On February 21, 2025, as part of a joint project of the Museum and the Hesed Menachem Charitable Foundation, another online meeting took place. This time it was dedicated to the figure of a native of Drohobych, Jewish artist Maurycy Gottlieb (1856–1879). The participants of the meeting had the opportunity to directly communicate with Ivan Dudych – an art critic, artist, long-time researcher of the biography and work of M. Gottlieb, a researcher at the Solomia Krushelnytska Music and Memorial Museum in Lviv. The meeting was moderated by Dr. Yehor Vradii, Deputy Director for Scientific Work of Museum “Jewish Memory and Holocaust in Ukraine”.
Fate gave Maurycy Gottlieb only 23 years. However, even in such a short period of time, the gifted artist, whose talent Gottlieb was recognized by the classics of European painting (including the famous Jan Matejko), managed to create unique, full of life and symbolism, artistic images of Jewish life in Galicia in the mid-19th century.
In his speech, I. Dudych not only offered to look at the artist's legacy from the point of view of an art historian, but also made an extremely interesting excursion into the context of M. Gottlieb's life, the spirit of the era contemporary to him, as well as the influence of the environment on his art. The life and work of M. Gottlieb is a vivid, but not the only example of the cultural interweaving of various ethnic, religious and human trajectories of the modern era in Ukrainian lands. Unfortunately, the tragedies of the 20th century, accompanied by mass human casualties, radically changed the humanitarian and cultural landscape of Ukraine. Moreover, we can speak of a situation of a certain erosion of the unique heritage – the result of the coexistence and mutual enrichment of Jewish, Ukrainian and Polish traditions. We hope that this and other meetings within the framework of the “Jewish Heritage” project, as well as various projects of the Museum, will contribute to the restoration and preservation of the memory of the experiences of the past.