Exhibition "The Dybbuk. Ghost of the vanished world" exhibition

It all begins with Shlomo An-ski's play Entre deux mondes. The Dibbuk (1915), a tragedy about the thwarted loves of Lea and Hanan, the new Romeo and Juliet of Yiddishland. The posterity of this story owes much to its supernatural character, with its evocation of a traditional world where souls seek each other beyond death. Alternately performed in Yiddish by the Vilner trupe in Warsaw, and in Hebrew by Habima in Moscow, in stagings that would become milestones in theater history, the play immediately met with international success, from Paris to Buenos Aires to New York.

Michał Waszyński's 1937 adaptation established itself as the most popular film in Yiddish cinema, reaching audiences far beyond the Jewish public. While the Holocaust engulfed the European Jewish world, interest in the dybbuk did not disappear. It moved to the United States in the 1960s, where the figure of the dybbuk embodied the return of the repressed. During the hunt for Adolf Eichmann by
the Mossad, "dybbuk" referred to the Nazi criminal. In Poland from the 1980s onwards, Andrzej Wajda and then Krzysztof Warlikowsky staged new productions of the dybbuk, which became the ghost of a country without Jews, haunted by its past.

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Featuring some one hundred works, the exhibition explores the figure of the dybbuk, through a journey combining painting, theater, cinema, music, literature and popular culture, from the presentation of 18th-century amulets to the screening of excerpts from films by Sidney Lumet or the brothers Joel and Ethan Coen, not forgetting works by Marc Chagall, Nathan Altman, Leonora Carrington, Michel Nedjar or Sigalit Landau.