He went on to international fame as a master illusionist, stunt performer and self-styled debunker of the era’s spiritualists.

He began performing for small groups at dime museums and sideshows, went on to become a headliner on the vaudeville circuit and adopted the name Houdini after his idol, French magician Jean-Eugene Robert-Houdin. While in his early teens, Erik, who became Ehrich Weiss, became obsessed with the world of magic.

(The exhibition features a Hebrew Bible that once belonged to Houdini’s father.) When he was 4, his family immigrated to the United States, where his father, Rabbi Mayer Samuel Weisz, assumed the pulpit at a congregation in the small Wisconsin city of Appleton. One of seven children, Houdini was born Erik Weisz in 1874 in the Hungarian capital of Budapest. Pinkert says one of the challenges of any depiction of Houdini’s life is separating fact from fiction “because he spent his career creating fictions about himself.” “We did this one in nine months.”Īt the exhibition, visitors will be encouraged to experiment with and perform some of Houdini’s most celebrated tricks and illusions, including “The Vanishing Elephant.” (In the JMM version, the 5-ton elephant will be a much smaller toy pachyderm.)

“Normally, it takes about two years to put a show like this together,” says Pinkert. London spent three months collecting Houdini memorabilia and artifacts around the country for the exhibition. “Inescapable,” which opens on June 24, was curated by London and designed by Baltimore-based independent creative consultant Danielle Nekimken.

Out of that conversation came the idea for the JMM’s upcoming exhibition, “Inescapable: The Life and Legacy of Harry Houdini.” “My bar mitzvah speech was about the intersection of Jews and magic!” As fate would have it, he immediately noticed magician and storyteller David London performing for a group there.Īfterward, Pinkert, who is executive director of the Jewish Museum of Maryland, asked London if he knew anything about Jews and magic. Pinkert ducked into the lobby of the Theatre Project to escape the oppressive heat. Last July, while attending the annual Artscape festival in Baltimore’s Mount Royal neighborhood, Marvin D.

Harry houdini mayer samuel weisz