Stolpersteine: A Sacred Homage to my Ancestors and a Gift of Repair, with Ben Wood

Click here to register for this free virtual event, co-presented by the JFCS Holocaust Center.

Visual artist Ben Wood will discuss his family’s Stolpersteine journey, which took place in March 2024, during which they visited Berlin and nearby towns Seelow and Strausberg to lay Stolpersteine for his grandparents’ families who were victims of the Holocaust.

Stolpersteine, translated as Stumbling Blocks, are a project of the artist Gunter Demnig, who remembers the victims of Nazism by installing commemorative brass plaques in the pavement in front of their last address of choice. More than one hundred thousand have been placed throughout Europe.

The laying of these Stolpersteine by the Wood family was a culmination of years of research and laid the groundwork for Ben Wood’s now continuing artistic projects that seek to recover lost family stories, and honor the memory of his great-grandparents and their destroyed Jewish communities. In the midst of his research, in a Berlin archive, Wood recovered lost postcards by his great-grandfather that were written while in a Polish ghetto.

In addition to placing these Stolpersteine, Wood gifted the town of Strausberg with an additional memory plaque to be affixed on the facade of the family’s confiscated house, and which via an augmented video retells the building’s history. Wood also recovered the history of the Jewish cemetery of Seelow, which was destroyed during World War II and was later paved over as a parking lot. Wood has created a dynamic visual proposal and with the town of Seelow seeks to return the site as a memory park.

Ben Wood is a public video artist based in San Francisco. His career-long interest remains the hidden and ignored histories that lie dormant within buildings in our community. He has created more than twenty projected video installations, onto buildings and monuments, using contemporary media to animate them with projected video artworks.

Wood is known for large-scale displays in San Francisco on Coit Tower, Dewey Monument, the Haas-Lilienthal House, Temple Emanu-El, Saint Ignatius Church, within Mission Dolores, the Cliff House at the East-West Center in Honolulu, the Museo Nacional de Arte in Mexico City, and the London Jewish Museum. Wood received a Master of Science in Visual Studies from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a Bachelor of Fine Art in Digital Media from the San Francisco Art Institute. He maintains his own visual art practice in San Francisco, whose work can be seen at benwoodstudio.com.

Program made possible, in part, by Larry Burgheimer.