Toby Klein Greenwald

Toby Klein Greenwald has founded, co-founded or directed more than 12 theater companies or educational theater projects. She is the artistic director of Raise Your Spirits Theatre (www.raiseyourspirits.org), in which capacity she has co-authored (lyrics) and directed musicals on Esther, Noah, Ruth, Deborah and the daughters of Tzelofchad (sole lyricist). She directed and script-advised the show Count the Stars in Gush Etzion in 2014 and directed Joseph & the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat for both Raise Your Spirits and for the Brothers’ Troupe, a project for men and boys in Gush Etzion. She is the co-founder and producing director of the Dor L’Dor Interactive Theater Troupe which grew out of the award-winning psychology website WholeFamily.com, of which she is co-founder and editor-in-chief. She founded and directs Na’na Playback Dance Theater and Playback Hamra. She directed the Gush Etzion Playback troupe, taught Playback in Ramat Beit Shemesh and Jerusalem, and lectured in Playback Theater in the Institute for Expressive Therapists in Jerusalem College for Women. She created a new method called Biblio-Playback (or Playback Midrash) on which she gives workshops in Israel and abroad, and lectures also on Cinema Midrash. Toby directed Pippin in a theater program she founded for youth at risk, co-directed a theater project for struggling American youth in Israel called Secrets, directed a theater project for high school girls from Gush Katif following the destruction of their communities, called Scenes from our Lives, advised on a theater project of students of Sederot, called Children of the Kassams, directed a youth theater project on the Russian refusenik Ari Volvovsky, and directed other school and community theater projects, including Sephardic Orchard by past president Yitzhak Navon. In earlier years she taught drama to students in Sfat who were survivors of the Maalot terror attack. She is the recipient of the Yaakov Egerest Memorial Award for Jewish Culture, of the Torah Culture Department of Israel’s Ministry, for her work in educational, community and Jewish theater, and the recipient of the Ohr Torah-Shavei Rachel award for her educational Jewish theater work. She is also a journalist, a poet, and a teacher of Tanach, Creative Writing and English Literature, the translator of In the Land of Prayer, the editor of The Golden Pens of Gush Etzion, and the initiator and editor of the acclaimed Listening to God, by Rabbi Shlomo Riskin. She is a graduate of Jerusalem College for Women, of Hebrew University and of Bar Ilan (M.A.). She lives in Efrat with her husband, and her children and grandchildren live throughout the land of Israel.

https://www.raiseyourspirits.org/