The Brief

In 1943, Hedy Shenk arrived in Los Angeles. She was one of the thousands of Jewish refugees from Europe fleeing the Nazis. Life as a single mother was hard, and Hedy worked tirelessly as a bus driver, quality control supervisor at Xerox, and toy entrepreneur.

But Hedy had another job, which meant more to her than any other. She was determined to reclaim the artworks and treasures stolen from her family during the horrors of the Holocaust.

RECLAIMED: A Family Painting, on view at the Skirball Cultural Center Oct. 19 to March 3, tells the remarkable story of Hedy, her daughter, Liz Goldman, and her granddaughter, Cheryl Bernstein. These three generations of Angeleno women spent over eight decades fighting to regain their rightful inheritance. “

The desire to heal wounds, to understand your family history is very strong, and neither restitution or reclamation is about making money,” Cheryl Bernstein says in a testimonial video on view at the exhibition. “It's more about understanding family, bringing families back together.”

Johann and Lisbeth Bloch in Brno, Czechoslovakia, c. 1903

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Carl Pietzner, K.U.K Hof-Atelier

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Courtesy of Elizabeth H. Scholtz

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The family’s saga begins in another time and place. Hedy was born in 1906, to Johann and Lisbeth Bloch. Johann ran E. Block & Company, his family’s prominent leather goods business. The elegant Bloch home in Brno, Czechoslovakia, was a vibrant, cultural place, filled with noted artworks and Czech glass collected by Lisbeth. The Blochs passed on their love of the arts to their daughter, Hedy, who took art classes and learned how to sew from the family’s live-in seamstress.

In 1922, the Blochs purchased their most valuable work, Baroque German artist Johann Carl Loth’s 17th century painting Isaac Blessing Jacob from the Dorotheum Auction House in Vienna. The painting was hung in place of honor in their dining room, which was often graced by members of their close, extended family, many who would later be killed in the Holocaust.

Lisbeth would have little time to enjoy her prized painting. She was killed in a car crash in 1928. Life went on, and Hedy married a Catholic engineer named Leo Schenck (Hedy would later change the spelling of her name to Shenk). Their daughter, Liz, was born in 1936. But the family’s happiness was tempered by the growing menace of the Nazis.

Isaac Blessing Jacob by Johann Carl Loth

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Robert Wedemeyer

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Loan courtesy of Elizabeth H. Scholtz

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Aware of the enormous danger facing him as Jewish man, Johann and his new wife, Erna, attempted to get a visa to Switzerland, but they were denied. In September 1938, the Nazi-controlled Czech government confiscated the Blochs’ grand Brno home, along with their art collection. Johann and Erna fled to family in Prague. While still attempting to export his art collection to England for safety, Johann died of natural causes in 1940. Erna was killed by the Nazis.

The family believes that Isaac Blessing Jacob was stolen from the Bloch house in 1939, and resold at Dorotheum Auction House, one of approximately 600,000 Jewish owned artworks looted by the Nazis.

Bloch Family Dining Room in Brno, Czechoslovakia, 1930s

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Dr. Bruno Wolf

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Courtesy of Elizabeth H. Scholtz

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Meanwhile, Hedy and her husband were in their own race to escape. In 1938, Hedy and her daughter were baptized by a Catholic priest to shield them from anti-Jewish persecution. The young family fled to Switzerland, but Hedy had one more thing she had to do.

In 1939, she ventured back to Brno, collecting important family photos, including one showing Isaac Blessing Jacob in the family dining room, which would prove invaluable in her fight for reclamation.

“My grandmother was so incredibly smart and forward-thinking,” Cheryl Bernstein says. “As she's fleeing in the middle of the night with her toddler, she had the presence of mind to take the professional photographs of the inside of her father's home with her, and the minute she found out her father had died … they started working on his estate.”

Elizabeth Schenk arriving in New York as a refugee, 1940.

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Courtesy of Elizabeth H. Scholtz

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As World War II ravaged Europe, Hedy was able to obtain visas for her family to go to America. In July 1940, they arrived in New York aboard the Cunard White Star’s RMS Scythia along with many other war refugees. A photo of an excited looking four-year-old Liz was published in the Daily News, along with other child refugees. The paper minimized the trauma Liz had suffered, claiming she took the escape as a “lark.”

The small family moved around America as Leo took engineering work before permanently settling in Los Angeles, then a haven for European refugees. Always industrious, Hedy was able to obtain a bank loan to purchase a small apartment building and rent out some of the units to tenants. Hedy and Leo divorced in 1947, and Hedy proved to be an enterprising spirit. In the 1950s, she even created a line of whimsical hand sewn stuffed animals called Hollyfornia Creations.

However, Hedy never forgot the life and inheritance that had been stolen from her. For 50 years, she repeatedly filed art claims with the Czech and German governments, using photos and surviving family members’ testimony to prove ownership.

With her modest funds, Hedy hired expensive international lawyers and traveled to Europe repeatedly in an attempt to track down her family’s collection. In the 1960s, Liz joined in the search and brought her daughter Cheryl along. Together, the three-generations toured Austrian salt mines, where Nazis reportedly hid looted art, and visited the Bloch family home in Brno searching for clues.

Although Hedy would receive modest reparations and payments from the Blochs’ confiscated bank accounts and property, she was never able to recover Loth’s Isaac Blessing Jacob or her family’s other lost artistic treasures. She died in 1997.

But her daughter and granddaughter were not finished. In the early 2000s, Liz took up the family’s quest. “n 2001, a claim was filed with the Art Loss Register. That claim led to the Holocaust Claims Processing Office.

“It took about 20 years until this very brilliant attorney, Rebecca Friedman, finally started looking into…the Czech claims, that things really started to roll along,” Cheryl says. “In about 2019, she called me with this great news that the Loth painting has shown up at the Dorotheum for auction, and they contacted her because we had a claim. It was really at that point that the hard work started because they had the painting, we knew we were heirs, we had to prove to them that we were the heirs.”

Using Hedy’s meticulous records, her decades of legal correspondence, and the photos she had spirited away, the family was able to prove that Isaac Blessing Jacob was rightfully theirs. In 2020, the painting was finally returned to the Bloch family. In February, four paintings Johann Bloch had been forced to “donate” to the National Gallery Prague were also returned to Cheryl at an official restitution ceremony.

While much of the Bloch collection remains lost, Isaac Blessing Jacob is the centerpiece of RECLAIMED: A Family Painting, hanging in a recreation of the Bloch family dining room, filled with mementoes and artifacts from the family’s century long odyssey.

“This painting has brought my mother and I even closer together. I'm grateful for the journey that this painting brought in my life, and the deeper understanding of everything she went through,” Cheryl Bernstein says. “I am grateful to the Skirball for allowing us to put it here, where I knew it would be honored in the way that I felt my grandmother deserved and my mother deserved. Grandma worked on this her entire life.”

The Trump administration on Thursday released its plan to open up federal waters off the coast of California to oil drilling, taking a momentous step that state leaders and environmentalists had long expected.

The Interior Department’s proposal, which sets up a direct confrontation with Sacramento on energy and climate change, would also allow drilling in federal waters off the coast of Alaska and the Southeastern U.S. It would rip up a ban on new offshore drilling in most of these places that President Joe Biden signed a few weeks before he left office.

President Donald Trump signed an executive order repealing that ban on his first day in office in January, and last month, a federal judge in Louisiana ruled Biden had overstepped his authority.

Administration officials argued that the move to open federal waters to new oil and gas leases will help restore energy security and protect American jobs.

“By moving forward with the development of a robust, forward-thinking leasing plan, we are ensuring that America’s offshore industry stays strong, our workers stay employed, and our nation remains energy dominant for decades to come,” Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said in a press release.

Gov. Gavin Newsom previously said the plan would be “dead on arrival” and promised attendees at an international climate conference last week that California would immediately sue.

On Thursday, his office quickly blasted the proposal as “idiotic” and “reckless.” He added that it “endangers our coastal economy and communities and hurts the well-being of Californians.”

Companies have drilled very little oil off the coast of California since the 1969 Union Oil platform blowout spilled 4.2 million barrels of crude into the waters 6 miles off the coast of Santa Barbara, catalyzing an environmental movement.

Newsom’s press release included a photo of a bird covered in crude oil, with a caption that said, “If Trump gets his way, coming to a beach near you soon!”

Numerous California lawmakers, including Sen. Alex Padilla and Rep. Jared Huffman, hastily convened a media call to push back on the plan.

Padilla called it “another outrageous announcement” from an “out of control administration.”

Rep. Jimmy Panetta compared the proposal to Trump’s controversial renovation of the White House.

“The California coastline is not the East Wing of the White House,” he said.

The Democratic lawmakers are supporting legislation that would prohibit new oil and gas leases off the West Coast.

The public will have a 60-day window to comment on the plan when it appears in the Federal Register on Monday.

Orange County isn't where you'd expect to find your next great bagel. But that's exactly what's happening in Irvine and Costa Mesa, where bakeries are proving that the future of bagels isn't about replicating New York — it's about reinventing it with California's best ingredients.

Three shops have quietly been reinvigorating an old formula, taking inspiration from traditional East Coast-style bagel shops while using farm-sourced ingredients to create something unlike anything else in Southern California (or the country).

Read on and enjoy these maximalist offerings.

RISE Bagels (Irvine)

The One Fish from RISE Bagels in Irvine, featuring a bright, silky lox bagel layered with sweet yellow tomatoes, pickled onions, and plenty of dill.

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Ron De Angelis

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Courtesy RISE Bagels

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Chef John Park's bagel philosophy stemmed from his desire for something lighter than traditional, heavy New York bagels. Park and his team opened RISE Bagels earlier this month in an upscale Irvine business park, tucked away like an oasis among pristine high-rise buildings.

Park aims for bagels with a crispy crust and more air pockets. These aren't special sourdough or crazy fermentation projects — just a focus on achieving lighter crust and crumb.

RISE offers signature open-face options like the One Fish ($20), featuring smoked salmon with citrus notes (orange, lime, lemon, dill, coriander, fennel, black pepper), a balanced sweet-salty ratio, and pickled onions with yuzu kosho, a fermented paste containing chili peppers, yuzu peel and salt. The Two Fish ($23) adds dashi-marinated salmon roe for a touch of sweetness and smokiness.

Closed sandwich options include Get Jjigae With It ($18), with beef bulgogi, kimchi jjigae, scrambled eggs, American cheese, sesame leaf, soy-pickled radish, cucumber, and ssam jang schmear made from fermented soybeans and chili paste. The Jersey Boy features Taylor ham, soft scrambled egg, American cheese, ketchup, and Tokyo Negi schmear — a Japanese long onion spread sourced from Girl and Dough farm in San Diego.

On my recent visit, the One Fish delivered a level of freshness that nearly knocked me off my feet — a touch of salty brine as if it had just been harvested from nearby San Clemente beaches. The Jersey Boy brought me back to land with sweet, gooey flavors from soft scrambled egg, melty American cheese, and ketchup, with just the right amount of salty notes in between.

Boil &  Bake (Costa Mesa)

Boil & Bake in Costa Mesa features fresh figs over cream cheese with a heavy drizzle of hot honey and a scatter of sesame seeds on their black and white sesame bagel.

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Gab Chabrán

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LAist

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Carlos Perez's bagel education began at 8, working under his father, also named Carlos, when the family took over Shirley’s Bagels, an Orange County staple. But the son of Guatemalan immigrants wanted to move beyond Restaurant Depot products and machine-made dough. After working his way from dishwasher to manager at local restaurants, he felt ready to open his own place. He connected with Chef Luke Bramm, who'd trained in fine dining kitchens and specialized in curing meats, through a mutual chef friend. Together, they opened Boil & Bake in Costa Mesa, developing a three-day sourdough process and strict farm-sourcing philosophy, seasonally editing the menu — removing items entirely when local ingredients aren't available.

The menu splits between open-face bagels and sandwiches, emphasizing California ingredients and house-made products. The O.G. features Guatemalan-style longaniza sausage with cilantro aji crema (a nod to Perez's heritage), while The Dodger pairs Native Cure smoked salmon with pickled onions instead of traditional capers. The Fully Loaded Lox ($20) goes maximalist with house-cured fish, cucumber, radish, and sprouts. The M.F. takes a more inventive route with maple-fennel sausage and sweet-onion Aleppo aioli. Valdivia Farms heirloom tomatoes and La Bahn Ranch eggs appear throughout, reinforcing the local-sourcing philosophy. Most items range from $14 to $17.

On my visit, I ordered a black-and-white sesame bagel topped with black figs and hot honey, that day's special. Quartered black figs with their deep purple-red flesh glistened under a drizzle of hot honey. It feels more California farmers market than traditional East Coast bagel shop, with fresh-tasting, light flavors that work well together.

Deli Seoul Bagels (Costa Mesa)

A beautifully chaotic egg, tofu, and cheese combination — runny, melty, and nestled inside an egg bagel, made with Irene's chili mayo from Deli Seoul.

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Gab Chabrán

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LAist

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Also in Costa Mesa is Deli Seoul, a mother-and-son operation run by Jun and Irene Wang. Irene opened Deli Seoul in 2008 in a busy shopping center off Harbor Boulevard as a traditional bagel shop. Jun joined later after leaving the tech industry. It was only in the last year that the family decided to lean into their Korean heritage in bagel form.

The breakfast menu operates on a build-your-own model: customers start with a bagel or bread ($7.50 base, $9.85 with protein), then add cheese and protein. Korean options set it apart: Seoul steak with a sweet sauce, spicy pork, sweet-glazed Spam and marinated organic tofu sit alongside traditional bacon and sausage. Specialty bagels include coconut, pineapple, and Asiago. Sauces range from standard mayo to Irene's Korean chili mayo and chipotle mayo. It's customization that appeals to both traditionalists and adventurous eaters.

Jun Wang and his mother Irene pose together in the kitchen area of Deli Seoul in Costa Mesa.

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Gab Chabrán

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LAist

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By my third stop that day, I was experiencing a bit of bagel burnout, despite my love for them. So I ordered something different: a bagel sandwich with scrambled egg and marinated tofu, with Irene's Korean chili mayo on an egg bagel. The combination was surprisingly light and flavorful, perfectly summing up what Deli Seoul offers — a delightfully diverse array of flavors from an approachable perspective that still represents what's happening with bagels in Orange County.

Infant formula linked to a botulism outbreak that has sickened dozens of babies across 15 states may still be on store shelves even after being recalled, federal health officials say.

As of Wednesday, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) said, 31 cases of suspected or confirmed infant botulism have been reported in babies who consumed ByHeart Whole Nutrition formula and got sick between August and mid-November.

No deaths have been reported. But all 31 babies were hospitalized with the illness, which can cause a potentially life-threatening form of gradual paralysis in infants less than a year old.

"Epidemiologic and laboratory data show that ByHeart Whole Nutrition infant formula might be contaminated with Clostridium botulinum, which is causing infant illness in multiple regions of the country," the FDA said.

ByHeart Whole Nutrition recalled two batches of its infant formula earlier this month before expanding the recall to all of its products — which include cans and single-serve packets — last week. They are sold at major retailers — including Target, Publix, Walmart and Whole Foods — and online nationwide, with some products shipped to customers outside the U.S.

ByHeart, which describes itself as a "next-generation baby nutrition company," first hit the market in 2022. The FDA says its products make up "approximately 1%" of all infant formula sold in the U.S., so it does not have concerns about a potential shortage.

In an apology note to parents, ByHeart says it is cooperating with the FDA and "investigating every facet of our process" to identify the cause of the outbreak.

In the meantime, the company — along with the FDA — is urging adults to stop using the formula and monitor their babies for symptoms of botulism. The FDA is also asking stores to stop selling the product.

But in its Wednesday update, the agency said it had "received reports that recalled formula is still being found on store shelves in multiple states." NPR has reached out to the FDA for more information but did not hear back by publication time.

The FDA says it is working with state partners and retailers "to ensure an effective recall" as its investigation into the outbreak continues.

ByHeart infant formula was removed from shelves at a Walmart store in Temecula, Calif..

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JoNel Aleccia

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AP

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What we know about the outbreak

As of Wednesday, the FDA said the 31 cases had been reported in 15 states: Arizona, California, Idaho, Illinois, Kentucky, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, North Carolina, New Jersey, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Texas and Washington.

The outbreak has grown since the FDA first announced its investigation on Nov. 8. At that point, it said that out of an estimated 83 cases of infant botulism reported nationwide since August, 13 of the infants had consumed ByHeart formula at some point.

That raised red flags because botulism is uncommon in dairy products and "there is no historical precedent of infant formula causing infant botulism," the FDA said.

In response, ByHeart promptly recalled two batches of its products. The next day, it announced that the California Department of Public Health had tested a sample from one of those batches, and the result came back positive for Clostridium botulinum, the bacteria that causes infant botulism.

That sample came from an opened can, which ByHeart originally said did not prove that its product was to blame (as the bacteria can occur naturally in places like soil and dust). But in an FAQ on its website, it now says further testing by a third-party group identified the bacteria in some samples of unopened formula, too.

ByHeart says the FDA informed it in a "late-night call" on Nov. 10 that it had found two more cases of infant botulism in babies that had consumed its formula. The next day, ByHeart, citing "too many unanswered questions," recalled all of its products and released information for parents about how to switch to a different formula brand.

What to know about infant botulism 

Botulism is a rare but serious illness caused by Clostridium botulinum. When a baby swallows the spores, "they grow in the gut and make toxin," according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Symptoms can appear three to 30 days after consuming the bacteria, and generally start with constipation, poor feeding, difficulty swallowing and loss of head control.

"If untreated, infants with infant botulism experience a progressive, flaccid paralysis that can lead to breathing difficulties and require weeks of hospitalization," the CDC says.

Treatment for infant botulism involves an antitoxin known as BabyBIG, which is administered through an IV.

The CDC says parents should stay vigilant for several weeks after their baby last consumed ByHeart formula. They are advised to wash contaminated surfaces and label any leftover powder "DO NOT USE" and store it safely for a month, in case their infant develops symptoms and the state health department wants to test it.

The CDC says parents should seek immediate medical care if they see any concerning symptoms, and also directs them to an infant botulism outbreak hotline from the California Department of Public Health set up specifically to respond to this outbreak.

What the company is doing 

ByHeart says it is conducting its own "extensive testing" and giving the FDA "complete and unrestricted access to all of our facilities and products for their investigation."

The company has released more resources for customers in the days since the recall, like a 24/7 support hotline and refunds for purchases since October.

It has also pledged to implement stronger safeguards and testing in the future, saying that Clostridium botulinum was "not among the pathogens routinely tested for across the industry" — until now.

In the meantime, several affected family members have taken legal action.

The parents of two four-month-olds who were hospitalized with infant botulism — in Arizona and Kentucky — filed separate federal lawsuits last week. They accused ByHeart of negligence and are seeking compensation for medical bills and emotional distress after both their daughters required hospitalization. A separate class-action suit filed in New York alleges deceptive marketing.

ByHeart told NPR over email that it cannot comment on litigation, but reiterated its commitment to supporting families and the FDA's investigation.
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