Ursula Merchant Ursula Merchant Ursula Merchant (born September 10, 1932 in Rostock) is a German Las Vegas-based performance artist, conceptual artist, carpenter. She is probably best known for her series 'Forkin' Hell'. Merchant was born "Ursula S. Wernerberger" in post-war Rostock. Her parents were of Russian extraction. Her father abandoned Ursula and her mother early in Ursula's youth, when he returned from a prisoner of war camp after World War II. Her family moved to a remote village in the Black Mountains of Switzerland after the house next to theirs was destroyed during the bombing at the close of World War II.
Ursula Merkin Ursula Merkin Ursula Merkin (1919–2006) was a German-born American philanthropist. She was born in Frankfurt, Germany to Isaac Breuer, a noted German Rabbi, as Ursula (Sara) Breuer. In 1933, at the age of fourteen, she left Germany with her family for Palestine. She remained there with her father, to whom she was very close, until his death in Jerusalem in 1946, at the age of 63. Shortly thereafter, she emigrated to the United States, where she found a teaching position at a Jewish girls' school in Paterson, New Jersey. In 1950 she met and married Hermann Merkin, a German-Jewish businessman,