New Performance of The Dybbuk at Tel Aviv University

The Tel Aviv University Theatre performed the famous S. An-sky’s play The Dybbuk from January 7 to January 14, 2026. The perfomance, played in Hebrew, has been translated from the original Yiddish by Dr. Ruthie Abeliovich, an associate of our project, Dr. Oren Cohen Roman and Dr. Miriam Trinh.

Shloyme Zanvl Rappoport (1863 – 1920), known by his pen name S. An-sky, was a Jewish author, playwright, researcher of Jewish folklore, polemicist, and cultural and political activist. He is best known for his play The Dybbuk or Between Two Worlds, written in 1914. In 1912-1914, he led the Jewish Ethnographic Expedition, which visited approximately 60–70 shtetls to the Pale of Settlement. The expedition collected thousands of invaluable artifacts and made over 500 recordings of Jewish folk music using a phonograph.

The Dybbuk was first staged in Warsaw by Joseph Lateiner (1853–1935) on 1920, one month after An-sky’s death. Since then it has been translated into over a dozen languages and performed thousands of times all over the world. It remains a Hasidic Gothic Yiddish story turned also into a film by Michał Waszyński in 1937.