The Castle of Yiddishland Concept is a large-scale open-air installation floating above the Venetian lagoon. It envisions the symbolic establishment of Yiddishland at the Venice Biennale — a conceptual, non-national pavilion shaped by Yiddish experiences of diaspora, migration, and doikeyt. Inspired by the wooden architecture of shtetl synagogues, it illustrates an unsettlement and the impossibility to root or find a place.

Inspired by René Magritte’s “The Castle of the Pyrenees”, the project by Anna Kamyshan echoes his vision of safekeeping in free suspension. Here, the Castle is a lost wooden synagogue—the spiritual and communal heart of Eastern European shtetls—drifting above the cities of today’s dispersed Yiddishland. Each synagogue’s architecture adapts to its surroundings, merging local forms with the memory of vanished Jewish spaces. The work reclaims airspace as territory, recalling how Jews in Venice were forbidden to build synagogues on the ground floor, raising them above the city. In perpetual flight, these synagogues evoke a homeland without land—resilient, adaptive, and borderless.