Frank Meisler
Frank Meisler (30 December 1925 – 24 March 2018) was an Israeli architect and sculptor. He was born in the Free City of Danzig (now Gdańsk, Poland) and fled the Nazis as a child on the Kindertransport in 1939. He grew up in London, where his parents were killed at Auschwitz. He was educated at Harrow, served in the Royal Air Force, and studied architecture at the University of Manchester, helping to build Heathrow Airport.
Meisler moved to Israel in the late 1950s and opened a workshop and gallery in the Old City of Jaffa. He created many public sculptures, including a memorial to Ben-Gurion in Israel and Eternal Kiev in Kyiv. He made several Kindertransport memorials: The Arrival at Liverpool Street in London (2006), Trains to Life – Trains to Death in Berlin (2008), The Departure in Gdańsk (2009), Crossing to Life at the Hook of Holland (2011), and The Final Parting in Hamburg (Dammtor, 2011).
He also designed the interior of the Holocaust Memorial Synagogue in Moscow and produced sculptures for Russia’s National War Memorial. A memorial of the death march and murders at Palmnicken was unveiled in Kaliningrad in 2011. He published an autobiography, On the Vistula Facing East (1996).
Meisler received several honors, including the Franz Kafka gold medal (1999), honorary academies from Russia and Ukraine (2002), and Germany’s Officer’s Cross of the Order of Merit (2012) for his work in German-Jewish and German-Israeli relations. He was awarded the Freedom of the City of London.
He married Batya (Phillis) Hochman in 1953, and they had two daughters, Michal and Marit. Frank Meisler died in Jaffa, Israel, in 2018 and is buried in the Givat Brenner cemetery in Israel. A street sign in his hometown of Gdańsk honors his memory.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 16:24 (CET).