On Monday, Alex and I visited one of the two locations of the Jüdisches Museum Wien. On Wednesday, we visited the other location. (The ticket grants you access to both museums in a four-day window.) To distinguish the two, I will refer to the first as the Dorotheergasse museum and the second as the Judenplatz museum.
Founded in 1896, it was the first Jewish museum in the world. After the Anschluss (the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany) in 1938, the museum’s artifacts were seized and redistributed to other museums. The artifacts that could be recovered were returned to the Jüdisches Museum across the back half of the twentieth century.
These original artifacts are displayed in the top floor of the museum on Dorotheergasse. They include torah crowns, mantles, shields, and pointers; candlesticks; seder plates; and tzedakah (charity) boxes salvaged from different Jewish communities across the former Austria-Hungarian empire. There’s also a small “antisemitism collection,” mostly figurines and canes with Jewish caricatures for the handles (the long nose creating the handle). I didn’t realize the significance of this at the time, but all the items in the antisemitism collection were pointed backward, away from the viewer. You could only see them because of mirrors on the back of the case. This was designed to force visitors to face their reflections while viewing these unpleasant artifacts.
Together, the exhibits in the two museums trace three periods of Viennese Jewish history. First, the Jews who lived in medieval Vienna from 1194 to 1420/21. Next, the Jews who returned to Vienna until they were expelled in 1670. Finally, the “third wave” of Viennese Jews, a community that flourished from the late 18th century until the Nazi era.
The first documented Jew in Vienna was Shlom, a mint master, who lived there as early as 1194. The first Jewish community lived in one section of Vienna near what today is called Judenplatz. There was once a great synagogue there. While excavating the site for the museum, they discovered the ruins of the synagogue, and they are now on display in the basement. This first Jewish community was expelled by Duke Albert V in the 1420-21 “Vienna gesera.”
When Jews returned to Vienna a couple centuries later, they were restricted to a ghetto north of the Danube Canal. We have documentation that there were once 132 Jewish households in this region. In 1670, Emperor Leopold I called for a second expulsion of Jews. The former Jewish ghetto was renamed Leopoldstadt, which is still the district’s name today. It also, interestingly, remains a center of Jewish life, including for the city’s Hasidic community.
Again, Jews slowly returned to Vienna. In 1782, Emperor Joseph II’s Edict of Tolerance extended more rights to them. By the late 19th/early 20th century, Vienna was 10% Jewish (about 185,000 people). I find that remarkable. 10% Jewish! I think the only modern city that compares, putting aside those in Israel, is New York City, which is between 9-13% Jewish according to different Internet sources. In contrast, there are only about 7,000 Jews in Vienna today, which is something like 0.4% of the population. Most of those Jews came from farther east, largely former Soviet Union countries.
Some Jewish families (most notably, the Rothchilds) managed to rise to positions of wealth and power, becoming close with the Habsburgs. The Habsburg monarchy protected some Jews because they played critical roles in funding wars and the construction of palaces. One plaque said something about how Franz Joseph I realized “Jews were his most loyal subjects.”
That might sound nice, but of course, this is not a happy story.
In 1938, Austria became part of Nazi Germany. On the nights of November 9 and 10 of that year, Jewish businesses and synagogues were looted and set on fire. Many Viennese Jews were arrested. You may know this event as the November Pogrom or Kristallnacht. Over the next couple of years, thousands of Viennese Jews, including Sigmund Freud, left Austria. Starting in 1941, Nazis forcibly deported the remaining Jews to concentration camps, where most of them were murdered.
Interestingly, one synagogue, the Stadttempel, survived World War II. Due to orders of Emperor Joseph II, it was not allowed to be built with its façade directly on the street. Instead, it was built behind a row of apartments, so that you wouldn’t know it was there. This had confused us when we walked by it, as it really doesn’t look like a house of worship is there. Ironically, the forced concealment saved the temple because the Nazis couldn’t destroy it without setting fire to the entire block of apartments.
For most of the post-war 20th century, Austrians refused to accept any responsibility for the Holocaust. Austrians embraced a “first victim narrative,” viewing themselves as Hitler’s/Nazis Germany’s “first victim.” Only in 1991, when the Austrian chancellor finally issued a public apology on behalf of the nation did Austria accept responsibility for the Holocaust.
In the three decades since, Austria has done some work to atone for its crimes. The Holocaust Remembrance Project describes Austria as making “vast, if belated, progress on Holocaust remembrance” while also noting that Austria remains one of the most antisemitic countries in Western Europe. Descendants of Nazi victims in Austria can now apply for Austrian citizenship, there is a National Fund to compensate victims, and there has been some effort to return property, artwork, and other artifacts to the original owners (or their descendants).
There are also a couple Holocaust memorials in Vienna. One sits outside the Jewish Museum in Judenplatz. The books are supposed to represent Jews being “people of the book.” They are turned outward, unreadable, to represent the lives and memories lost.
Just last November, the city inaugurated another Holocaust memorial—the Shoah Gedenkmaurn—in a city park. It reminded me of the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, DC, as it is also composed of walls listing the names of those killed. But unlike the Vietnam memorial, due to the oval created by the walls, you can’t turn away from the names. As Alex put it while we were standing there, “there’s no way to escape being confronted by a wall of death.”
We walked around the memorial and read many of the names. We found a section with several dozen Blums. We also found a couple dozen Weinstocks (my maternal grandfather’s name). I do not know if I am related to these Weinstocks, though I believe the Weinstocks who immigrated to the US came from Galicia, a region of eastern Europe that was once part of Austria-Hungary.