Moira Gervay, a rising senior at Padua Academy in Wilmington, Delaware, has received a $5,000 annual scholarship from Moore College of Art & Design in the Mordechai Anielewicz Creative Arts Competition on the Holocaust.
The award, sponsored by Century 21 Stores, was presented by Academic Dean Patricia C. Phillips at a ceremony held June 11 at Moore. The scholarship will be presented upon Gervay’s acceptance to Moore, and is worth a total of $20,000 over four years.
Gervay’s entry into the annual art competition was titled Test Group “A,” a framed collection of paper butterflies with damaged wings, notated with a number representing the tattoo that each concentration camp prisoner was given at Auschwitz. Her work was influenced by the horrifying experiments of Josef Mengele.
“The butterflies in my piece are supposed to represent the people who went through these experiments, but still persevered,” she said. “I felt it was very important to be represented.”
Gervay, the daughter of Nancy Gervay and the late Michael Gervay, plans to study graphic design after she graduates from Padua Academy.
Each year, over 400 students from a wide range of backgrounds participate in the Mordechai Anielewicz Creative Arts Competition, submitting original, creative responses to their Holocaust studies in the form of poetry, prose, painting, sculpture, music, dance and video. Named in memory of the heroic young leader who organized Jewish resistance and gave his life fighting in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943, the Mordechai Anielewicz Creative Arts Competition invites students, grades 7 through 12, to learn about the Holocaust and respond by means of creative expression. The competition is supported by the Jewish Community Relations Council of the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia, in cooperation with the Association of Jewish Holocaust Survivors in Philadelphia, the Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors Association of Philadelphia, the Sons and Daughters of Holocaust Survivors, and the Samuel Pelta Holocaust Education Endowment.
