Moshe Rynecki | Resources for Educators, Scholars, and Students

This section contains materials for more in-depth information, further research, and teaching opportunities.

Annotated Bibliography contains an alphabetical list of all known source materials containing information about Moshe Rynecki and his work as well as brief descriptions about each of the sources.

Curriculum Resources is intended to help those developing syllabi to find ways to incorporate the works of Moshe Rynecki, as well as information about his life, into teaching plans and course outlines. While traditional teaching takes place in schools, colleges, or universities, the materials here may easily be applied in other learning environments as well.

News Coverage provides information about what third parties have written about this website. It offers a chronological list of the stories published by a variety of news outlets.

Books

Chasing Portraits:
A Great-Granddaughter’s Quest for Her Lost Art Legacy

The memoir of one woman’s emotional quest to find the art of her Polish-Jewish great-grandfather, lost during World War II.

Moshe Rynecki’s body of work reached close to eight hundred paintings and sculptures before his life came to a tragic end. It was his great-granddaughter Elizabeth who sought to rediscover his legacy, setting upon a journey to seek out what had been lost but never forgotten… The everyday lives of the Polish-Jewish community depicted in Moshe Rynecki’s paintings simply blended into the background of Elizabeth Rynecki’s life when she was growing up. But the art transformed from familiar to extraordinary in her eyes after her grandfather, Moshe’s son George, left behind journals detailing the loss her ancestors had endured during World War II, including Moshe’s art. Knowing that her family had only found a small portion of Moshe’s art, and that many more pieces remained to be found, Elizabeth set out to find them.Before Moshe was deported to the ghetto, he entrusted his work to friends who would keep it safe. After he was killed in the Majdanek concentration camp, the art was dispersed all over the world. With the help of historians, curators, and admirers of Moshe’s work, Elizabeth began the incredible and difficult task of rebuilding his collection.Spanning three decades of Elizabeth’s life and three generations of her family, this touching memoir is a compelling narrative of the richness of one man’s art, the devastation of war, and one woman’s unexpected path to healing.The book is published by NAL/Penguin Random House and is available from your favorite bookseller!

Bonus Chapter

A CHASING PORTRAITS reader asked me to ask what had happened to Perla, my great-grandmother, after she brought the bundle of Rynecki paintings from Poland to her son (my Grandpa George) in Italy. Could I, she asked, please tell the rest of Perla’s story? And so I did. Perla – A Bonus Chapter.Book Club Discussion Questions

Be sure to check out these suggested book club discussion questions for CHASING PORTRAITS.

Praise for Chasing Portraits

“A page-turning personal history of [Elizabeth] Rynecki’s search for her great-grandfather’s legacy… A wonderful story beautifully told. Rynecki’s years-long search, successes, frustrations, and failures are a study in perseverance.”—Kirkus (starred review)

“Chasing Portraits is a miraculous story of heartbreaking loss and spine-tingling discovery. In her search for her great-grandfather’s paintings, Elizabeth Rynecki becomes a genealogist, an art historian, a detective, a crusader for justice, and a time traveler, peering through windows and into paintings to unearth her family’s past. Her memoir will break your heart, but it will have you cheering wildly too because every new discovery is a triumph of art and love over hatred and loss.”—Amy Stewart, New York Times Bestselling Author of The Drunken Botanist

“A heartfelt, vivid account of a hunt for lost masterpieces painted by a great-grandfather that prove to be unforgettable relics of a rich world swept away by war, taking readers on a lusciously detailed international journey that reminds us that the search for missing paintings is, at heart, a search for missing history.”—Anne-Marie O’Connor, National Bestselling Author of The Lady in Gold

“Elizabeth Rynecki’s Chasing Portraits is part of a gathering wave of stories by the children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of Holocaust survivors and Holocaust victims—stories that accept the burden of carrying this legacy forward, with all the anguish, the unanswered questions, and the unexpected joy of recognition this entails. With devotion and determination, Rynecki movingly demonstrates that, even after such unimaginable loss, even seventy years later, fragments of individual lives—and so the untold stories of individuals—can still be recovered . . . if only you keep searching.”—Glenn Kurtz, Author of Three Minutes in Poland

“In recent years, there has been an increase in the awareness of the problem of looted and stolen art, and Chasing Portraits makes an important contribution to the field. But it’s much more than just a tale of detective work. Elizabeth Rynecki’s story is transcendent, presenting the reader with an elevated level of passion and duty. For this reason, it sets itself apart from the rest of the field.”—Anthony M. Amore, Author of Stealing Rembrandts and The Art of the Con

Errata in Chasing Portraits:

Note #1: On page 166 it says, “After lengthy negotiations, in 1988 the Washington Principles were signed by forty-four governments, endorsing eleven principles for handling Nazi-looted art.” The Washington Principles were signed in 1998.

Note #2: On the last page of the color insert there are three photographs. The label for the photograph at the upper right has caused some confusion. The caption says, “Carving held by Shula Eliaz, gift to her family from Perla Rynecki.” The word “held,” is used to indicate Shula Eliaz possesses the carving, not that she is physically holding the carving in the photograph. If you look at the other captions they say, “ABC painting is HELD by XYZ institution (or sometimes individual).” In this Chuck Fishman photograph, Elizabeth Rynecki is the one holding the carving.

Note #3: On page 87 there is a sentence in the top paragraph that reads, in part, “when they finally found their way across the Vistula, Stasia was surprised…” Instead of the name Stasia, it should be Sophie. Stasia is Jerzy’ s wife and was not with Perla when she found the bundle of paintings.

Jewish Life in Poland: The Art of Moshe Rynecki (1881–1943)

Moshe Rynecki used his paintbrush and palette to document and chronicle the life of his community—the Jewish people of Warsaw, Poland. Some artists, however, do more than simply document the subjects that they see and watch. They use the canvas to reveal something new, to show us that which we did not see at first, that which we might not consider if we had observed the subject ourselves. While some might have seen a group of men sitting at a table studying the Talmud, Rynecki reveals the Rabbi gesticulating as he talks, he shows the men’s spines bent from spending so much time studying, he shows the tallit wrapped across the shoulders of those who have put their heads down for a brief rest, and he makes visible the light that gently streams into the darkened room.

Rynecki’s drive and ambition to paint came early in life and it came from within. When he was five years old he used chalk and crude brushed to paint on the walls and floors of his parents’ home. As he grew older, he always carried a sketchbook with him so that he could quickly draw that which caught his attention—people, their expressions, their hands.

While Rynecki spent much of his life painting the Jewish community, he also witnessed a great deal of change to his country, from the almost constant political turmoil that characterized Poland’s brief independence between the World Wars, to the onset of Soviet aggression, and Nazi brutality at the start of the Second World War.

Errata in Jewish life in Poland:

Note #1: in this art book under “Museum Holdings” it states that the National Museum in Krakow has 22 Moshe Rynecki paintings. It is now understood that these 22 paintings are held by the Jewish Historical Institute (ZIH) in Warsaw and that the paintings were loaned to the Krakow museum for the 1989 exhibition “Zydzi – Polscy.”

Note #2: Two pages after the Introduction is a painting with the caption “Paula Rynecki, 1929.” This is, in fact, a painting of Perla Rynecki, Moshe’s wife.

Purchase Jewish Life in Poland: The Art of Moshe Rynecki (1881–1943) on Amazon.

Surviving Hitler in Poland: One Jew’s Story

By the late 1930s Warsaw, Poland, was a vibrant city. It was home to a bustling business community and its historic promenade and outdoor cafés catered to the city’s community of artists, writers, and intellectuals. It was a magnificent place to live and visit.

On 1 September 1939, the day the Nazis invaded Poland, that all changed—particularly for the Jewish population. Before the outbreak of the Second World War, Poland was home to the largest Jewish population in Europe. It is believed that prior to the war more than three million Jews lived in Poland, and that perhaps fewer than four hundred thousand survived the war.

In September 1939, George Rynecki was a Jew living in Poland. He was a new father and just starting his business. The life he had planned was suddenly and radically altered. Instead of focusing on his family and nascent business, he found himself scrambling to outsmart the Nazis and provide for his family. With a combination of courage, wits, luck, and bribery he survived the Holocaust.

Unfortunately, George’s father, Moshe Rynecki, was not so lucky. Moshe, an artist who lived in Warsaw, refused to leave the city. While George was unable to save his father from deportation to the Majdanek concentration camp, at the end of the Holocaust he was able to retrieve many of his father’s paintings. Moshe’s paintings, which are realistic depictions of Eastern European Jewry, were obviously personally important to George, but are also of historic importance; they portray a people, a culture, and a community that was almost completely annihilated by the Nazis.

This memoir, read in tandem with viewing Moshe Rynecki’s paintings, provides a more complete picture of the Eastern European Jewish community, and the Rynecki family in particular.

Purchase Surviving Hitler in Poland: One Jew’s Story on Amazon.

Resources

Books

Chasing Portraits: A Great-Granddaughter’s Quest for Her Lost Art Legacy

Jewish Life in Poland: The Art of Moshe Rynecki (1881–1943)

Surviving Hitler in Poland: One Jew’s Story

Chasing Portraits:
A Great-Granddaughter’s Quest for Her Lost Art Legacy