Film Screening: Chasing Portraits with Elizabeth Rynecki

One man's art. One woman's unexpected path to healing.

An American woman’s emotional quest to find the paintings of her Polish-Jewish great-grandfather, lost during World War II.

Join us for a screening of Chasing Portraits, followed by a discussion with filmmaker Elizabeth Rynecki.

Moshe Rynecki (1881-1943) was a prolific Warsaw-based artist who painted scenes of the Polish-Jewish community in the interwar years. Sadly, he was murdered at Majdanek. After the Holocaust, Moshe’s wife was only able to recover a small fraction of his work, but unbeknownst to the family, many other pieces survived. For more than a decade his great-granddaughter, Elizabeth Rynecki, has searched for the missing art, with remarkable and unexpected success. Spanning three generations, this documentary is a deeply moving narrative of the richness of one man’s art, the devastation of war, and one woman’s unexpected path to healing.

This event is part of the Department of Jewish Studies's Holocaust Across the Disciplines lecture series.