Józef Sandel
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Sandel was born in Kolomea (Kolomyia, Ukraine), then in Galicia, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The son of a cap maker, he attended the Baron Hirsch school and then gymnasium.[1]
Around 1920, he moved to Dresden, Germany, where, in 1925, he co-published a short-lived German-language literary and art magazine, Mob: Zeitschrift der Jungen (Mob: Journal of youths).[1][2] He subsequently lived in France, Switzerland, and Austria, before returning to Dresden.[1]
From 1929 to 1933, he operated an art gallery in Dresden, called Galerie junge Kunst (Gallery of young art).[3] After the rise of the National Socialist regime in Germany, he moved to Belgrade (then in Yugoslavia), where he opened another gallery and mounted exhibitions, in 1933-1934.[1]
In 1935, he moved to Poland; he spent time in Vilna (Vilnius) and Warsaw, and published articles on art in Yiddish-language periodicals, including Literarishe Bleter.[1][4] At the outbreak of the Second World War he fled to the Soviet Union, and survived the war in Kazakhstan, where he taught German in a middle school.[1]
After the war, he returned to Poland and settled in Warsaw, in 1946.[5] There he became the leader of the Jewish Society for the Promotion of Fine Arts; Yiddish: Yidishe gezelshaft tsu farshpreytn kunst), or ZTKSP, a revival of an organization that had been active in Poland before the war.[6] The Society provided material assistance to Jewish artists, helped to promote their work, and fostered art education for Jewish youth.[7] It mounted some 98 exhibitions in Warsaw, and four exhibitions that were presented throughout Poland – two devoted to the work of individual artists, Rafael Mandelzweig, in 1946, and Lea Grundig, in 1949; and two, in 1948, in honor of the fifth anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, featuring works of Jewish artists who were killed in the Holocaust.[8]
After the dissolution of the ZTKSP, in September 1949, the art works that Sandel and his colleagues had assembled were integrated into the collections of the Jewish Historical Institute, Warsaw.[9] From 1950 to 1953 the institute operated a Gallery of Jewish Art, with Sandel serving as director.[10]
Sandel subsequently devoted himself to the writing of several art historical works concerning Jewish artists in Poland. Among his works, all written in Yiddish, is a two-volume biographical reference work on Jewish artists who perished during the Holocaust in Poland, Umgekumene yidishe kinstler in Poylen (Jewish artists in Poland who perished, Warsaw, 1957).[1]
