Józef Sandel ( Yiddish: יוסף סאנדעל; German: Josef Sandel; 29 September 1894, Kolomea – 1 December 1962, Warsaw) ^[1] was a Polish art historian and critic, an art dealer and collector, and an advocate on behalf of Jewish artists in postwar Poland.

Sandel was born in Kolomea ( Kolomyia, Ukraine), then in Galicia, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The son of a cap maker, he attended the Baron Hirsch school and then gymnasium. ^[1]

Around 1920, he moved to Dresden, Germany, where, in 1925, he co-published a short-lived German-language literary and art magazine, Mob: Zeitschrift der Jungen (Mob: Journal of youths). ^{[1] [2]} He subsequently lived in France, Switzerland, and Austria, before returning to Dresden. ^[1]

From 1929 to 1933, he operated an art gallery in Dresden, called Galerie junge Kunst (Gallery of young art). ^[3] After the rise of the National Socialist regime in Germany, he moved to Belgrade (then in Yugoslavia), where he opened another gallery and mounted exhibitions, in 1933-1934. ^[1]

In 1935, he moved to Poland; he spent time in Vilna (Vilnius) and Warsaw, and published articles on art in Yiddish-language periodicals, including Literarishe Bleter [ he]. ^{[1] [4]} At the outbreak of the Second World War he fled to the Soviet Union, and survived the war in Kazakhstan, where he taught German in a middle school. ^[1]

After the war, he returned to Poland and settled in Warsaw, in 1946. ^[5] There he became the leader of the Jewish Society for the Promotion of Fine Arts [ pl]; Yiddish: Yidishe gezelshaft tsu farshpreytn kunst), or ZTKSP, a revival of an organization that had been active in Poland before the war. ^[6] The Society provided material assistance to Jewish artists, helped to promote their work, and fostered art education for Jewish youth. ^[7] It mounted some 98 exhibitions in Warsaw, and four exhibitions that were presented throughout Poland – two devoted to the work of individual artists, Rafael Mandelzweig, in 1946, and Lea Grundig, in 1949; and two, in 1948, in honor of the fifth anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, featuring works of Jewish artists who were killed in the Holocaust. ^[8]

After the dissolution of the ZTKSP, in September 1949, the art works that Sandel and his colleagues had assembled were integrated into the collections of the Jewish Historical Institute, Warsaw. ^[9] From 1950 to 1953 the institute operated a Gallery of Jewish Art, with Sandel serving as director. ^[10]

Sandel subsequently devoted himself to the writing of several art historical works concerning Jewish artists in Poland. Among his works, all written in Yiddish, is a two-volume biographical reference work on Jewish artists who perished during the Holocaust in Poland, Umgekumene yidishe kinstler in Poylen (Jewish artists in Poland who perished, Warsaw, 1957). ^[1]

Sandel married Ernestyna Podhorizer (1903-1984), who was also originally from Galicia and worked for a time as the secretary of the ZTKSP. Sandel-Podhorizer was born in Dembits ( Dębica), and before the war had been a biology teacher in Lemberg ( Lviv); she was later a curator at the museum of the Jewish Historical Institute, and also worked at the Biology Institute in Warsaw. ^[11]

• Jewish Historical Institute: Józef Sandel – biographical timeline.
• Józef Sandel Papers (digitized), in RG 31 Germany (Vilna Archives) Collection, at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research