Last night we went to the opening of the 11th Annual Jewish Motifs International Film Festival. The Chasing Portraits cinematographer, Slawomir Grunberg, has a documentary about Karski in the festival. The opening night had the showing of a film: Gett-The Trial 
of Viviane Amsalem. The film was shown in Hebrew with Polish subtitles, so following all the details was very difficult for me (I don’t speak either language) but the acting was good and I could tell that it was about a woman’s struggle to divorce her husband and his refusal to give her a divorce. After the film we met some interesting people, including a man who recently completed a documentary film about Jewish painters in Kazimierz Dolny. For those of you who have followed the Chasing Portraits story for awhile, you will remember that my great-grandfather painted in this art colony in the interwar years. Tomorrow we are to go to this man’s office to watch his film and to learn what else might be in his archive!
Today is day two of the Chasing Portraits project filming in Warsaw, and it was a big and important day with a Maciej Grodecki, a private collector. I learned of Maciej’s collection more than 10 years ago when he lived in New York. His family has owned Moshe Rynecki paintings since the interwar years (1920s and 1930s). We think his grandfather may have even known my great-grandfather, but we aren’t entirely certain of the extent of their connection with one another. I knew Maciej had 6 pieces, but I had only ever seen photographs of 2 of the pieces. Today I saw all 6 pieces plus a mysterious seventh, an oil that is quite different in style from the watercolors, but that seems to have much in common with a market scene in the collection. Additionally, the back of the painting has several certificates, stamps, and signatures that bear the signature of my great-grandfather. As Catherine Greenblatt, who is part of the film production team and a very good friend, noted in her Facebook post about today’s discovery, “one more Chasing Portraits mystery.”
Here are the 6 other paintings that we saw. My apologies for the awkward cropping. I am working off a laptop and don’t have access to photoshop, so you’ll have to accept my slightly askew photographs of the works as presented here.
