Stolen art or recovered heritage: A lecture by Ted Rosengarten on the murals of Bruno Schulz

Can the property once owned by Eastern Europe’s victims of the Holocaust be trusted to the countries where they lived and died, or do the world’s surviving Jews have a moral right to reclaim it?

Theodore Rosengarten, the Zucker/Goldberg Professor of Holocaust Studies at the College of Charleston, will discuss the wall paintings of Polish-Jewish artist and writer Bruno Schulz, which were discovered in 2001 in the pantry of an old house in Drogobych, Ukraine, and spirited out of the country to Yad Vashem, in Jerusalem.

Using images of the “polychromes” painted under duress in 1942, and of scenes from Drogobych today, Rosengarten will explore the competing claims of Poland, Ukraine and Israel to control and exhibit the work of the murdered artist, and the consequences of its removal from its Ukrainian hiding place.

The free talk is scheduled for 10 a.m. Sunday in Arnold Hall at the Jewish Studies Center, 96 Wentworth St.