‘The Dybbuk’ returns

This is the final installment in a three-part series.

The Drama Group at Congregation Beth Shalom produced two performances of “The Dybbuk” in December 1984 under the direction of Dr. Ze’ev Raviv. Raviv had recently come to Pittsburgh from Boston to serve as education director of Beth Shalom.

Raviv was born in a Polish shtetl in 1924 and made aliyah a decade later. His entire village was massacred early in the Holocaust. He got hooked on drama attending Habima productions. After serving in the War of Independence in 1948, he studied directing at the Yale School of Drama. He used “The Dybbuk” as his senior thesis and later directed five productions of the play. “Why do I keep coming back to this play?” he told the Chronicle. “All I can say is that the play fills me with awe. The theme of love, and the transcendence of the two lovers — something just drives me to do it again.”

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By the late 1970s, Raviv was mostly using his theater background to advance Jewish education. He wanted American Jews to view their cultural heritage as a gift to all humanity, as art with universal appeal, and not only as a communal treasure illuminating the Jewish experience. The troupe at Beth Shalom initially resisted, Raviv said. “Slowly, they began to believe me, that it is a beautiful and unusual play, full of life.”

Edward Gilbert chose “The Dybbuk” for his first play as artistic director of the Pittsburgh Public Theater in 1993. He had fled Vienna in 1938 as an infant. His parents were killed in a concentration camp. He escaped to England, raised by Russian Jews.

Like the community production at the Y Playhouse in the early 1930s, Gilbert’s version of “The Dybbuk” was massive and ambitious. It had 23 actors playing more than 50 roles, plus elaborate sets, technically complex scenes and nearly 60 costumes.

If you read old newspaper coverage of the production, you’ll find advertisements nearby for Spielberg’s “Schindler’s List.” The play and the movie opened the same day.

“I have been at some pains to say to the actors that this is not a Holocaust play,” Gilbert told the Post-Gazette. “This is not about the suffering of the Jews. Everything gets colored by that. I’d be the last person to underplay the hardness. The main reality of this is poverty.” He preferred to describe the play as “a strong story dealing with justice and responsibility, mental illness and spirituality.” In a review, Christopher Rawson described the tone of the production as “sweetly elegiac and reverent, sorrowful and lyrical.”

It is overwhelming to situate the 1934 production alongside the 1993 production, each pushing aside the Holocaust in its own way to make space for a slice of Jewish life.

The most recent production of “The Dybbuk” was the Pittsburgh Jewish Music Festival’s’ 2013 production of Israeli composer Ofer Ben-Amots’ opera adaptation.

Aron Zelkowicz started the festival in 2003 to share accessible and overlooked Jewish classical music with the public. He felt that audiences were often unaware of the depth and breadth of authentic Jewish source material. “The Dybbuk” was a good example: a play that many recognized by name but few had actually seen performed.

“To me, the whole thing was a dreamscape,” Zelkowicz said. Here was the culture of the shtetl, refracted through its supernatural lore. To capture that dreaminess, he took an expansive approach to the chamber opera, adding spoken narration, musical interludes, a women chorale, a children’s choir, video installations, ballet dancers and puppets.

Zelkowicz also took the unusual step of changing the ending. Instead of passing over to the spirit world, the possessed Leah stays here. “It’s difficult dealing with death,” he explained, “but it’s more difficult to be with the living and deal with death that way.”

With that bold, simple change, Zelkowicz got to the heart of why this play has captivated this Jewish community and others for so long, through so many decades of change. It is a play insistent on life, regardless of the darkness falling around it.

In researching these articles, I felt a strong compulsion to read the play. I did, and I was captivated. I found myself reading it again and again on a loop for several weeks.

One central image sticks with me above all others: a gravestone belonging to a young couple that had been murdered on their wedding day in 1648 by Khmelnitsky.

The gravestone is not in a cemetery. It is in the town square, exactly where the act occurred. “The two of them were buried in the same grave so they could be together for all eternity,” Leah explains in a monologue. “And at every wedding, when people dance around their grave, their ghosts emerge and they participate in the joy of the newlyweds.”

She stands at the grave, with hands lifted, and says, “Holy bride and groom! I invite you to my wedding! Please come and stand at my side under the chuppah.” PJC

Eric Lidji is the director of the Rauh Jewish Archives at the Heinz History Center. He can be reached at rjarchives@heinzhistorycenter.org or 412-454-6406