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https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7229-2645

Biography

Instytut Historii Sztuki WNHiS UKSW w Warszawie

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Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University, Dewajtis 5, Warszawa, Poland

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Dziedzictwo kultury żydowskiej w Polsce – badania proweniencji muzealiów – specyfika, cele, korzyści, zagrożenia (?)

Magdalena Tarnowska

Culture Management, Volume 17, Issue 1, 2016, pp. 67 - 76

https://doi.org/10.4467/20843976ZK.16.005.4479

In pre-1939 Poland, there existed the biggest Jewish diaspora in the world (numbered 3.5 million people). It was also the most important centre of Jewish culture. Unfortunately, as a result of the Holocaust, only a small part of the Jewish cultural heritage survived until nowadays. Only about 400 thousand of Jews survived. Despite this fact, in the years 1946–1950 Jewish institutions – the Central Committee of Jews in Poland and The Jewish Society of Promoting of Fine Arts among others – were engaged in gathering and saving objects of Jewish religious art, fine arts and crafts, books, documents and others. They were gathered mostly at the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw and also as museum collections. Unfortunately, the origins of these objects haven’t been sufficiently investigated.

The accession to the European Union obligated the Polish government to adopt the international agreements connected with the Jewish heritage in Poland: Washington Conference 1998, Resolution of the Council of Europe no. 1205, 1999 as well as Vilnius Declaration 2000 and Terezin Declaration 2009. According to those agreements, in the years 2009–2011 the Ministry of Cultural and National Heritage took efforts to prepare museums to lead provenance research, however unsuccessfully.

Nowadays, according to my research, a large number of Polish museums does not carry out any provenance research of objects of unknown origin which may have belong to the Jewish heritage. The main reasons for that are: weak interest in provenance problems and their relation to the Polish and Jewish cultural heritage, too many demands and aims to achieve by museums, luck of funds, fear of restitution, and, last but not least, a weak support of the Ministry of Cultural and National Heritage. Nevertheless, it appears that benefits of the provenance research are more important than the fear of it. First of all, such research contributes to the development of the humanities in Poland, especially art history. Further, it increases trust of Polish and non-Polish citizens in cultural institutions and the government. The fulfillment of the international resolutions mentioned above would improve the image of Poland in the European Union.

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Zagłada i odrodzenie w twórczości ocalonej – łódzkiej malarki Sary Gliksman-Fajtlowicz (1909–2005)

Magdalena Tarnowska

Studia Judaica, Issue 2 (48), 2021, pp. 437 - 471

https://doi.org/10.4467/24500100STJ.21.018.15073

Sara Gliksman-Fajtlowicz, a painter, came from a well-off family of Majerowiczs, the owners of opticians’ shops in Łódź. She studied at private painting and drawing schools in Łódźand Warsaw. Before the outbreak of World War II, she was active in the Polish art milieu. In 1933, she became a member of the Trade Union of Polish Artists (Związek Zawodowy Polskich Artystów Plastyków, ZZPAP) and participated in its exhibitions in Łódź, Warsaw, Kraków,and Lviv. She painted mainly landscapes, still lifes, and—less frequently—portraits. She published her works in the union magazine Forma. In 1940, she was displaced to the Łódźghetto where she worked as a graphic artist at the Statistics Department. Thanks to this she could obtain art materials. Her clandestine activity was documenting life in the ghetto in paintings and drawings. She survived the liquidation of the ghetto and then was forced to work on cleaning that area. Liberated on 19 January 1945, she returned to her house where some of her prewar works had survived. After 1945 she continued her artistic career and exhibited with the ZZPAP, as well as with the Jewish Society for the Encouragement of Fine Arts. In 1957, she emigrated to Israel. Gliksman died in Tel Aviv in 2005. The aim of this article is to verify and describe Sara Gliksman’s biography, to present her activities in the Polish-Jewish artistic community of postwar Poland, as well as to place her works in the context of issues concerning survivors’ memory and artistic attitudes toward the Holocaust, and art as a manifestation of hope for the rebirth of Jewish life and culture in postwar Poland in the second half of the 1940s and the beginning of the 1950s.

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