Jean Besancenot’s photographs, taken from 1934 to 1937, are a priceless record of rural Jewish communities in Morocco no longer in existence. 

Echoing the "Chagall, Modigliani, Soutine… Paris pour école, 1905-1940" exhibition, the mahJ is paying tribute to Hersh Fenster (Baranów, 1892–Paris, 1964), the journalist, Yiddish writer and author of Undzere farpaynikte kinstler (Our Martyred Artists), published in Paris in 1951. Both a memorial and an art book, it retraces the lives and work of 84 Jewish artists living in France who died between 1940 and 1945, about whom Fenster compiled testimonies and photographs over a five-year period. Some, like Chaïm Soutine and Otto Freundlich, are well known, others, such as Étienne Farkas and Jacob Macznik, less. Yet all played their part in the final years of what the critic André Warnod dubbed in 1925 the “School of Paris”. Painters, sculptors, illustrators, men and women, their work was brought to a premature end and sometimes destroyed.

Founded in Russia in 1880 to extricate Jews from misery through the promotion of handicrafts and agriculture, ORT (Organisation Reconstruction Travail) is today an international education and training network established in more than forty countries on five continents. In 2021, the organisation celebrates the centenary of its presence in France, where every year it now trains some 5,000 students and trainees.

On the grounds of new findings in its archives, the mahJ also traced back the role of this organisation in the creation of the Museum of Jewish Art (1948-1998) in the rue des Saules, Paris, of which the mahJ is the heir.