Daniela Passal & El-Dan House
Daniela Passal was born to a Jewish family named Fessel in Krosno, Poland. In 1942 when all Jews were ordered to report to the train station ready to leave, Daniela’s mother Zipora Feiga Fessel, did not. Hiding, almost in plain sight, Daniela, her brother Wolf and her mother survived the war.
After the Second World War she attended the School of Fine Arts in Breslau. In 1950 she and her mother emigrated to Israel, taking the names Daniela and Felicia Passal. Daniela studied at the Bezalel School of Art under Max Ardon, a former Bauhaus student of Klee and Kandinsky.
In 1958 Daniela won a scholarship to study in New York at the Art Students League. There she lived at the International House and plunged into the excitement of the New York art world, painting seriously. Shortly after her arrival, she met another Holocaust survivor, Dr. Elias Gechman. In 1961 they married. They lived in New York, with a weekend home in Woodstock, for the next decade.
Shortly before Elias’s death in 1973, they also acquired a home in Israel, near Jerusalem in the village of Ein Kerem, which they called El-Dan. Daniela worked and showed steadily, exhibiting her large, abstract paintings at galleries in the U.S., Canada, and Israel.
At El-Dan Daniela created a “Forum for Multi-Cultural Creativity” with all sorts of programs such as music, theater or poetry readings, often in the garden which had exceptional acoustics thanks to the stone walls and the valley.
In 1989, when communist rule in Poland was overthrown, Daniela added a new element to her wanderings and began visiting there regularly joining the vigorous Polish art scene. She invited Polish artists to participate in the Forum by using a studio at El-Dan. She showed her own paintings and monoprints several times in Warsaw.
On May 12, 2005 Daniela died in Israel. In her last wishes she asked that El-Dan remain a place where artists could work, a place free from bigotry, a place for all.
