Lay-lah, Lay-lah
Lay-lah, Lay-lah is the first mural in the U.S. to commemorate the Holocaust in a public space. It is also the first mural ever permitted along Philadelphia’s ceremonial Benjamin Franklin Parkway. Bressi, as curatorial advisor, collaborated with Mural Arts Philadelphia and the Philadelphia Holocaust Memorial Foundation to create a brief for how a mural would fit into such a sensitive space, and to lead a worldwide search that led to German-Israeli artist Ella Ponizovsky-Bergelson and her design for a searing, sublime and contemporary mural about diaspora and memory.
Date | 2025
Client | Philadelphia Holocaust Memorial Foundation
Collaborators | Mural Arts Philadelphia (Lindsey Rosenberg)
Artist | Ella Ponizovsky-Bergelson
Artist Ella Ponizovsky Bergelson’s mural for the Horwitz-Wasserman Holocaust Memorial Plaza in Center City Philadelphia explores forced displacement that began during the Holocaust and carries on today, drawing on Philadelphia’s cultural hybridity and linguistic diversity.
Through public meetings held in the Philadelphia region, community members were invited by the artist to contribute childhood memories to inform the mural — lullabies, poems, stories — pieces that are building blocks of family heritage and cultural memory.
The mural explores what has been passed down and remembered and what has been lost to tragedy, time, and social change. It reflects on individual and collective memory, examining how memory is formed, erased, and overwritten.
The mural’s creation process and resulting style reflect its central themes of displacement and cultural resilience. Using a method of writing, fragmenting, shifting, and overwriting, the public’s contributions are depicted in 28 languages set in 17 scripts, reflecting the city’s layered linguistic landscape. The work examines fragmented cultural identities and their hybridity, tracing how languages and memories intersect, overlap, and transform within a shared space.
