Moshe Rynecki (1881-1943) was an artist who painted scenes of the Polish Jewish community in the interwar years. He had a keen eye for exploring and documenting the daily rhythm and life of synagogue, teaching, labor, and leisure. His work is made rarer and more precious by documenting the nuances of both a way of life and a place that were irrevocably destroyed by the crushing impacts of World War II and the Holocaust.

At the outbreak of the Second World War, Moshe became concerned about preserving his life’s work. In the early days of the war he made the decision to divide his oeuvre of approximately 800 works into a number of bundles, and to hide them in and around Warsaw. He gave a list of the locations where the works were hidden to his wife, son, and daughter, in hopes that after the war the family would retrieve the bundles and the collection would be [Read more…]

Last year, I reconnected with a man in Canada whose parents had purchased a bundle of Moshe’s paintings from a Polish farmer shortly after the end of the war.  His parents had been partisans fighting the German army in Russia, and encountered the farmer while returning home.  He said his parents had given away many of the paintings from the original bundle to different friends and family.  As a result he didn’t know where all the pieces from the bundle were, but he had a few, and his aunt in Israel had several more. About a year ago, he sent four pictures of paintings in his possession, and just a week ago, I received an email with photographs of eight more paintings from his aunt.[Read more…]

Chanuka

WOW! So I have a story to tell. In April 2012 I learned of an article in Polish all about my great-grandfather. A friend in Finland had a friend in Poland who offered to read it (it was just too long for me to type into Google Translate) and to let me know if it said anything significant. It did. The footnotes mentioned a newspaper, a Polish-language Zionist daily published in Warsaw (1923-1939), titled: Nasz Przegląd (Our Review) and a special insert section called Ilustrowany (illustrated). [Read more…]

In March 2008, we received a remarkable phone call.  A gentleman from Canada called to ask about our website and my grandfather’s memoir.  He said, “I read your book.  I think I have one of the paintings described in the book.”  He was referring to a description of a painting my grandfather wrote about in his memoir.  The passage from the book reads as follows:

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 [Read more…]