My great-grandfather, Moshe Rynecki (1881-1943), used his paintbrush and palette to chronicle the life of his community – the Jewish people of Poland. He painted Jewish worship and religious study, as well as cultural and lifetime milestones such as wedding celebrations and death. Most of all, he had a special affinity for portraying people at work in their everyday tasks. More than merely recording the scenes he painted, he features details that are often lost in the background of day to day life, illuminating and making plain the essence of his subjects. In painting a group of men sitting at a table studying the Talmud, Moshe highlights the Rabbi gesticulating as he speaks and men’s spines curved from hours of studying. Instead of showing a dark interior scene with a contrasting window, he emphasizes the window as the sole source of illumination, rays gently streaming from the window to highlight men reading the Talmud. His talent was to respectfully and intimately convey private moments of the world he knew and loved. His work is a window to the past, bringing back to life a people whose lives and culture were torn asunder.

I am pleased and proud to share my great-grandfather’s works with others because I believe his oeuvre of work opens interesting gateways for educators. The subjects of his pieces lend themselves to Jewish history, religious studies, art history, and ethnicity and identity issues. For example, Moshe often painted the religious community, but painted himself in western garb, more as ethnographer or observer than as part of the community he portrayed. The physical paintings open up an even more interesting discussion of Holocaust studies as they themselves have their own Holocaust story of separation, destruction, loss, and partial redemption.

Museum curators often think of the Moshe Rynecki story either as a Holocaust story or as the tale of a Jewish painter and his legacy of fine art. Today I believe there is an opportunity to reframe the entire discussion. As the world loses more Holocaust survivors, there are fewer people to bear witness and share their experiences, so there must be other ways to pass on their legacy. The children of survivors cannot speak for the survivors, but we can carry their stories forward. My great-grandfather once hoped his original collection of 800 paintings would be reassembled after the war, but that was not to be; my family has just over 100 paintings. I know the collection will never be whole again, but today I search for the lost and missing canvases and share the work we do have because his story, and the larger story of the paintings, is an important part of the Jewish cultural tapestry.

My father was constantly painting.  When the Polish came to power he painted a painting, oil on canvas, which became a controversial one in Warsaw.  He created a Russian pogrom, an attack of the Cossacks on a synagogue in which raping of women was shown, dead men wrapped in the holy scrolls, a very strong political painting against the White Russians.  Of course the story of the Russian pogroms was well known, but had never been shown in a painting of such dramatic dimensions.

The man on the phone then told me the most incredible story:

My parents were Polish Jews.  During the Second World War they went into Russia and became partisan fighters.  At the end of the war they returned to Poland.  At one point during their journey they passed a farmhouse.  The farmer asked them, “are you Jewish?”  My parents told the farmer that, yes, they were Jewish.  The farmer said, “I always knew the Jews would return. I have this bundle of paintings showing Jewish life.  Do you want to buy these paintings?”  My parents bought the paintings, maybe about 50 works.  For many years my parents hung the paintings on the walls of their home.  Over the years they gave away different canvases to different people.  Today I have some, here in Canada.  My brother has some paintings as well; he’s in Israel.  We don’t know all the people that were given paintings over the years – my parents did not keep a list.  I recently decided to reframe one of the works and, on a whim, decided to Google the Rynecki name.  That’s how I found your website.

I was at a loss for words.  This man’s parents had saved a bundle.  They had protected, transported, cared for, and shared Moshe’s works with others.  I, of course, immediately wanted to see photographs of the paintings.  It wasn’t until 2012, four years later, that I was given photographs of those pieces. I’m quite excited to share them here with you!  The first painting displayed here, Russian Pogram – Attack of the Cossacks (by the way, I should make clear that all the titles of the paintings are ones I’ve created) is unlike anything I’ve ever seen by my great-grandfather.  And yet immediately I knew it was his work.  The style is all his.  Here are four photographs of the paintings held by the gentleman from Canada:

Russian Pogrom – Attack of the Cossacks

Religious Study at Table

Woodwork

Man and Girl on a Walk

I don’t think the Museum has these paintings on display on a regular basis.  I got the impression that they had to pull them out of storage to accommodate my request.  They kindly did so and had their photographer (Ligier Piotr) did take some really nice and high quality images.  I share those here with you:

W Parku (In a Park), 1935

Talmudysci (The Talmudists), undated

If you’re traveling to Warsaw, Poland, and you want to see the paintings, I’m guessing you’d have to call ahead and schedule a special viewing.  The inventory numbers for these paintings are: Rys.W.2146 and Rys.W.2145.  You can find them at the Muzeum Nardowe w Warszawie.  Let me know if you go and see them!  I’d love to hear about it.

To Whom It May Concern:

I am writing to tell you about CHASING PORTRAITS: A Family’s Quest for their Lost Art Heritage, a documentary film project about my family’s quest for the lost, stolen, and missing paintings by my great-grandfather, Moshe Rynecki (1881-1943), and to ask for your funding assistance.

Moshe Rynecki painted the Jewish community in Warsaw, Poland in the 1920s and 1930s. He documented religious scenes (e.g. men studying the Talmud), images from everyday life (e.g., women doing household chores), and ultimately scenes from inside the Warsaw Ghetto. In 1939, when the Nazis invaded Poland, Moshe realized his life’s work was at great risk of being destroyed. In an effort to protect and preserve his paintings he bundled his collection of over 800 paintings into a number of packages and distributed them to gentile friends in and around Warsaw. He told his family where the paintings were hidden so that after the war the family could collect the bundles and make the collection whole once again. Moshe perished in a Nazi concentration camp. When his surviving family went to retrieve the paintings, they were only able to find a single bundle. Today the Rynecki family has just over 100 of the original 800+ paintings; the rest of the collection is scattered or lost.

The Moshe Rynecki art project is a multi-layered, multi-media project, with a variety of content components, including museum exhibitions, an online website gallery, and published books. The centerpiece of this new project is CHASING PORTRAITS. The film will follow Moshe Rynecki’s great granddaughter, Elizabeth Rynecki, as she meets one-on-one with museum curators and private collectors around the world who have her great-grandfather’s paintings in their collections. While Elizabeth tries to find lost paintings,
she will also take audiences on a journey of discovery about how the paintings survived. This personal journey will take audiences to the heart of the Rynecki family’s efforts to find Moshe’s scattered, lost, or plundered works, and to discover previously missing paintings in museums and in people’s private homes.

Narrative Synopsis and Humanities Content – Jewish studies, an interdisciplinary field that combines aspects of history, religious studies, sociology, political studies, ethnic studies, and art history, is a well-established path of study. Schools such as Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Harvard, and the University of California at Berkeley all support programs in this field. CHASING PORTRAITS occupies a compelling intersection of the many disciplines that comprise Jewish Studies: its core content includes art history, holocaust studies, trans-generational biography and autobiography, and European-American Jewish history. But the film is also animated by a number of other humanities fields, such as cultural studies and visual studies and museum and curatorial studies as well as media studies.

Jewish Studies – Of necessity an interdisciplinary form of Humanities research and teaching, Jewish Studies draws from a great number of conventional disciplines and research practices, from narrative ethnography, to literary and cultural history, historiography, and art history. CHASING PORTRAITS will extract storytelling practices from all of these disciplines, focusing especially on the central place of oral tradition within the family and Jewish culture generally. Much is not and cannot be remembered by the Moshe Rynecki family and of course much cannot be known. The ellipses of the Moshe Rynecki story are as important as the known and knowable content, so the film will accent such absent moments in the film’s narrative. For example, the taped interview Elizabeth conducted with her grandmother (Moshe’s daughter-in-law) is punctuated by many moments of failed and frustrated memory, heartbreaking lacunae that reveal both Elizabeth’s desire to know and her grandmother’s limits of memory. Likewise, Elizabeth’s father (Moshe’s grandson), who was a child in hiding during the war, remembers little of where he was and what his life was like. Much Humanities research in Jewish Studies has brought to the surface the depth of the elliptical moment, the signifying absence, which signals the narratives of survivorship and its traumatic modes of storytelling.

Holocaust Studies – Inevitably, a major movement of Holocaust Studies has been a shift in focus from the survivor’s narrative to the experience of the surviving children. The next generation of Holocaust studies, so to speak, has been inspired by issues of remembrance, memoriality, and historical relationship. The quest of CHASING PORTRAITS— to find, to know, and to represent the paintings of Moshe Rynecki— is therefore an example of this shift, but the project also moves through the generations of experience and memory between great-grandfather and great-granddaughter. Moshe Rynecki’s paintings hang pervasively in the house of Elizabeth’s father, though verbal memory plays little role in his representation of Moshe. Elizabeth’s grandfather wrote a memoir (Surviving Hitler in Poland: One Jew’s Story), which provides the major verbal/written memory of the family’s experience during the war. The trans-generational trauma of surviving the war, of losing Moshe and many of his paintings, but retrieving memories through the paintings and those that know about them, is a striking contemporary example of Holocaust Studies through the perspective of this generation, shining light on the means we have of expressing our grief, of commemorating those who have died, and of residual family trauma.

Media Studies – Moshe Rynecki’s paintings form the most compelling visual center of the film, but the online gallery (www.rynecki.org) devoted to him is the framework through which many are introduced to his work and information about him is disseminated to the world. It is also through this website that many discoveries have been made about the location of works presumed to be lost, stolen, or looted. The film itself makes another visual layer of the project, and this of course is the layer of narrative quest, which repositions the Rynecki story from the perspectives of his great-granddaughter and grandson. Therefore, the many media involved in the project feature different strategies and modes of representation, each with its own style and trajectory and purpose. The field of Visual Studies over the last thirty years has elucidated many of the ways that meaning is subtly transmitted through narrative, image, point of view, and genre. By its very nature, CHASING PORTRAITS raises many of these issues of visual representation:  through the many media it needs to tell its story, emanating from the paintings themselves, through photographs of them and where they have appeared and who has the rights to use images of the paintings; through the virtual museum and the access it gives to the paintings but also the restrictions on what can be displayed there; through actual museums such as Yad Vashem and how Moshe’s paintings are displayed, or not displayed; through the layers of verbal narrative by family members and other collectors who possess the paintings; and finally, through the film itself, which will synthesize all of these layers while maintaining their distinction.

Personal Narrative and Filmic Autobiography  – The overarching form of CHASING PORTRAITS is the narrative of quest. Elizabeth Rynecki searches for the work and the meaning of her great-grandfather, traversing generations as she seeks her family’s story as those stories can be expressed through Moshe Rynecki’s paintings. The paintings themselves, mute as they are, tell dramatic stories of survival as well, though gleaning information from and about them is often exasperating. The narrative of quest then often meets with frustration and unknowability, the narrative ellipses mentioned above. The authority of the personal narrative as a form of legitimate history writing has, at least since the 1970s, grown in popularity among Humanities disciplines. Such filmic autobiographies abound, such as “My Architect,” about a son’s journey to learn about his father, architect Louis Kahn, a man he never knew. In many ways film is a most natural medium for representing a story from an avowedly subjective point of view. Subjective historical representation is still, after all, historical work, whether or not the archive is the principal source of historical information. Oral tradition/storytelling is the main methodology of this quest narrative, though CHASING PORTRAITS will also visit museums in Poland and Israel as well as conduct interviews with scholars, curators, and private collectors in the San Francisco Bay Area, France, Canada, New York City, and Los Angeles.

Goals and Activities of the Project – While Moshe Rynecki has primarily been spoken of as a Holocaust victim, the family strives to broaden the public’s understanding of who he was by emphasizing his contributions to the Jewish cultural community. His paintings aren’t merely relics from the Holocaust or of Polish Jewry; his art addresses issues of Jewish identity, religion, and community. We believe that the combination of the paintings themselves, the books, the website, the documentary film, and film shorts we intend to include on our website, will promote and prompt discussions across such topics as religion, culture, history, Jewish studies, what it means to be a Jewish artist, the Holocaust, war, looting, and provenance. We foresee these conversations taking place in the Jewish community, in classrooms, in academia, and in the art world, where the relationship between war and cultural artifacts continues to be a thorny and difficult topic.

Anticipated Impacts - Once completed, CHASING PORTRAITS will premiere at JEWISHFILM, the National Center for Jewish Film’s Annual Film Festival in the Boston area. This has been agreed upon with our fiscal sponsor, the National Center for Jewish Film.  Additional venues will include other Jewish film festivals (such as those in New York, Washington, Seattle, Atlanta, Los Angeles, New Jersey, Israel, and the UK) as well as film festivals featuring a documentary film category. We are also optimistic about the possibility of its inclusion in more mainstream venues such as film houses (specializing in indie and documentary films) as well as public television broadcasting. After the film has shown in these venues, we will make the film available to teachers for use in the classroom.

Looting, the act of taking valuables during wartime, is a recurrent and ongoing historical problem. The impact of cultural theft has far-reaching consequences, both directly on those who suffer the loss, and indirectly by impoverishing the broader community. For those directly affected, the loss is immediate and lasting, whereas for the community at large, the loss of cultural enrichment may go almost completely unnoticed.

Today, three generations after Moshe hid his paintings, Moshe’s grandson and great-granddaughter struggle with how to protect, preserve, and promote the remaining collection. Outreach efforts to the Polish museum and individual collectors with Rynecki’s works in their possession have not been particularly fruitful. These rebuffs impede the Rynecki family’s abilities both to learn more about and to share Moshe’s work. The questions and debate surrounding the thorny issue of art restitution will be explored and discussed throughout the film. Because the film will offer an intimate view of the struggle of these issues, it will put a personal face on a topic that tends to be discussed by cultural institutions, museums, governments, and politicians in more intellectual or legal terms. Our hope is that by personalizing these complex issues, we will help lawmakers, elected officials, and policymakers more directly see the impact their decisions have on the lives of survivors and their descendants.

Support the Project

Fiscal Sponsorship for Chasing Portraits is provided by The National Center for Jewish Film at Brandeis University. To make a donation to support the production of the documentary film, make your check payable to The National Center for Jewish Film, with “Chasing Portraits” written in the memo line, and send to:

The National Center for Jewish Film
Brandeis University
Lown 102
MS053
Waltham, MA  02454

Donations are tax deductible. Gifts over $250 will receive a letter for tax purposes.

As a fiscal sponsor, The National Center for Jewish Film serves as a non-profit tax-exempt umbrella organization that accepts and administers contributions made to select film projects. Fiscal sponsorship allows filmmakers to solicit and receive tax deductible donations from individuals and gifts from foundations without having to create a 501(c)3 non-profit corporation.

When my grandfather died in February of 1992, I thought the story was gone forever. I felt fortunate to find it in his memoir that we found in the trunk of his car. (We later edited the vignettes he’d written and turned it into a book, Surviving Hitler in Poland: One Jew’s Story). This is the story as my grandfather wrote it and it’s pretty much how I remember him telling it to me all those years ago:

In June 1943, my wife, Stella, and son, Alex, over six years old at the time, were arrested on the street in the southern district of Warsaw, Mokotow. They were dragged by the Polish police to the police station. At the same place a few weeks earlier, Stella’s two nephews, one ten the other five years old, were also arrested, and disposed of to the Germans for execution. The two boys were children of my wife’s two sisters, Irene and Clara. Clara’s ten year old was already a mathematical genius. They were taken by the Poles with one of their fathers. No one ever heard of them again.

I was by chance sitting at Kojder’s home. The telephone rang. Kojder was in the shower, so I picked up the phone. It was Stella calling from the police station. She denied being Jewish and asked to make one call to me. She claimed to bring me there and explain everything. As luck wanted, I picked up the phone. I was not far away from the station. I started to run. It was already close to the curfew hour and there was no other way but on foot. On my way I stopped at our apartment to get a solid gold cigarette box. The box was fourteen karat and weighed two hundred grams. I had a small amount of money. I knew that money was the key, and a means to salvation. I arrived there drenched in perspiration from running and stress. I barged in and saw Alex on a bunk crying. Stella sitting next to him trying to quiet the boy. First I had to show my papers. The policemen, there were three of them, said, “You are not involved, we can see that, but she and the kid are Jewish and we have to deliver them to the Gestapo.” I started to bargain for my wife’s and child’s life.

I offered to meet them the next day with money. Showed them the box. It impressed them a bit. “OK, but it is not enough. And if we should let them go, there has to be a lot more money and now. No delays. Before nightfall they’ll be delivered.” It took more than money and time to persuade the Polish bullies. In sheer desperation I told them in a very quiet voice, “You better do what I tell you, because in five minutes from now, if I don’t show up downstairs with her and the kid, this whole complex will blow sky high. You are here surrounded by my colleagues from the Army of the People. I am not making  jokes. This time you are trapped, not me.” My desperate position made an impression and in a minute or so the “transaction” was made. I had to show up the next day at noon in a local restaurant with five thousand zloty and buy them a lunch with drinks. This is how it happened. I grabbed Alex in my arms and we ran out. The curfew was already on, and there was a chance we’d be shot on sight. We came to the apartment in one piece, and all of us in shock. It’s impossible to describe this experience, and remain calm. That was a Polish national pastime. To catch a Jew and get money or deliver for a price his money to the Germans. We were nothing but chattel and, of course, God was hiding somewhere else.

Next day I did show up against the policemen’s expectations. I gave them the money, and actually we became “friends.” They assured me that no one will ever touch me or my little family. I must say I have never counted on this promise. My mother lived not far away from this location, and I had to go through there at least once a week. It is true that they did not bother me at all. They were positive I was an Aryan.

In reflecting on the times, I am sure we saved our lives by thinking fast and clear.

After the bitter experience with the Polish police, I felt we had to move again. We found a nice house in a fairly new development at the Fort Mokotow. It was summer 1943, the weather was beautiful, I felt somehow more secure. I just acquired new papers, looking excellent. I think the papers were actually original. Nobody could detect the falsity of them. One could buy anything on the black market. This is how we could survive starting with food, clothes, and down the line. Nothing could stop the black market. The Germans themselves used it to get things unavailable through ration coupons. As long as I wouldn’t say so, nobody knew me as Jewish. I believe this was my secret to survive the war. Kojder was the closest one to me, and even he didn’t know or suspect. One day someone actually pointed me out as Jewish. It happened in Krakau. An official of the Hitlerjugend asked Kojder. His answer was no, and he offered to bring me to the Gestapo for examination. These things would happen with real Poles quite often. In defiance I actually presented myself with Kojder to a higher official of the Gestapo. Believing Kojder, he asked us to come to his home one evening. We did go. He let us wait for about fifteen minutes, then let a huge German shepherd into the room. The dog sniffed for a moment then settled at my feet. I patted the animal, and it was quiet. The German walked in introduced himself, looked me over, and said, “You are not Jewish. The dog would tear you apart if you were. He was trained to do it. Too bad some people sidetrack us with false reports. These are mostly jealous Poles and we have to check every case as it comes. I wish I haven’t had the duty to do it to you. You are free to go of course.” I asked the man if he could give me a letter stating my status as non-Jewish. Without hesitating, he said, “Come tomorrow to my office and you’ll get one.”

This little paper saved me not once in my constant travels. A bit of determination and perhaps courage paid off. We had a collection of different papers. Some originals, some phonies. We used to flirt with the German secretaries in the offices, and developed a system how to steal blank letterhead, put a stamp in place of a signature, and later write all kinds of stories or recommendations for ourselves, and the needs of the hour. It was my way to fight the war and to survive. I was successful during all the war years up to almost the end.

Moshe painted his whole life.  He primarily painted scenes of the Jewish community – scholars studying the Talmud, Rabbis giving sermons, and congregations celebrating religious holidays.  He had a flair for making the mundane seem compelling and a talent for conveying the essence of his subjects. Art historians and museum curators often refer to my great-grandfather as a “Jewish painter.” At times I am troubled by the insistence on referring to his religious background to describe his passion and vocation.  Part of me wants him to be recognized completely separately from his religious upbringing.  He did, after all, paint more than just scenes that could be considered strictly Jewish.  And yet, given his place in history, describing him as a “Jewish painter” has meaning and purpose. While I think it is important to acknowledge the historical value of Moshe’s work, for me paintings have substantial personal value. The paintings provide more than a look at the past – a way of life destroyed by the Nazis – they are an actual, physical link to the past.  The paintings are objects my great-grandfather actually touched.  He bought the canvases, he chose the paints, thought about the scenes he wanted to record, and then he applied his vision to the canvas.  The brush strokes on each of the canvases are an extension of his very being.  Just having them around makes me feel closer to my great-grandfather, and bonds me to a past that would otherwise seem impossibly remote.

Elizabeth with her father(1970s). Moshe's paintings in background.

The responsibility for the second generation (the children of survivors) to bear witness is a rather odd one.  The second generation didn’t actually experience the Holocaust.  We only know its aftermath – its effects on our parents and, through our parents, its indirect effects on us.  But as survivors grow older and pass away, there is no one left to tell the stories; to pass on the lessons learned.  If we do not learn our family’s experiences and pass them along, these stories might be lost for forever.

Many children of the second generation seek to understand their relationship to their parents’ Holocaust experiences and what it is that they should, can, or ought to do with their family’s stories. Since children of survivors cannot bear witness since they did not experience the Holocaust, many struggle to find their voice within Holocaust discourse.  For me, the most compelling voice is found in Art Spiegelman’s Maus books. Spiegelman does an incredible job of balancing his fathers’ Holocaust stories while articulating his own struggles to understand the Holocaust legacy.  The way I read the Maus books, Spiegelman made it okay for children of survivors to talk about their own experiences without diminishing the importance of the stories of survival themselves.  That insight was liberating for me because it meant I could talk about my own story and relationship to the Holocaust without diminishing my father’s and grandparents’ own stories of survival.

Elizabeth with grandfather George Rynecki at Magnes Museum opening.

As a young girl I took my great-grandfather’s work for granted.  I was not interested in hearing about my family’s history, or the persecution my family endured during the Holocaust.  I had little interest in “the old country” or in learning about my family’s post-war difficulties.  Later on, after my grandfather died, I regretted my indifference.  I wished not only that I had listened; but that I had asked questions.  Fortunately, when my grandfather passed away in 1992, my father found, in the trunk of his car, a collection of vignettes that we have since published as Surviving Hitler in Poland: One Jew’s Story.  There is one passage from the book that I have read time and time again:

Some say it will never happen again.  Well, it’s too easy. It did happen. They killed openly without fear.  Where and how did they have that much hatred toward us? It could happen again. We cannot and will not forget. We will carry it, like the Bible, forever.  There are hundreds of books on the subject. Nevertheless, I am a Jew and I write. I’ll do it till the end of my days. If only for my granddaughter, Elizabeth, to know the truth, and not to be afraid of it. It’s funny how were are not afraid to tell the truth.

As I get older, I continue to think not only of ways to share my family’s history and my great-grandfather’s paintings with others, but also about how to effectively pass it on to my children.  While it is important for my children to know their history, I do not want them to dwell on it in a way that is unhealthy.  When my sons were little I introduced little tidbits about Moshe.  I made sure they knew that their great-great-grandfather was an artist.  Now that they are eight and nine I have started to expose them to their family history – they know their grandpa was born in Poland and they know that some of the art that hangs in our home was painted by their great-great grandfather.  Someday, perhaps, they will come to understand the history behind the paintings.  My grandfather was right: it is important not to be afraid of the truth.

Shemoneh Esreh, no date

The category of Jewish Art History cannot be simply subsumed into a generalized European art history. The modern artist as the author-agent of the work of art is a relatively new persona and figure for Jews, emerging only in the nineteenth century along with greater historical movements of emancipation for Jews in Europe. My great-grandfather was split between affinities:  on the one hand, he was a painter of traditional Jewish life in Poland, settling his gaze upon scenes of synagogue, teaching, labor, and leisure. In this, his paintings are an invaluable source of visual information about a world that has vanished. On the other hand, his self-portraits reveal a man apart from the world he depicted, a modern subject rendered in a minimalist style with expressionist lines in contemporary and not traditional dress. The tension between the ethnographic content of the painting and the modern gesture of the cosmopolitan painter is a fascinating one, a tension that plays itself out as Jews became modern citizens of European capital cities (one thinks of Freud as Moshe’s contemporary). At the same time, the shtetl lay just over the border, where the ostjuden, Jews of the east, with their foreign, traditional, anti-modern culture, lived.

This tension, and the duality which gives rise to it, is even greater than it might seem, because the very idea of talking about Jewish artists was once unfathomable. The Jewish community’s strict interpretation of the Second Commandment’s prohibition against graven images would not allow for Jews to be artists. Today the concept of a “Jewish painter” is less contradictory and much more accepted. Pioneering artists in the nineteenth century such as Moritz Oppenheim, Camille Pissarro, Maurycy Gottlieb, and Max Liebermann were forced to make difficult choices about whether to embrace their religious background and incorporate it into their work, or instead to elide their ethnic heritage. Their individual choices ultimately made it easier for artists who followed in their footsteps to navigate and live in a broader society without abandoning their Jewish roots.

In fact, for some painters, art emerged directly from their Jewish identity; there was no separation between their Jewish identity and their art. For others, political freedom made it possible to relinquish the Jewish world and to expand their opportunities and experiences. For a third group, there was a constant struggle to find a balance between the demands of the contemporary art world with their own religious background. Those who navigated this path seemed to live in two worlds; they were motivated to accurately depict religious study and rituals, but did not want to paint classically religious paintings. Instead of attempting to document a devout lifestyle, these artists sought to accurately reflect the Jewish experience in its historical context, and to celebrate the people and their traditions without making their works overly brooding or nostalgic. These works appealed to the growing acculturated middle class Jews living in Central and Western Europe. The art reflected the middle class’ struggle to live a contemporary life while searching for ways in which to preserve their Jewish identity. The paintings helped them to do both.

Self Portrait, 1931

My great-grandfather’s dual identity as a Jew, and as a member of the growing middle class in the more secular setting of Warsaw, allowed him to intimately paint aspects of Jewish life and tradition and yet to distance himself to position himself as a witness, an ethnographer of the community. It is this philosophy and approach that convinced him to go into the Warsaw Ghetto to, “be with my people” and to paint and record the tyranny and cruelty perpetuated by the Nazi regime. Ultimately this decision cost him his life.