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Portrait photograph of Zygmunt Karol Allina

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Portrait photography of Zygmunt Karol Allina. The photograph was taken before 1932 in the open air, most likely in Warsaw. Zygmunt Allina is dressed in a suit, with a hat on his head.

Zygmunt Karol Allina (1867–1932) was an assimilated Jew and Austro-Hungarian citizen whose family came from Spain. Together with his wife, Julia née Rauch, he came to Warsaw in the last decade of the 19th century. Julia was a Czech Jew who converted to Christianity. The couple had three children. In 1894 was born their firstborn son Karol, a year later Stefania, and in 1897 the youngest child – Bogusław. The Jewish origins of the Allina family were kept quiet for years. It is known that Zygmunt Karol Allina's brothers Ignatz and Maximilian, who lived in Vienna, remained Jewish; sister Julia died at one year old. It is likely that Zygmunt Allina's family never accepted his conversion, and presumably his marriage to a Catholic woman. None of Zygmunt Karol Allina's brothers survived the war, while his children – Karol, Stefania and Bogusław – survived the German occupation.

In the first decade of the 20th century, Zygmunt Karol Allina started building his own business in Warsaw. It was there that Z. K. Allina and a representative of the Laurysiewicz family established and developed a commercial business under the banner of the company "Allina & Laurysiewicz". Their area of business was sanitary ceramics – they imported tiles from various countries. Their tiles have been preserved to this day in the tenement house "Pod Messalką" on Krakowskie Przedmieście Street in Warsaw, in the former municipal bathhouse. The company probably operated until the outbreak of the World War I. In 1914, the men of the Allin family went to Russia to escape conscription into the Austrian army. Zygmunt Karol Allina went to Kharkov and his sons to Ufa in the foothills of the Ural Mountains. Their wandering began, including with Polish troops from the 5th Polish Rifle Division. After returning from Siberia to Warsaw and completing their studies, Karol and Bogusław took up work in their father's new company, "Sztuka Ludowa", which dealt with ordering products from peasant artists and selling them in Warsaw, and over time also exporting them abroad, including to the USA. In time, Karol left the company. Bogusław remained in the family business, and after his father's death in 1932, he ran it himself. | MH

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Information about the object
Author/creator
unknown
Object type
photography
Time of creation / dating
20th century
Created place
Poland (Europe)
Technique
photograph
Material
photographic print paper
Keywords
Copyright status
Owner
POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews
Identification number
MPOLIN-A41.4.3