Bruno Schulz by Benjamin Balint

Author:Benjamin Balint
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2023-03-06T00:00:00+00:00

“Grains of Sugar”

YAD VASHEM, JERUSALEM, FEBRUARY 20, 2009

In 2005, the new $56 million Yad Vashem museum opened in Jerusalem. “By building this kind of museum,” said Tom Segev, an Israeli historian and the author of The Seventh Million, “Israel is trying to gain back the monopoly on the Holocaust; the Holocaust is ours and ours alone, and no humanistic or universal values should overtake what we feel about the Holocaust.”19

As the extensive renovations were being completed, heated negotiations ensued about the murals kept out of sight in a basement vault. Zinoviy Bervetsky, the director of the Drohobych Museum, was invited to accompany Ukrainian president Viktor Yushchenko to Jerusalem for the talks. “I flatly refused,” Bervetsky said. “Let them first return the illegally exported goods to Drohobych, and then we’ll negotiate.”

In the end, Bervetsky visited Yad Vashem as part of a Ukrainian delegation including deputy minister of culture Vladyslav Kornienko, ambassador to Israel Ihor Tymofieiev, and a representative of Ukraine’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Yehudit Inbar, the director of the museum department, and Yehudit Shendar, the director of the arts department, allowed the guests to inspect Schulz’s murals. (All these years later, the episode remains a sensitive issue. “I still can’t talk about the Schulz murals at Yad Vashem,” Inbar told me.)

The Ukrainians admired the artworks’ state of preservation. “Our frescoes would not be restored as well as Yad Vashem restored them,” Bervetsky said. “I am generally delighted with what I saw there. I also think it would be good if we in Ukraine honored the victims of the Holodomor [the famine and mass starvation that convulsed Soviet Ukraine from 1932 to 1933 as a result of Stalin’s policies], for example, in the way Israel honors victims of the Holocaust.”

Nearly seven years after the Israeli operation to spirit Schulz’s murals to Jerusalem, Israel and Ukraine reached an agreement: the disputed artworks would remain in Yad Vashem “on loan” from Ukraine for twenty years, after which the loan could be renewed every five years. The Israelis pledged to provide Drohobych with facsimile copies of the murals.20 On February 28, 2008, Pinchas Avivi, deputy director general and head of the Central Europe desk in the Israeli Foreign Ministry, and Ukraine’s ambassador to Israel, Ihor Tymofieiev, signed the agreement in the presence of Yad Vashem chairman Avner Shalev and Ukraine’s Vice Prime Minister Ivan Vasyunik.

Just over a month later, the Israeli Ministry of Education, the Jewish Agency, and the Claims Conference brought 450 Jewish tenth-grade students from the former Soviet Union to Schulz’s hometown. Uri Ohali, a Jewish Agency staffer who organized the trip, said it was the first of its kind. “Through Bruno Schulz the students understand the complexity of Jewish life in Poland before the war,” Ohali said.21

A year after the signing, in February 2009, Yad Vashem put Bruno Schulz’s murals on public display for the first time. Ihor Tymofieiev and deputy minister of culture Vladyslav Kornienko attended an opening ceremony in the museum’s auditorium. “The paintings have artistic, cultural, national and historic significance both to the Jewish people and the Ukrainian people,” Kornienko said.

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