Imagine you are a world champion ballroom dancer, with the entire world at your feet and the brightest future ahead.
Now, imagine you wake up one day with a sore throat, and end that same day paralyzed from the waist down due to a one-in-a-million complication from a cold.
This is exactly what happened to Tomer Margalit, who recently won the silver medal at Para Dance Sport European Championship in Prague with her dance partner, Orel Chalaf.
For 29-year-old Margalit, this is the latest in a long series of awards won at various Para Dance Sport events.
“For years, I didn’t even want to hear about para dancing, I couldn’t imagine myself competing in a wheelchair,” Margalit tells ISRAEL21c.
Something extremely rare
Margalit has been competing in the para dance category for the past nine years. From the ages of three to 14, however, she was a “standing” dancer, as she herself puts it. Until the tragedy struck that no one could have predicted or even imagined.
“It was something extremely rare,” recalls Margalit.
“I had a cold, and my body, instead of attacking the bad bacteria, attacked the good ones; I developed autoimmune inflammation in my spine, which caused paralysis,” she says.
Margalit says her memory of the incident is “terribly vague,” but it was only a matter of hours.
“When I got to the hospital, they didn’t give me the right medicine because they didn’t do an MRI right away,” she says, adding that even the doctors didn’t suspect such a horrific scenario.
Wheelchair dancing
Margalit explains that she spent the next six years trying to come to terms with her condition, which she admits was “very, very, very difficult.”
She says that throughout the years various former coaches tried to convince her to return to dancing in some capacity, to no avail. “I wasn’t ready for wheelchair dancing; I remember myself bursting into tears just thinking about not being able to dance on my feet.”
Eventually, coach Limor Goldberg Samuel from The Israel Sports Association for the Disabled, managed to convince 20-year-old Margalit to try para dancing.
“She told me, ‘Try it once, [and if] you won’t like it, go home, everything is fine,’” the dancer recalls.
Margalit liked it. “Wheelchair dancing,” as she puts it, reignited in her the passion for dance and life.
Back to competitive dancing
Before she knew it, Margalit was competing again. This time in para dancing. Over the past few years she has won a number of international championships, competing solo.
In 2021, she even drew the attention of Gal Gadot. The Israeli actress posted on her social media the video of Margalit dancing in a Wonder Women outfit during the World Para Dance Sport Championship, where the dancer clinched a gold medal.
“When Gal posts something on her social media, it becomes very viral; the post created a lot of hype around me,” Margalit tells ISRAEL21c.
As a result, Margalit was invited to perform as a guest on “Rokdim Im Kochavim,” the Israeli version of “Dancing with The Stars.”
Finding her dancing partner
During her appearance in the show, Margalit befriended one of the other contestants, Orel Chalaf, whom she had previously seen compete at various dance championships.
“I came up to him in the middle of a rehearsal, and told him, ‘I don’t want to interrupt, but I want to ask you, what do you think about performing with me for a show?’ Luckily, he said he would be really, really happy,” recalls Margalit.
The one-off show turned into a partnership, and the duo began competing at para dance events as a couple in 2022.
Chalaf, 24, took up ballroom dancing at age 13, a little later than some, and remarkably exceeded all expectations.
“At 20, I won the national championship, but then the pandemic broke out,” explains Chalaf, adding that coronavirus put an indefinite halt to his competitive career as a solo dancer.
“But then I met Tomer,” he says.
Hostage tribute
When the duo won their silver medal in Prague, they made headlines in Israel after staging one of their qualifying dances to the tune of Hurricane. The song was performed by Eden Golan at the tumultuous 2024 Eurovision Song Contest.
“We chose it to honor the hostages, to raise awareness in Israel and around the world,” says Margalit, referring to Israelis kidnapped by Hamas into Gaza on October 7, 2023.
The duo was later invited to perform this dance at this year’s “Rokdim Im Kochavim” final.
Margalit and Chalaf say they are expected to travel soon to the United States where they were invited to perform the dance at various events and fundraisers organized by the Jewish community.
What’s next?
ISRAEL21c’s interview with Margalit and Chalaf was conducted at their spacious dance studio in Kiryat Ono, which they opened six months ago.
Margalit had just finished teaching a dance class for wheelchair-bound individuals, with some students joining in via Zoom.
Now the duo is busy training and rehearsing for the World Para Dance Sport Championship in September.
“As athletes, we are always on a lookout for spaces to train in, to have an actual training space available to us every hour of the day; we train every day for six hours,” explains Margalit.
“There are a lot of other competitions worldwide throughout the year, but there are budget considerations; Tomer and I are working very, very hard to try and get some kind of a sponsor,” says Chalaf.
Margalit says she hopes her story will serve as an inspiration to other people caught up in tragic or undesirable circumstances.
“I’ve had days and nights filled with nothing but crying, wondering, ‘Why me?’” she admits.
“But slowly I started telling myself that I will not give up; giving up on yourself is giving up on life.
“Take that little thing that makes you feel good; find some time for it. It really recharges the batteries and gives you a lot of energy to first continue the day, then the week, and then the rest of your life.”
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