Seasoned activist Rabbiner Yaacov Frenkel dreams big for Austria’s Jews

By Binyamin Rose, Vienna
Photos: Ouriel Morgensztern

The streets of Vienna are paved with reminders of the Jewish life that once flourished in Austria’s capital.

This includes the Stolpersteine — literally “stumbling blocks,” copper plaques that gleam like gold when the sun strikes them. Elevated slightly above the sidewalks, the plaques are emblazoned with the names of Jews killed or deported by the Nazis in the Holocaust, and are situated near the homes they used to own.

Berggasse 19, in Vienna’s ninth district, is another Jewish landmark. Once the home and office of Sigmund Freud, the site is now a museum commemorating the life and times of the “father of psychoanalysis.” Freud was fortunate enough to flee to safety in England three months after Nazi Germany annexed Austria in the Anschluss.

Tour guides will always take their clientele to experience those aspects of Jewish Vienna. But there is one relatively new site that Rabbiner Yaacov Frenkel insisted was a must-see on my recent visit to Vienna, because it both tells a vivid tale of the city’s traumatic past while serving as a symbol of its revival.

It’s located at Malzgasse 16 in Vienna’s second district. At street level, it is a dreary, pinkish-gray building. Most of the concrete has been peeled away from the lower level, revealing a layer of bricks that look to be arranged haphazardly. An unsightly fire escape blocks half of the building. The only giveaway that something dynamic is happening here is the fleet of bicycles and scooters arrayed neatly underneath the fire escape landing.

The rest of the story begins below street level. The building is home to Vienna’s Machsike Hadass cheder. Before the Holocaust, it served as a multipurpose building, housing a Talmud Torah, synagogue, and Jewish museum. The Nazis confiscated it for their purposes after Kristallnacht in 1938 and obliterated every trace of Jewish history.

Or so they thought.

Seven years ago, the heating system in the building failed. Repairmen found they couldn’t access the heating pipes because they were blocked by earth and concrete. They began drilling to find the source of the blockage. Visitors can still see some small holes the size of a drill bit on the floor of the school’s basketball court where repairs began.

Arieh Bauer, secretary-general of Machsike Hadass, one of the largest chareidi umbrella organizations in Vienna, escorted me and Rabbiner Frenkel around on a muggy late-summer morning. Bauer recalled the repair work that took place in the winter of 2015-2016, and said he would stop by a few times a day to supervise the workers. Once they drilled a big enough hole, he decided to take a look for himself.

“I crawled in on my stomach and took some pictures. I felt like the Mars Rover,” he said. He couldn’t believe what he saw. “Suddenly I saw coal and ashes on the floor. I saw memorial stones from the shul with Jewish names on them, and I started to feel like I was right back in the middle of Kristallnacht.”

Today, the basement area that once housed the shul has been fully excavated of an estimated 700 tons of rubble that Nazis used to cover up their vicious crimes.

To this day, some of the brickwork is charred from the fire that ravaged it the night of Kristallnacht. If you close your eyes, you can almost hear echoes of the heartfelt prayers that must have been uttered there. For now, it’s the melodic voices of Torah study that resonate from two stories above, from the breath of the tinokos shel beis rabban, which serves as sweet revenge for the ravages that lie below.

When Rabbiner Frenkel arrived in Vienna 20 years ago after accepting a teaching job, no one would have dreamed that a thriving cheder would once again exist on this plot of land. The curse of Kristallnacht has been transformed into a blessing, not only on this site but at multiple locations in Vienna. Rabbiner Frenkel deserves a large share of the credit for the growth of the community that occurred on his watch during the time he also served as managing director of Vienna’s Machsike Hadass institutions. Aside from the cheder, Machsike Hadass runs Vienna’s only yeshivah ketanah and chareidi Bais Yaakov, in addition to other synagogues and mikvaos, and it has its own kashrus supervision. This growth has made Vienna an ideal destination for Orthodox Jewish tourists, in addition to the estimated 8,000 Jews who make Vienna their year-round home.

That number swelled by more than 1,000 this year with the influx of 1,000 Ukrainian Jews who fled their land after the Russian invasion. Along with his colleague, Moshe Starik, Rabbiner Frenkel led the European office of the Vaad Hatzalah rescue organization’s fundraising drive on behalf of Ukrainian Jewish refugees worldwide.

“We received a large portion of the Orthodox refugees,” says Rabbi Arie Folger, former chief rabbi of Vienna and a founding member of its beis din. “Rabbi Frenkel organized truckloads of food and clothing and all sorts of supplies. He is someone who cares deeply about his fellow Jews.”

Rabbi Yermiya Goldman, rosh yeshivah at the Machsike Hadass yeshivah ketanah for the past 14 years, and a grandson of the famed Rav Shlomka of Zvehil, also expressed admiration for how Rabbiner Frenkel took on this special project.

“He is a man of the people,” Rabbi Goldman said. “He always makes himself available to help with both personal and community matters, and that even includes finding help for an avreich who’s struggling to pay his electric bill.”