Four centuries later, Jewish life in Vienna is coming full circle 

Photos: MB Goldstein

Jewish Vienna saw its heyday after World War I — over ten percent of the population was Jewish, and while it was a magnet for secular culture, nearly every one of the two dozen districts had at least one shul. By 1938, 400 years of history and tradition literally went up in smoke, yet many of the old markers remain. And despite the horrors the city witnessed, Jewish life is again beginning to come around full circle

The Darker Side of Exile

Exactly 400 years since Jews were readmitted to Vienna by the Habsburg monarchs in 1624, we’re walking the streets of a city that has often served as an important center of Jewish life. The 20th century inaugurated a new heyday; when World War I forced Eastern European Jews to flee, many leaders and organizations found refuge in Vienna. In the 1920s, the city hosted Europe’s third-largest Jewish population: Roughly one out of every nine Viennese was Jewish, and 18 of the city’s 22 districts had at least one synagogue.

We’re going to look around the Second District, home to most of Vienna’s community today and a Jewish center since 1624.

The tram glides down Taborstrasse, a main thoroughfare, as pedestrians mill around cheerfully. Stores and apartment buildings line the streets, an urban milieu unrelieved by greenery. The occasional fully dressed Jewish passerby stands out among the crowd in the summer heat.

I’m apprehensive about my tour of Jewish Vienna. I love seeing where Yidden lived, hearing the stories of their lives, but something tells me that here we are about to see the darker side of our galus story. The Wall of Names memorial lists 65,000 Jews who were killed from all over Austria. The sidewalks I’m strolling on saw Jews pushed off, forced to kneel and scrub streets, taunted and beaten, and a glorious community was destroyed like a flourishing tree in sulphuric acid rain.

I leave my Holocaust ghosts and get back to the present. Historian and journalist Mrs. Rifka Junger, advisor at the Austrian Parliament, is walking with us from the busy junction of Taborstrasse along the line where the ghetto wall stood.

The first 14 Jewish houses in Vienna stood right here, in 1624. We pore over a historical map in the shadows of the surrounding 19th century buildings. The Tosafos Yom Tov served here as a rav in the original shul that used to stand between two of these buildings back in the 1620s, and he was later brought back from Prague to be imprisoned in Vienna. He mentions Vienna in his narrative of persecution entitled Megillas Eivah.

The ghetto grew fast, and in 1650, a large synagogue was built to serve some 1,500 members. But by 1670, Emperor Leopold I, a devout Catholic, had ascended the throne and expelled the Jews, who then numbered  about 3,000 people. Their houses were given to gentiles.

And the shul? In front of us, flanked by statues of the emperor, stands the St. Leopold Catholic church, its position and structure identical to the synagogue outlined on the ancient map. Emperor Leopold had the shul destroyed, but it is said he left the foundations intact for a church dedicated to his “holy” personage. We scan the Latin engraving, which mentions that the Jews “left” the area, then a more modern plaque admitting the bald truth of expulsion.

The sidewalk offers a Stolperstein, a metal paving stone usually used to memorialize Holocaust victims, but here a monument to the exiled second Jewish community of Vienna, expelled in 1670. (See the sidebar for the story of the first community of Vienna).

Our next site, on Grosse Pfarrgasse, is far more modern and also special to Lubavitch — the building where the Rebbe Rashab and his son the Rebbe Rayatz lived for some months in 1903, when they came to Vienna to meet with psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. We look up at the second-story windows of the apartment that housed the Rebbe.