1 Art Collecting by Galician Jewish Aristocracy: From Majer Jerachmiel von Mises to Artur Lilien-Brzozdowiecki Sergey R. Kravtsov, Center for Jewish Art, Hebrew University of Jerusalem My presentation is largely based on a memoir by a Polish Jew, Artur Lilien-Brzozdowiecki, written in 1944. It was due to the good will of Artur’s daughter Joanna Grun that his typescript was published by the Academic Studies Press in 2016, with my humble contribution in a capacity of the editor. Artur’s memoir is a multifaceted story and the art collecting is only one of its many subjects, though an important one to the group of well-to-do and ennobled Galician families. Art collecting historically is a privilege of aristocracy and public exposure of the assembled treasures is a relatively late phenomenon. In Lviv, the Galician capital, valuable collections of Polish hereditary nobility became a national asset from 1816. The transition of private collections into the public realm was of special importance to the Poles, who were a nation without state at the time of partition. The donations of princes Józef Ossolinski and Henryk Lubomirski, who founded the national public library and a museum in the purposefully built edifice, were aiming in preservation and presentation of the glorious history via the exposure of manuscripts, the armory, historical-memorial art, and the general picture gallery. It is notable that the images of Jewish life in Poland were among the earliest exhibits of Ossolineum. This institution served as a beacon to Ukrainian and Jewish communities of Lviv, who would inaugurate their art museums in 1913 and 1934 respectively. Their resources were incomparable with those of the old Polish nobility. The recently knighted railway engineers and architects Ludwik Wierzbicki and Julian Zachariewicz took a similar path in socializing their collections. They donated their personal libraries of professional periodicals, very expensive at that time, to the Industrial, that is the Arts and Crafts, Museum, which they had founded for the city. Judaica was among the assets they gave to the public domain. This generous pattern was eagerly followed in the Jewish community. The library of the banker Samuel von Horowitz was donated to the Jewish Communal Library. Horowitz was not alone in this kind of philanthropy: the chef rabbi of the Progressive congregation Bernhard Löwenstein and a bank auditor and Jewish scholar Solomon Buber (Martin’s grandfather) also transferred their valuable libraries to the community. Book collecting was still more popular among the “people of the book” than the art collecting and two Jewish communal libraries were founded decades earlier than the Jewish museum.