In popular Jewish culture, a dybbuk refers to a wandering soul that takes possession of a living person, according to a belief that developed in Eastern Europe from the 18th century onwards. The dybbuk is one of those supernatural creatures that have gone beyond the realms of superstition to become a theme that inspires artists past and present. The mahJ is the first museum to explore the subject in a rich exhibition combining theatre, film, music, literature and popular culture.
Jérôme Zonder's graphic work is virtuoso and multi-faceted, in tune with his eye for the infinite flow of popular culture. For the mahJ, Jérôme Zonder has devised an installation that unfolds on the floor and walls of the contemporary gallery. The visitor is invited to wander inside the work itself, a vast game board to be explored square by square, before being locked in an endless cycle amidst the images.
As part of the Cultural Olympiad, the mahJ is devoting an exhibition to the Hungarian photographer André Steiner, a pioneer of the "New Vision", who expressed his talent by capturing athletic bodies in motion in Paris in the 1930s.
The musée d'art et d'histoire du Judaïsme presents the first retrospective in France devoted to Joann Sfar. Featuring almost 250 plates and drawings, most of which have never been shown before, as well as notebooks, photographs and films, the exhibition traces the career of an exceptional artist whose creativity has spanned comics, film and literature for over thirty years.
A cosmopolitan city, like other major ports in the Levant, Salonika - Greek Thessalonika under the Ottoman Empire - was for a long time a Jewish city, where shopkeepers of all denominations closed on Saturdays and during Jewish holidays. The 150 works in the mahJ exhibition tell the story of Salonika from the second half of the 19th century to the end of the First World War.
On the occasion of Nuit Blanche, the mahJ invites the artist Yosef Joseph Yaakov Dadoune to take over the spaces of the museum with works emblematic of his career and his questioning.
The mahJ will be showing the first exhibition entirely devoted to Pierre Dac (1893-1975). More than 250 family archive documents and excerpts from films and television and radio programmes will highlight the life and work of this master of the absurd, one of the founder figures of contemporary French humour.
