Holocaust Plaza Breaks Ground in Philadelphia
There’s big changes coming to the decades-old Holocaust Memorial on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. This week, city officials came together to break ground on a whole new memorial, while still preserving the best features of the original. The old memorial, which sits at a triangular lot at 16th Street and the Parkway, is overdue for an overhaul, says Mayor Jim Kenney.
“In light of the toxic national rhetoric, it’s more important than ever that we properly commemorate the victims of this tragedy and never forget this dark period of history,” the mayor said at the groundbreaking.
This rendering by WRT, the firm behind the new Holocaust Memorial, shows what the re-imagined plaza will look like.
Staying in the plaza will be the Six Million Jewish Martyrs statue, first erected in 1964 as the first public statue of its kind. New elements will be added to the plaza to educate the public about the Holocaust and commemorate the victims of this bleak point in world history. David Adelman, chairman of the non-profit Philadelphia Holocaust Remembrance Foundation (PHRF), refers to the new memorial as an “outdoor living classroom” and “engaging civic space.”
One part of the new memorial will be the Six Pillars. As described by Curbed Philadelphia, “[e]ach pillar will depict a motif of the Holocaust, contrasted with an adjacent pillar describing one of America’s core values.” Within the Remembrance Wall, an eternal flame will symbolize the light of human goodness and a perpetual remembrance of the lives lost during the time period.
A tree grove will take up one end of the plaza. The trees will represent the woods in which Jewish refugees hid during the Holocaust. A sapling of the Theresienstadt Tree, which children at the Theresienstadt Camp planted and nurtured, will also be part of these trees.
Lastly, train tracks from the Death Camp of Treblinka will be physically implanted in the plaza in honor of the Jews who were displaced from their homes and tormented during the Holocaust.
