Community Bulletin Board

Art Commission

The Philadelphia Holocaust Remembrance Foundation and Mural Arts Philadelphia are proud to announce the selection of Ella Ponizovsky Bergelson as the artist for the mural at the Horwitz-Wasserman Holocaust Memorial Plaza on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. Ella was selected from a nearly year-long process that included a pool of over 50 applications from around the world. The roughly 2,500-square-foot mural — which will serve as a backdrop to the nation’s oldest public Holocaust monument and represent the first large-scale mural dedicated to the Holocaust in a public space — will enrich the Memorial Plaza and enhance its significance as a site for reflection and education. (At left, a recent mural of the artist in Berlin, Germany.)

About Ella Ponizovsky
Ella is a visual artist with significant experience creating powerful public artwork, including several murals across international locations. Her work often focuses on the experience of being uprooted from one’s homeland, a topic she understands intimately, having moved from Moscow to Israel as a child after the fall of the Iron Curtain and then later from Israel to Germany. She was specifically selected for her refreshing take on exploring the Holocaust. The central themes of her proposed mural are discrimination and displacement during the Holocaust and WWII, as well as the subsequent cultural and linguistic diversity these displacements triggered. You can see some of her work here.

Expected Timeline
After the community meetings, Ella will begin working on her design, which will go through a multi-stage review and approval process throughout Spring 2025. The mural will be installed in Summer 2025, with a public dedication ceremony in September 2025.