HOLY NAMES FOR OUR DYBBUK

site-specific performance, film, and photography

2024-2026

Holy Names for Our Dybbuk is a multidisciplinary project reimagining spirit possession and exorcism across site-specific performance, photography, and experimental film. In two live encounters staged at sites of historical violence in Poland, including a former Nazi concentration camp in Kraków and the grounds of the former Warsaw Ghetto, Weitz embodies the Yiddish folklore figure of the dybbuk, channeling ancestral grief. A multigenerational ensemble of Polish dancers assumes the role of healers, activating movement, ritual, and sound as forms of collective repair.

The project extends into a single-channel film that places these performances in dialogue with archival footage from the 1937 Yiddish classic Der Dibuk, underscored by an original score by klezmer-electronica artist Chaia. Commissioned by FestiVALT and the POLIN Museum, with support from a Fulbright Scholar Award and the Hadassah-Brandeis Research Institute.

In a photographic series extending Holy Names for Our Dybbuk, Weitz staged her dybbuk character at sites of Jewish death in Poland. A masked figure in a wedding dress stands in a snowy cemetery, surrounded by broken gravestones, holding a Yiddish sign reading, “Wherever we live, that’s our homeland,” referencing the Bund, a prewar Jewish socialist labor movement. The same figure lies on the ground of a destroyed Jewish cemetery, draped in a blanket inscribed with text from Leviticus 19:16, a foundational Torah injunction against bearing false witness and violence.