An Austrian shul gutted by the Nazis is finally restored

Photos: Burgenland Memschala archives

November 9, 1938

Kristallnacht. The Night of the Broken Glass. Nearly 300 shuls attacked, many burned down to the ground. Hundreds of Jews beaten, arrested, murdered.

On that night of destruction, a shul in Kobersdorf, a small market town in Austria, was also attacked. Its stained glass windows were shattered, its interior destroyed. Only the walls survived.

Glass is the most fragile of materials. It can be easily broken, smashed into tiny fragments. But at the same time, it is the most enduring of materials: It can never be fully destroyed.

And like glass shards ground into the dirt but never completely obliterated, the small shul in Kobersdorf, which survived that most terrifying of nights, has, after more than 80 years lying desolate and desecrated, come back to life.

One day this summer, a group of Austrians, Jews and non-Jews alike, came together in the beautifully rebuilt and renewed Kobersdorf shul to celebrate – and to remember.

For the story the shul tells spans hundreds of years, in a cycle of exile and salvation, banishment and return. Under the newly-painted walls lie layer upon layer of history, of building, devastation, and rebuilding. This is the story of the construction, destruction, and reconstruction of the Kobersdorf shul — and of those who, dedicated to the memories of a lost world, made it possible.