Or perhaps his soul.

Adam’s wife and daughters—then aged 13 and 15—responded with courage to the news that he had become disabled. But his mother was inconsolable; she wept endlessly. “I told her: ‘Mom, don’t cry. We live in Israel. I could have come back to you in a coffin. But I came back half a son—so enjoy the half that survived.’”

Thus began Adam’s new life—in a wheelchair.

“I don’t present myself as disabled,” he says in a tone almost apologetic. “If you don’t broadcast helplessness, people won’t treat you as helpless. My daughters, for instance, don’t even perceive me as disabled. I remember once asking my eldest to grab something from the top shelf. She said, ‘No way. Do it yourself.’ So I grabbed a cane—and I did it.”

Just a year after the injury, he flew alone to the U.S. and the UK. “I wanted to test my limits. At a hotel in London, I told the clerk, ‘I’m going to shower. If I don’t call in 30 minutes—come check on me.’ He forgot. But I didn’t. I overcame that too.”

One day, his wife spotted an ad in Ma’ariv for dance classes for wheelchair users at Beit HaLochem. She persuaded Adam to try. At his first session, the instructor Orly pointed to two women and asked: “Would you like to dance with Ruhama or Nurit?”

“It was heaven,” he laughs. “When I danced on my feet, no one wanted to partner with me. Now I had two ladies to choose from.”

In 1997, a group of dancers from Beit HaLochem performed for the first time at the Karmiel Dance Festival. “Back then we were the only ones. Today, every self-respecting city has a troupe like this.”

Six months after the injury, he returned to work. He was greeted like a hero.

“They saved my job. Built a ramp. Shortened my desk so I could roll under it in my wheelchair.”

He went on to earn a law degree. “For Polish parents, it was a point of pride to have a lawyer in the family.”

Eventually, he left work—for the sake of dance.

“I’m a very shy person by nature. But dance gave me freedom.”

He danced waltz, tango, foxtrot, quickstep. In 2002, he won a silver medal at the first wheelchair dance competition in the Netherlands. “That’s when a new world opened up for me. I saw that even from a chair, you can express strength and beauty through dance.”

He explains the rules with a judge’s precision: “You have to hold your arms at the same height, and present your partner to the audience and judges in a way that makes it clear—she’s the most beautiful woman in the room.”

When Adam recalls meeting the Emperor of Japan, a smile crosses his face. “It was almost unimaginable—a guy in a wheelchair, sitting in Tokyo among gold medalists from around the world. The Emperor and Empress walked past each of us, greeting everyone. When they reached me, they stopped and asked questions about Israel.” He pauses. “I don’t have a photo from that moment. A pity.”

He won that competition. At Ben-Gurion Airport, childhood friends from Holon awaited him with balloons and posters. “I felt on top of the world.”

Adam Greenfeld is a laureate of many international competitions and a finalist in the 2008 World Championship. One performance in Germany left a lasting impression.

“After every dance—waltz, tango, quickstep—the judges raised their paddles. Every time, I got the highest score. When the Israeli flag was raised and the anthem HaTikva began to play, I burst into tears. The Germans didn’t understand why. But I knew: this wasn’t just my medal. It was my father’s victory.”

“As a child, I was ashamed of my father,” Adam admits with searing honesty. “He wore socks with sandals in the summer, and I’d run away so no one would know he was mine. But as I grew older, shame turned into pride. He typed, he wrote, he collected, and eventually was invited to light a torch at a state ceremony in the Knesset—and to meet the Pope.”

As mentioned earlier, the photograph of Pope Benedict XVI kissing Adam Greenfeld’s father’s hand made headlines around the world.

“I feel I’m continuing his mission. Today, when so few Holocaust survivors remain, the responsibility lies with the second generation. Especially after October 7—we see what happens when we’re not strong enough, when we don’t remember enough.”

In Adam’s study, three books are kept. Two were written by his parents. The third is a collection of poems by a 14-year-old boy who perished in Auschwitz—Abramek, the son of Adam’s grandfather. A boy who sketched the Łódź Ghetto from the window of the shack where he was hiding. That same day, the Germans found him. Abramek was sent to the crematorium. Adam’s grandfather never spoke of it. Only after his death was a notebook discovered, containing eight poems written by the child. One of Abramek’s drawings was later chosen as the official logo of a national memorial ceremony.

“My mother doesn’t have a number tattooed on her wrist,” Adam adds. “She arrived at the concentration camp with the last group deported from the Łódź Ghetto. The Germans no longer had time to tattoo numbers. I didn’t know that for years—I never asked. When I was 32, before I was injured, we traveled to Auschwitz together. My mother cried. She remembered the road. She remembered the last time she saw her own mother.”

Adam speaks of how a dance partner is not just a partner, but a part of you. “Havatzelet, my childhood friend, once said: it’s harder to find a dance partner than a life partner. She was right.”

Adam knows exactly what he looks for in a partner: height, weight, tempo—yes. But above all: perfection. And this perfection isn’t just about control over the body—it’s about control over memory. A dance containing pain, victory, family, silence, and a fourteen-year-old boy named Abramek, who wrote poems about a world that never let him grow up.

Over the many years Adam has danced, his partners have changed frequently. He says he especially enjoys dancing with those who are not wheelchair users—dancers who are on their feet. “I strive for my partner to have many worlds—and I’ll be just one of them. I’ve been sentenced to the chair. She hasn’t.”

He explains that dance demands a great deal—both physically and emotionally. “It’s not easy to dance with a partner who’s in a wheelchair. She has to lead me, carry the weight. That’s why I always encourage others to dance with walking partners too.”

For him, the hunger for movement is stronger than the desire to win. “I can’t stop dancing. Dance is the meaning of my life.”

In recent years, Adam has also entered the world of freestyle, working with an extraordinary partner—a professional ballerina. But his main ballet role is in the production Memento, where he plays the father.

It all began with a Saturday evening drive to Jerusalem with his daughter, a rehearsal, and a sudden falling-in-love—both professional and human.

“Nadya treated me as an equal. Since my injury, no one has treated me that way. She showed extraordinary sensitivity, and I value that deeply. It was pure humanity—it had nothing to do with the show.”

He speaks of a body moving through the chair. Of a new aesthetic born of limitation. Of his first performance with Jerusalem Ballet, dancing alongside Anaëlle Zateikin—the company’s leading ballerina. She portrayed Franciszka Mann. He portrayed her father.

Now, let’s give the floor to Nadya Timofeyeva.

“He came to one of our rehearsals, we did a trial, and I knew instantly—this was it. An utterly astonishing story: his father left Łódź carrying a small bust of Beethoven, and in my production, Adam travels to Auschwitz carrying a bust of Beethoven. I had this immediate association: a dancer without legs—like a composer who has lost his hearing. And there it was, echoing in the Ode to Joy from the Ninth Symphony. I love the German of the Ninth’s finale—and I am terrified by the German of the Nazis. That’s why I draw a parallel between the two German languages. The ballet is full of such tiny strokes, running through it like a hidden current; this one I called ‘Beethoven.’ It’s what connects Adam’s family and Adam himself. And, in a way, the Nazis too—those highly educated people, capable of enjoying Beethoven, and at the same time sending people to the gas chambers.

“There’s also a connection to The Pianist—the scene where people are thrown from their wheelchairs.

“Adam entered the ballet magnificently. I think he adds a profound and essential color. We often say each artist is like a particular hue in a painting—well, Adam is a vital link, a central figure around which the narrative is built. I even made him the conductor—which is why he travels with Beethoven’s bust. And in the final scene, at the gas chamber, in the moment called ‘Selection,’ Adam looks up at the Nazi officer, raises his hands—and conducts. He conducts in the face of the executioner. All this while a Strauss march plays in the background, distorted by sound effects, turned into a roar of madness. ‘You can kill me, but you can’t break me.’

“Memento is filled with scenes of ideological and moral collision. Here, good and evil are not abstractions—they’re embodied in physical forms. The audience’s gaze shifts between a handsome, powerful Nazi officer and a frail, elderly man in a wheelchair—and suddenly the question arises: which of them is truly broken? Who is the one truly maimed?

“This production is impossible without Adam. Without his physical presence, without his biography, without his truth. Because it’s not just a metaphor—it’s real. And it is that very truth that makes the audience cry.”

Both Adam and Nadya are convinced that Memento must be seen beyond the borders of Israel.

“We have to bring this show to America. So that American audiences—especially the younger generation—don’t see just ‘another Holocaust story,’ but a living wound, a reminder, a warning. We want America to cry with us—not out of fear, but out of understanding. To grasp the truth: this is no way to live. And everything that happens in this world comes at a cost. Because Memento is not just a ballet. It’s an attempt to stop time—and look once more into the eyes of those who are no longer with us. Through dance. Through the body. Through memory.”

Photos courtesy of Nadya Timofeyeva and the Jerusalem Ballet