A mural dedicated to Holocaust memory — in Babylonian, Yiddish and Chinese

Ella Ponizovsky-Bergelson’s mural, Lay-lah Lay-lah. Photo by Lindsey Rosenberg

By PJ Grisar September 26, 2025

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The Holocaust Memorial Plaza in Philadelphia stands at the intersection of many cultures and tongues.

The triangular plaza is bordered by Benjamin Franklin Parkway, the grand boulevard inspired by the Champs-Élysées, bearing the flags of 108 countries and Puerto Rico. Where Sixteenth and Arch Streets meet is sculptor Nathan Rapaport’s 18-foot, Monument to Six Million Martyrs — often cited  as the first public memorial to the Holocaust in the U.S.

The monument, commissioned by local Holocaust survivors, is a bronze tower of thrusting arms, some felled by Nazis, others resplendent with swords, was dedicated in 1964 and regularly hosts Yom HaShoah memorials. In 2018 the Philadelphia Holocaust Remembrance Foundation expanded the plaza for its education initiatives. On the site now, there are train tracks from Treblinka and a sapling taken from a tree planted by Jewish children in Theresienstadt.

On Sept. 26, the site will dedicate a grand mural on the east facade of the historic Bell Telephone Building abutting the plaza. The mural, Lay-Lah Lay-Lah, tells a story of displacement in 28 languages, including Babylonic cuneiform, Yiddish, Aramaic and English.

The eight-panel mural is the work of Ella Ponizovsky Bergelson, a Berlin-based artist and typographer who won the commission after an international call for artists in May 2023.

“It’s a work about memory,” Ponizovsky Bergelson told me. “About how we remember. What we remember, what we don’t remember, what is overwritten.”

Ponizovsky Bergelson is the great-granddaughter of Yiddish writer Dovid Bergelson, who was killed by Soviet authorities on the 1952 Night of Murdered Poets. In an interview near the mural, which was being weather treated, Ponizovsky Bergelson connected Bergelson’s writing — with stories that have multiple meanings — to her technique of overwriting text. But most important to the theme of the piece were Bergelson’s travels.

Born in Ukraine, he moved to Berlin and Copenhagen and then Moscow. Ponizovsky Bergelson was born in Moscow and grew up in Jerusalem before settling in Berlin.

“The bottom line of this is that we all come from somewhere and we’re all multifaceted beings,” said Ponizovsky Bergelson. “We don’t have just one national identity, one cultural identity. We’re not one dimensional beings. We have been moving since the beginning of humankind and we will forever continue moving, and there are all these obstacles around us that prevent us from moving freely and during the Holocaust this became a life and death problem for people.”

The mural, with its many handwritten fonts and daubs of grey, white and orange, was inspired by “memory forms” that Ponizovsky Bergelson asked Philadelphians to fill out.

Akin to immigration forms, the documents asked people where they and their parents came from and to remember a line from a lullaby or story they remember from childhood.

Ponizovsky Bergelson processed the responses and then worked at the Center for the Study of Manuscript Cultures in Hamburg to develop calligraphies for quotes that included a section of Hannah Szenes’ poem “A Walk to Caesaria” and the Mourner’s Kaddish. From there she took the text, overwrote it and “shuffled” the fragments, giving the work a palimpsest quality.

The mural is fractured. Its lines disappear between panels, mirroring the disorientation of displacement across languages and cultures. The survey’s respondents were eclectic, so Chinese characters mix freely with Cyrillic and Yiddish.

“People will be drawn in by the beauty, by the color, by the text — by things that they know and things that they don’t know,” said Jane Golden, founder and executive director of Mural Arts Philadelphia, who worked with the Philadelphia Holocaust Remembrance Foundation to launch the mural.

Eszter Kutas, executive director of the Philadelphia Holocaust Remembrance Foundation, said the organization has built lesson plans for teachers, and is working on an app that will explain the origin of all the text on the wall using chip technology.

The lessons will speak to the refugee crisis before and after the Holocaust and ongoing today. Kutas, a third generation survivor who was raised in Hungary, has a quote from a Jewish Hungarian folk song her mother sang to her and she sang to her own children included in Ponizovsky Bergelson’s collage.

“It’s nice for me to have this feeling that I can walk up to the wall and put my hand on the quote, and I feel this connection to my own Hungarian Jewish heritage,” said Kutas.

Ponizovsky Bergelson described working on the piece, her first direct engagement with the Holocaust, as healing. Aware she was an outsider to Philadelphia, she was stunned to see some in the community sharing memories with her.

One respondent remembered the song Oyfn Pripetshik, about a rabbi teaching his pupils the aleph-bet, letters that will give them strength in the diaspora.

Reading it, Ponizovsky Bergelson remembered that her grandfather sang the song to her.

“Because I grew up to become a language artist, the moment I remembered this was very emotional,” Ponizovsky Bergelson said. “A connection to our ancestors’ language giving us power to be ourselves in a new context — this was something that really touched me.”