When Ella Ponizovsky Bergelson thinks about the 2,000-square-foot Holocaust mural she created, recently installed in downtown Philadelphia amid an audience of 300, she draws on a musical term “polyphony,” which refers to layered melodies.
The Jewish artist, who was born in Moscow, emigrated to Israel and moved to Berlin in 2016. She created this work using calligraphy in 28 languages; it combines and draws upon lullabies, prayers and poems contributed by Philadelphia residents.
“It’s built out of language—contributions from people all over Philadelphia,” Bergelson told JNS. “The result looks like a polyphony of many voices overlapping.”
The Philadelphia Holocaust Remembrance Foundation, a nearly 20-year-old nonprofit, and Mural Arts Philadelphia, a 30-year-old nonprofit directed by Jane Golden, a Jewish artist and community organizer, dedicated “Lay-lah Lay-lah” at the Horwitz-Wasserman Holocaust Memorial Plaza on Benjamin Franklin Parkway on Sept. 26.
The artwork, whose title repeats the Hebrew word laylah, “night,” is the first large-scale U.S. public mural dedicated to Holocaust memory, according to the foundation.
‘You can’t not see it’
Eszter Kutas, executive director of the Philadelphia Holocaust Remembrance Foundation, told JNS that other installations in the plaza “focus directly on the time before or during the Holocaust.”
“This mural examines the aftermath and the impact that still resonates in our world today,” she said.
The foundation oversees the plaza, in which a “Monument to Six Million Jewish Martyrs” was installed in 1964. The site was redesigned in 2018 to include new installations.
Lindsey Rosenberg, a project management consultant for Mural Arts Philadelphia, told JNS that the central location of the mural—about a quarter of a mile from City Hall and about a mile from the famous “Rocky” steps at the Philadelphia Museum of Art—can attract public attention. The plaza itself is located outside a busy SEPTA train station stop and gets the traffic of daily commuters and tourists alike.
Rosenberg, who has lived in a community of second- and third-generation Holocaust survivors in the city for more than 20 years, said that many of her neighbors didn’t know about the memorial.
“What Ella has done here is that you can’t walk by and not see it anymore,” Rosenberg told JNS.
‘I am deeply moved’
Rabbi Benjamin David, who leads the Reform Congregation Keneseth Israel in Philadelphia, founded in 1847, and who is a member of the project’s steering committee, told JNS that the mural “urges us all to a place of greater compassion and kindness.”
The artwork also “speaks in its own way about the need for a Jewish homeland,” according to the rabbi, the grandson of Holocaust survivors.
“At the time of the Holocaust, we were essentially homeless and helpless, and there was nowhere for us to hide,” he told JNS. “Had there been an Israel, things might have gone differently.”
Bergelson’s concept was chosen from more than 50 applications. She painted canvas panels in Berlin that were shipped to Philadelphia for installation.
Hana Halper, a Philadelphia resident and retired teacher, told JNS that the mural has a “living, almost breathing reality.”
Another city resident, Jill Sablosky, who has participated in community workshops, told JNS that Bergelson “has brought public art to a new level of communication with process and meaning, keen intelligence, skill and extraordinary beauty.”
She said, “I am deeply moved by this mural.”
