Who Owned 'Vexed Man' Sculpture During WWII? Austrian Dispute Hits Getty Museum

Documents sent to the public prosecutor’s office in Vienna suggest that it’s not entirely clear who owned the work before and during the Nazi regime.

Uri Blau for Haaretz.com

A family dispute in Austria raises questions about the ownership history of a famous sculpture purchased eight years ago by the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. Austrian news magazine News reported Friday that it is not entirely clear who possessed the piece during World War II.

The sculpture in dispute, “Der Verdrüssliche” (“The Vexed Man”), was created by Franz Xaver Messerschmidt, a leading Austrian artist of the 18th century. After working for Empress Maria Theresa, making sculptures of her and her husband, Messerschmidt left Vienna and made dozens of sculptures known as “character heads” – works world famous for their awkward faces. 

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Iraq’s Last Jews Need Our Help

by Tina Ramirez for The National Review

The violent persecution and near genocide of Iraq’s Yazidis and Christians have made headlines around the world. Less well-known is the story of Iraqi Jews, who face near eradication. As millions flee Islamic militants in Iraq, one man has emerged to help rebuild the Jewish remnant.

When I met with Sherzad Omar Mamsani, the Jewish representative to the Kurdish government, in December 2015, he proudly wore his kippah in public — an act of bravery and defiance against those who would see him and his people wiped out in Iraq. He told me that, contrary to reports of only a half dozen, there are as many as 430 Jewish families left in the Kurdish region of Iraq.

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They Were the Good Kids on the Lower East Side

Laurie Gwen Shapiro for The Jewish Daily Forward   

The three alter kockers looked much younger than their years when they greeted each other at the Seward Park Library on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Mentally sharp, with considerable color in their skin and dyed hair, they seemed giddy that they’d been chosen to be the first formal interview subjects for The New York Public Library’s new oral history project on the Lower East Side. The interview will be catalogued in the Library’s Irma and Paul Milstein Division of United States History, Local History and Genealogy, and made available online to the world.

Seven decades had elapsed since my 95-year-old father, Julius, and his sisters Paula “Peshie” and Esther, 92 and 85, had been in this high-ceilinged Lower East Side Renaissance Revival building. The 20,000-square-foot landmark the width of a city block on the eastern side of Seward Park was designed by Babb, Cook & Welch and built in 1909. Two of the architects also designed Andrew Carnegie’s 1901 64-room Carnegie Mansion — better known today as the Cooper Hewitt Museum.

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New Pew report highlights Modern Orthodox Jewry straddling two worlds

by Jared Sichel for JewishJournal


 Just as Charedi Jews in the United States are likely to enroll their kids in a yeshiva, attend synagogue every week and vote Republican, so too are Modern Orthodox Jews.

But also, just as non-Orthodox Jews in the United States tend not to marry before the age of 25, earn at least a bachelor’s degree and have a significant number of non-Jewish friends, so, too, do the Modern Orthodox.

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