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 Long Beach Unified School District is looking for a new operator to handle a major after-school program following the city of Long Beach’s decision not to participate in an attempt to save money.

Since 2002, the city’s Parks Department has helped anchor the initiative, known to families as WRAP. It provides free programming for hundreds of transitional-kindergarten through eighth-grade students across seven local campuses: Garfield, Edison, King, Grant, Lafayette, Burbank and Herrera.

Long Beach Unified officials stress that the vital student services will continue under a new operator this fall. It’s not clear yet who it will be and what, if any, changes they’ll make.

The city’s quiet retreat from the program has sparked deep anxiety among three full-time and 80 part-time municipal workers who now face potential layoffs.

Workers say they were first notified of the decision during a June 15 staff meeting with a city superintendent, where they were told their employment with the program would conclude on Aug. 15.

“Everybody was kind of caught off guard,” said one 13-year city employee based at an elementary school, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect her position. “I mean, again, I’ve been doing this for 13 years; we had people there that had been doing it over 20 years that had never moved sites.”

Today, the before- and after-school services are paid for primarily through the state-funded Expanded Learning Opportunities Program (ELOP), a combination of California’s After School Education and Safety (ASES) grant and specific ELOP apportionments.

Historically, the city was granted this funding by the school district without a formal bidding process, typically receiving roughly $15 per student plus administrative fees, which it supplemented with allocations from its own general fund.

This year, however, the school district was forced to overhaul its grant-funding process and consider bids to meet tightening state mandates for the program’s ELOP funding.

Shortly after, the city informed the school district it would not bid on the program.

City spokesperson Jennifer De Prez said the decision “was made so that the department can focus its limited financial resources” on other programs it runs.

The city is facing an estimated $61 million budget shortfall in the upcoming fiscal year — a deficit that top administrators warn makes citywide reductions inevitable.

The city could not immediately provide numbers on how much money it expected to save by ending its participation in the WRAP program. Last year, the city provided $193,254 of in-kind-services at its own expense on top of the program’s grant-funded budget, according to documents provided by De Prez.

Meanwhile, the school district went ahead with a bid application for a replacement operator on May 22. Proposals were due June 12 and are scheduled to go before the Board of Education for consideration at its July 15 meeting.

District officials emphasized that the state funding remains fully intact and that student services will continue without interruption.

The district and the city are also working on a joint letter to families detailing the transition, which is scheduled to be sent out soon.

But for the frontline staff, the transition has been destabilizing and abrupt.

These part-time employees, who work between 20 and 30 hours per week depending on the season, rotate through campuses where individual site enrollment ranges from 85 to 160 students.

The employee who spoke with the Post said that despite directives from supervisors to keep the changes quiet until future plans solidified, she chose to notify parents so they would have time to prepare.

“As a parent, I would want to know if it’s not the same people that I’ve trusted my kids with for years,” she said.

The long-term fate of the workforce remains unresolved, forcing many to look for employment elsewhere.

“As far as employment opportunities, they didn’t lay us off, they didn’t fire us, they just basically told us the contract with the schools will be done August 15,” the anonymous employee said. “Past that, we have no idea what’s going to happen.”

City officials say they will soon meet with representatives of the International Association of Machinists (IAM) union to discuss the workers’ future.

“We are committed to ensuring this process is transparent, informed by complete information, and focused on protecting both employees and the quality and continuity of the vital services the WRAP program provides to the Long Beach community,” said Sashi Muralidharan, a spokesperson with IAM 947.

Editor’s note: This story was updated with more information about the program’s cost to the city.

A community organization in Los Angeles is criticizing how the FBI enforced a strict no-drone policy around World Cup venues after federal agents disrupted a community gardening event in South L.A.

The incident took place the first Sunday of the tournament, while crowds were watching matches at the FIFA Fan Festival at the Los Angeles Coliseum. Nearby, the Los Angeles Neighborhood Land Trust was hosting a celebration for teenagers who had created a native plant garden on a patch of land that used to be an oil drilling site.

Then someone flew a drone to photograph the moment. Minutes later, Department of Homeland Security agents and Los Angeles police officers were on the scene, according to Bz Zhang, a project manager who was helping run the event. Soon the FBI arrived. They confiscated the drone and fined the person operating it.

The Neighborhood Land Trust was hosting a celebration for teenagers who had created a native plant garden on a patch of land that used to be an oil drilling site when authorities arrived.

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Wendy Salvador

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" We were unknowingly in violation of federal airspace, and we were told that we were a threat to national security," said Zhang, who witnessed the encounter.

The drone had violated temporary flight restrictions implemented for the World Cup. The Federal Aviation Authority has banned unauthorized drones within "3-nautical-mile radius and up to 3,000 feet above ground level" around stadiums on match days and also prohibited them around certain fan events, like the one at the Coliseum.

Since the tournament started in L.A., federal authorities have seized dozens of drones near SoFi Stadium and the Coliseum, according to the FBI. In total, more than 600 drones have been confiscated across the country.

The crackdown is part of an effort across all 11 U.S. host cities to identify and remove unauthorized drones from the skies around World Cup venues and fan events. Ahead of the tournament, FEMA awarded host cities $250 million specifically to combat drone usage.

"We knew we needed to act quickly to keep the World Cup safe from the rising threat of unmanned aircraft systems and that’s exactly what we did,” said Karen Evans, FEMA's acting cdministrator, in a statement announcing those funds.

But Zhang said that the incident at the garden represented the unintended consequences of hosting mega-events like the World Cup for ordinary community members.

" It's one thing to be aware of construction. … It's another to be expected as residents to know, to the 10th of a mile, that I'm in a particular zone and that, to the hour, I need to be in compliance," Zhang said.

Laura Eimiller, FBI spokesperson, disagreed. She said drone operators are responsible for knowing the rules and that every person in L.A. who had a drone confiscated during the World Cup also received a fine.

"There's been a zero-tolerance approach," Eimiller said.

Hiding out among the luxury beachfront condos in the Newport Beach neighborhood of Corona Del Mar is an outpost where scientists have been conducting important marine research for nearly a century.

And you can go check the place out for yourself.

A ‘magical’ marine station 

With its Spanish style architecture that includes a central tower and red-tiled roof, Caltech’s Kerckhoff Marine Laboratory looks like it’s been teleported in from another time and place.

Originally built as a boat and club house, it was purchased by Caltech in 1929 for use as a beachfront science outpost.

Victoria Orphan, James Irvine Professor of Environmental Science at Caltech and director of the Kerckhoff Marine Lab, said the place is one of the oldest running marine labs on the West Coast.

“There’s something just really magical about marine stations. They’re rustic, so it’s not like you’re going into a fully polished clean room. But that’s part of the charm and you really feel the history,” Orphan said.

One of her favorite spots? The tower. That’s where Orphan said some famous papers were written.

“Sometimes when I have writer’s block, I’ll go and sit in the tower and try to channel the scientists of old,” she told LAist.

That would include the work of Wheeler North, one of Orphan’s heroes. From 1962 to 2002, he conducted pioneering research on the ecology of kelp forests. Orphan said North’s work was instrumental for learning how an imbalance in the sea urchin population can decimate kelp forests.

These days that important research continues, with scientists at the lab looking at how microbes can capture carbon dioxide, mitigating global warming. They even have a 4-foot, bright yellow autonomous vehicle that scans the seafloor so scientists can learn more about seagrasses, which are important for oxygen creation and carbon capture, serve as fish nurseries and help protect the coastline from storm surge.

Kerckhoff Marine Laboratory in Corona del Mar

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Courtesy Caltech photo archive

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“In areas where you have seagrass, you get less sediment erosion [and] a little more protection of the property on land, which people who live on the coast care about,” Orphan explained.

Engineers from Jet Propulsion Laboratory are also interested in using autonomous vehicles in cooperation with the lab to see how they can help study the deep ocean right outside the harbor.

You can visit the lab to learn about all of the science going on there, with free open houses on Tuesdays and monthly ‘Science and Sunsets’ events that include dinner and cocktails at the historic outpost.

A pop-up book that’s seeking to break the world record for size has unfolded at the Central Library in downtown Los Angeles.

The art piece is 31 feet wide, more than 11 feet tall, and weighs in at 1,800 pounds.

Luceros y Penumbras, which roughly translates to “starlight and shadows,” is rooted in L.A. artist Daniel González’s experience visiting the library and his family in Mexico as a child.

“It's a knowledge tree that's been shaped by all these different things that I've learned at the library, about myself, about the city I grew up in, [and] about the town where my family's from,” González said.

The nonprofit Library Foundation of Los Angeles collaborated with the library to commission the piece as part of the Central Library’s centennial celebration.

The project is inspired, in part, by the library’s Toy Movable collection, an archive of more than 2,000 pop-up books.

“Normal pop-up books … they seem so simple, but something amazing pops out when you open the page,” said Todd Lerew, the foundation’s director of special projects. “That sort of childlike wonder that you feel that's persistent, even as an adult, is something that was really important to capture and dial up to 11 with this project.”

The origin of 'Luceros'

The foundation asked González in June 2025 to create a book that told the story of his personal relationship with the library. As González pondered questions including  ”What did the library do for me as a young person?" and "Why was I so attracted to it?" he thought about how knowledge was passed down in his family through the generations.

His grandmother told him stories about the stars above her farm near Teúl, Zacatecas, in Mexico. She said those that emerged at dawn — luceros — were among the most special because they signaled the start of a new day.

“ I looked at those stars … and the histories that my grandparents were sharing with me as these guiding lights,” González said. “Just like the library is a guiding light for many people.”

Daniel González's maternal grandmother, Isabel Gómez, told him stories about the creatures that lived near her farm, including owls, that could teach healing.

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Courtesy Daniel González

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González grew up blocks away from the Benjamin Franklin Library in Boyle Heights.

“ I spent summers there because it was literally the coolest place to be,” González said. “It just gave me the opportunity to explore anything that I had an interest in.”

Daniel González, as a child, after an unsuccessful attempt to make a kite after a trip to the library.  "My dad's like, 'I'm gonna take a picture of you so you can see what you look like when you get grumpy,'" he said.

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Courtesy Daniel González

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Later, he’d visit the Central Library during a middle school field trip and return on the bus to wander the stacks and ask the staff questions.

“ I'm really lucky that I met the people that nurtured that curiosity,” González said.

From sketches to ‘paper engineering’

First, González sketched the images, carved them into linoleum, printed them with ink and digitized them to add color and other details.

A few of Daniel González's tools. In the future, he plans to sell prints related to "Luceros y Penumbras."

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Mariana Dale

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LAist

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Matthew Reinhart, children’s book author, illustrator and “paper engineer,” was tasked with translating the images into three dimensions.

“ My job is really making mistakes,” Reinhart said. “Making mistakes, figuring out where they are and solving them and — of course — making them look good.”

The construction and the fabrication of the book took the work of more than 30 people over a series of months. At least a dozen people using giant poles capped with cushions turn the pages.

Luceros y Penumbras is four pages that open to create two scenes — one of the Central Library building and another of a sprawling tree with an I Spy-like collection of creatures and images throughout. The featured pages will change throughout the exhibition, which is open until mid-November.

There are at least a dozen different symbols throughout “Luceros y Penumbras."

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Mariana Dale

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LAist

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The sea turtle at the base of the tree is a reference both to the creatures that live in the San Gabriel River and to the original inhabitants of the L.A. basin. The Gabrielino-Tongva Tribe tells a story that connects the region’s earthquakes to the turtles.

“When we think of sea turtles, we think of these faraway places where they live, like tropical places,” González said. “But they exist here and they've had to adapt to a changing climate, a changing environment, and find places to call home, just as people do.”

Other images include:

• A star resting in an outstretched hand in honor of Octavia E. Butler, the science fiction writer who also spent time in the library. 
•  Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent Aztec deity and a frequent motif in East L.A.’s murals. 
• An owl, a symbol of knowledge associated with the Greek goddess Athena and the Roman goddess Minerva. 

González said the goal is for viewers to create their own narrative about what they see.

“ I just hope that people carry with them a sense of curiosity to further explore the things that I present, but also maybe something within them,” González said.

Visit the pop-up book

Central Library Centennial Festival

On display