An Israeli muralist has been selected for Philly’s Holocaust Memorial Plaza

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A public mural planned for the Horwitz-Wasserman Holocaust Memorial Plaza on Philadelphia’s Benjamin Franklin Parkway now has an artist. Ella Ponizovsky Bergelson, an Israeli citizen of Russian descent based in Germany, has been selected by the Philadelphia Holocaust Remembrance Foundation and Mural Arts Philadelphia.

Bergelson’s concept for the 2,500-square-foot mural will be finalized this winter after a public engagement and feedback process. It is expected to be completed next summer.

“It’s really important to stay open to what will happen next once I’m in Philadelphia and I’m interacting with the community,” Bergelson said from Berlin during a Zoom interview. “This mural should reflect the community in Philadelphia and speak to the people over there.”

Bergelson has installed many murals in other places, including an augmented reality project for the 2022 Venice Biennale. Her works are often based on graphic representations of Hebrew lettering rendered nearly abstract.

She has never shown her work in Philadelphia, nor has she ever made a public work through a community engagement process. Her concept for the Holocaust memorial will be text-based design with words derived from ideas and experiences that arise from two planned community workshops in December and a virtual workshop in January.

Eszter Kutas, executive director of the Philadelphia Holocaust Remembrance Foundation, said Bergelson was chosen out of 54 submissions worldwide.

“Ella’s work was selected because it explores the Holocaust in a new way that we haven’t done on this site before. I’ve been in the field for a while and I haven’t seen something like this,” Kutas said. “The central theme of her mural will be about the displacement that happened due to the Holocaust of the Second World War and the subsequent cultural identity these displacements triggered.”

The mural will be located at the site of America’s oldest Holocaust memorial, home to a statue that has stood since being erected in 1964. In 2018, the memorial space was expanded into a plaza.

The wall on which the mural will go is part of the neighboring building owned by Verizon, which was vandalized with a spray-painted swastika last year. It was immediately removed.

“Antisemitism and bigotry have been rising in our nation steadily since 2014. If you look at data related to antisemitism between 2014 and 2020, there’s a quadrupling of incidents,” Kutas said. “Then you take what has happened on Oct. 7, 2023, and the war that followed, at this point everybody knows that antisemitism and Islamophobia has skyrocketed.”

The memorial is prominent in the city for both what it represents and its location. The large, blank surface is on the Parkway with sight lines directly to LOVE Park and City Hall.

“This is probably one of the most significant projects that we’ve worked on,” said Jane Golden, executive director of Mural Arts. “It’s a site that we’ve looked at a lot. I would sometimes go, as I was cutting it across town, I would sit and just reflect in that Memorial Plaza.”

Golden said her grandparents, who were living in Russia during the Holocaust, talked about it with her a lot.

“They felt it was very close and could happen again,” she said. “As a child it was very present to me. I’m always drawing a line between the Holocaust and current times. I’m drawn to Ella’s work because there’s something very specific and yet universal about it.”

The two in-person community meetings will be Dec. 8, 4 p.m., at the Reform Congregation Keneseth Israel in Elkins Park, and Dec. 11, 6:30 p.m., at the WHYY building on 6th Street in Old City. An additional online meeting is being scheduled for January.