2013 was marked by many great milestones and successes for the Moshe Rynecki project. A brief listing of this year’s finds:
(1) In early June a Fulbright scholar in Warsaw tracked down 2 images I’d never seen before. These images were printed in Nasz Prezglad – a Polish Zionist daily published in Warsaw in the interwar years.
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- Chanuka
(2) In late June I received photographs of 7 Moshe Rynecki paintings held by a woman in Israel. She is the aunt of the man I visited in Canada, whose parents were partisan fighters and who bought a bundle of my great-grandfather’s paintings after the war.
(3) In October I learned about the University of Toronto’s Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library and the Otto Schneid archive. In that archive were letters written by my great-grandfather that I’d never seen before and 13 black and white photos (and newspaper clippings) of paintings that were all new to me. I now hope to be able to track down those canvases…
(4) In November the Jewish Historical Institute (ZIH) in Warsaw emailed me photographs of 17 of the 52 Moshe Rynecki paintings held in their collection.
In case you’re counting, that’s a discovery of thirty-nine (39!) images of my great-grandfather’s work that were all new to me in 2013! Wow. It’s been quite a year.
Thank you for following (and helping!) me as I continue on my quest to find and learn more about my great-grandfather’s body of work. I can’t promise what 2014 will bring, but I do have tentative plans to travel to Warsaw in the fall, and that should prove to be an interesting journey.