On Tuesday night, 10 days after the return of Ran Gvili’s body, members of my Jerusalem synagogue Shira Hadasha gathered in an evening of song and to store away, in personalized fabric cases, the many accoutrements related to the return of the hostages. These, it was suggested, could be opened at appropriate times, such as on October 7, on Passover “to teach it to our children,” or on Memorial Day.
Everyone was encouraged to write their own messages. I have my share of yellow ribbon pins, yellow ribbons from my car, and a dog tag in gold attached to a necklace with birds flying free. But the symbol of identification that was most personally meaningful to me was on my fingernails – where the hostage yellow ribbon was created and recreated over the past two years in gel polish on my ring fingers.
So on Wednesday, I took a deep breath, and sat across from Hadassah Hospital-based manicurist Annael Toledano to remove the ribbons from my nails. It wasn’t a full manicure, so it was over in two minutes. It was emotional for her, too.
In January 2024, my friend, Jerusalemite Shari Greenwald Mendes – who volunteers for the IDF reserve unit tasked with preparing the bodies of fallen female soldiers for burial – spoke to a visiting mission of Hadassah leaders from the United States. She had just returned from testifying at the United Nations.
Greenwald Mendes described the appalling conditions of the bodies that she and her teammates treated with love and respect. An architect attuned to color, Greenwald Mendes spoke of the only bright colors amid the dark hues: pink, blue, and red polished nails. Many of the young women soldiers had polished their nails or gone for manicures for Simchat Torah, even though they would be spending the holiday at their army bases and not with their families, boyfriends, or synagogues.
The team paused to picture those women on October 6, and took a moment to honor them. Sitting to my right at the talk was Jerusalemite Madelaine Black, who volunteers at Hadassah Hospital. “Let’s polish our nails yellow in their memory and for the hostages,” she said. “Let’s spread the word.”
Tie a yellow ribbon, paint some yellow nails
And so it started – a campaign for yellow nails that began in Jerusalem, and then spread to the Diaspora. I think I was the first to polish my nails yellow, and Toledano, who provides uplifting manicures to harried staff and scared patients, suggested taking it one step further. She turned the pinkie fingers yellow, and then painted a three-dimensional-looking ribbon on both ring fingers.
She started offering it to clients, and even created a stand on International Women’s Day at the hospital. Then we were off to Hostages Square in Tel Aviv, offering yellow polish to visitors and families of hostages. I made a vow that I would continue until the last hostage was home, thinking then that it would be a matter of weeks or months. Hadassah women led the charge of nails in the US, and my Facebook feed filled with yellow.
Wherever I went in the Jewish world, women and men (who wanted to show their wives) took photos of the ribbon. When I met OPI nail polish co-founder Suzi Weiss-Fischmann in the summer of 2024, she was giving out yellow polish at the Hadassah Convention in Las Vegas, and I had the opportunity to tell her the moving origin story, which she hadn’t known.
What would I do when the hostages came home, I was frequently asked. I would turn those nails orange, I always answered, in honor of Shiri, Ariel, and Yarden Bibas. We wouldn’t find out they were murdered for another year, in January 2025.
From yellow to orange
So, it was on Thursday that I went with orange nails to see the newest woman-to-woman musical David the Servant King, my first time in a lovely theater in Jerusalem’s Talpiot Industrial Zone. Who knew? I was among 495 women there, nearly all in the modest dress and assorted head coverings of contemporary Orthodox Jews. There were enough young women for the tickets to include a request “not to bring babies.” There was also a list of biblical, Talmudic, and Midrashic sources in the playbill.
I felt exhilarated to be sitting among all these women from a sector that has played an out-sized role fighting in the war. They’re also probably the only audience in the world familiar with the aggadic interpretations dramatized in the play. One of Jerusalem’s great women Torah teachers was sitting in front of me, and I had the opportunity to ask her about her wounded nephew, whom I’d met in rehab.
Like the Bibas family, King David was reputedly a redhead, and the musical emphasizes his fraught childhood and unlikely kingship. All parts are played by women, a reverse of Shakespeare’s productions, and the actresses had training in adapting their movements to look more like men.
Playwright and lyricist Shlomit Koffler Weinreb first imagined the King David musical in 2017. She believes it was a heavenly inspiration shared with the creators of the House of David series for Amazon Prime, which had premiered in February 2025, and the enormously successful animated movie David, released that December. Esteemed journalist and author Melanie Phillips, also a Jerusalemite, has spoken of the “return of the heroic David warrior” – the valorous men and women who fought this war above and below ground and who maintained the thorny home front.
Readers of this column know that I am a longtime fan of the genre of women-to-women theater, music, and dance, in which Orthodox women who don’t perform before men express otherwise hidden and unexpressed talents. It’s hard for me to believe that it was 44 years ago that I went to my first women-to-women rock concert to raise funds for the family of Chaya Malka Abramson, recovering from a horrendous gas fire in the Old City of Jerusalem.
Koffler Weinreb was a composer, guitarist, and vocalist in her own women-to-women band called Ayelet Hashachar (“morning star”) in Baltimore. She plays a stirring prophet Samuel in David the Servant King. Tamar Rabinowitz, a co-creator and vocalist of that same women’s band, brings to life David’s resolute mother, Nitzvevet. Their band’s first performance on September 9, 2001, two days before 9/11, was a fundraiser for victims of terror in the Second Intifada.
David is played by the magnetic singer, actress, and scriptwriter Avital Macales. When, in the musical, Samuel anoints the future king, and the chorus sings the familiar words from Psalms and “Hallel” – in the midrash, from the mouth of David’s mother: “The stone the builders despised has become the cornerstone” – the tears in my eyes were not only for the ancient king of Israel but also for my unfairly reviled magnificent homeland and for our irrepressible people.
The writer is the Israel director of public relations at Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America. Her latest book is A Daughter of Many Mothers, with Holocaust survivor and premier English-language witness Rena Quint.