Refining Our Values

K

arl Nehammer was born and raised in Vienna and educated in a community framework that emphasized discipline, intense study, and moral responsibility — something that clearly influenced his political path and later decisions.

He joined the military, where he rose to the rank of lieutenant, and then worked as a trainer in strategic communication for the defense ministry.

After leaving the army, he met up with August Wöginger, an experienced politician and longtime member of parliament, who was also a friend. “He was the one who pulled me in,” says the former chancellor.

Eventually Nehammer was appointed Secretary-General of the Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP).

“My main mission was to build our story,” he said. “To refine the values, shape a clear platform, and most importantly, to know how to speak to the public in a language they understand, without insulting their intelligence.”

While he was always fascinated by politics, his dream was to work behind the scenes: to advise, guide, strategize, and help public figures find their path. He never planned to reach the top, but it happened in 2021, when Austria’s government found itself in the midst of a political storm: Sebastian Kurz, the young, charismatic chancellor who took office at just 31, was forced to resign after a corruption scandal that shook the country.

According to the allegations, Kurz and his team used public funds to buy favorable coverage in the newspaper Österreich, including financing polls and articles presented as objective journalism but actually serving the political interests of his party. The allegedly biased coverage occurred between 2016 and 2018, when he was foreign minister and later chancellor. As a result of the allegations, law enforcement raided Kurz’s office, the finance ministry, and the Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP) headquarters in Vienna.

Public and political pressure mounted, factions on the left demanded his resignation, and in the end, Kurz decided to step down to prevent chaos and ensure the country’s stability.

In the sudden vacuum, the ÖVP needed a stable figure to lead during this challenging period. They chose Alexander Schallenberg, the foreign minister and close ally of Kurz, known for his hardline stance on immigration and regarded as a friend of Israel.

Schallenberg, who had not sought the role of chancellor, suddenly found himself at the forefront of the political stage. He stated from the outset that he saw his position as a temporary solution until a new leader was elected for the ÖVP. Karl Nehammer, who was then serving as Minister of the Interior, was unanimously elected as the new party leader.

As is customary in Austria’s political tradition, the leader of the largest party in the coalition becomes chancellor. Accordingly, Nehammer was sworn in as chancellor in December 2021. (And in case you were wondering, Kurz is already hinting at a comeback and has meanwhile partnered in a promising Israeli startup.)

Nehammer began his term during a challenging period, when there was a need to stabilize the political system after recent upheavals.

“I wrestled with the decision until the last moment,” he recalls. “Some people told me, ‘This is your moment — you have to take the position.’ But it was never something I aspired to. I always saw myself as someone who works behind the scenes — a strategist, not a political star.”

Yet as the days passed and the political entanglement deepened the governmental paralysis, the pressure increased.

“In the party they kept telling me, ‘This isn’t the time for hesitation — the country needs leadership now.’ I tried to dodge it, but eventually I realized it wasn’t about personal desire, but rather about responsibility. Sometimes, you don’t choose your destiny. Destiny chooses you.”

Complacency Costs Lives

N

ehammer says his first encounter with Jews was when his parents took him to a symposium about Theodor Herzl at Vienna City Hall.“

I was 16, and although I’d read about Jews in history books, I’d never met a Jew that I knew of,” he says. But once he was appointed Minister of the Interior, he came face-to-face with the reality of what it means to be Jewish in Europe.
Persecution and harassment motivated by anti-Semitism blended with attempts by terrorist organizations — mostly ISIS affiliates — to carry out deadly attacks against Jews.

The steps he took revealed his security-oriented mindset, his uncompromising stance against fundamentalist threats, and his deep concern for the Jewish community’s safety.

After a deadly shooting attack in Vienna in November 2020 in which four people were murdered and more than 20 injured, Karl Nehammer had to deal not only with the public shock but also with a resounding systemic failure. It turned out that Austrian intelligence services had received early warnings about the attacker’s intentions — he was an ISIS activist — but had failed to translate that information into preventive action.

Instead of passing the blame, Nehammer took responsibility. He admitted the intelligence failure with rare candor, called for an independent external report, and understood that what was needed wasn’t just a patch, but a fundamental overhaul.

Shortly after, he ordered the dismantling of the federal counterterrorism office, the central agency responsible for handling internal threats which, in his view, had become bloated, rigid, and pretty much ineffective.

In place of the old agency, a new security and intelligence service was established, based on advanced models from leading Western countries. The focus shifted to real-time intelligence, monitoring extremists on social media, and better integration between intelligence collection units and decision-makers on the ground.

Nehammer’s move was not just a bureaucratic reform; it marked a turning point in Austria’s security doctrine — an acknowledgment that jihadist terrorism is not a theoretical threat but a real and present danger in the heart of Europe.

“It was a moment when we realized that complacency costs lives,” Nehammer said at the time. “My responsibility as Minister of the Interior doesn’t end with the shock — it begins with it.”

At the same time, he dramatically tightened security around all Jewish institutions in the country, including synagogues, schools, and memorial sites. During his term, he was responsible not only for law enforcement and domestic security agencies but also for the preservation of Holocaust memorial sites, including the Mauthausen and Gusen concentration camps. These camps serve as chilling testimony for Austrians to the horrors of World War II and the Holocaust that took place within their own country.

Be There in Person

S

ince entering politics, Nehammer has been one of the most prominent supporters of the Jewish state, and one of the first world leaders to visit Israel in the days following the Hamas attack.

“I felt I had to be there,” he says. “I couldn’t just issue a statement and condemn the attack — I had to be with the Jewish people in that moment.”

When he stood alongside Prime Minister Netanyahu in Jerusalem and declared “Austria fully supports Israel,” he says it wasn’t just diplomacy, it was conviction.
“I had to show the world that there are no two sides here. There is a side of terror, and there is a side of victims. And the Western world needs to stop getting confused.”

“It was important to me,” he adds, “to send a clear and unequivocal message that we see ourselves as bearing responsibility for the Jewish people — not only in Israel, but especially in Austria, because of our shared history.”

Nehammer arrived in Israel with the Prime Minister of the Czech Republic. The two visited hospitals, met with the wounded, embraced bereaved parents and survivors of the massacre, and heard firsthand the stories that the local population was still struggling to process.

But the most significant moments of the visit took place far from the cameras, during a closed meeting with Prime Minister Netanyahu. At one point, the chancellor surprised everyone by placing a red folder on the table containing classified intelligence materials: a map of threats against Jewish communities across Europe.

The materials revealed a steep rise in anti-Semitic incidents, the emergence of extremist networks among immigrants from Muslim countries, and disturbing reports of planned attacks targeting synagogues and Jewish schools.

Nehammer didn’t stop there. He presented a comprehensive plan to combat these threats.
Sources who were present at the meeting described how Netanyahu and his team were stunned by the depth and precision of the Austrian intelligence community’s work.
The visit didn’t go unnoticed.

While other European leaders searched for cautious, politically-correct wording so as not to anger the Arab street, Nehammer stood in Jerusalem and declared:
“Hamas is ISIS, and there are no two sides here. There is good and there is evil. Austria stands with Israel.”
This statement drew criticism and attacks in the European media and from progressive circles, but he refused to back down.

As soon as he heard about the massacre, Nehammer says he instructed his team to prepare for a trip to Israel. “I didn’t feel that sending a statement was enough,” he says. “I felt I had to be there with you at this difficult time.”

Afterward, Nehammer spoke with European Union members.

“I told them, ‘Look what the State of Israel endured in a single day at the hands of a terrorist organization that murdered, burned, and slaughtered small babies — exactly like in the Holocaust, only in the State of Israel. What do you expect it to do? How do you expect it to behave?’

“But you know, they didn’t have a decent answer. The problem is that the European Union always shifts the blame to Israel. They forget that the Palestinians use civilians as human shields. How can you blame Israel for civilian casualties when Hamas itself uses civilians as human shields and embeds itself in the civilian population?”

But when it comes to the Middle East, Nehammer says, there’s often no one to talk to.

“After October 7, when I was in Israel,” he says, “I told Prime Minister Netanyahu, ‘Israel has already lost the war in the media and on social networks. The media has completely distorted the narrative. We know the inherent hostility, yet in the first few days, there was still some empathy toward Israel. Even the harshest critics couldn’t ignore Hamas’s cruelty. Where did it vanish so quickly?’

“And do you know what Netanyahu answered? He said, ‘Our intelligence units presented us with global data showing that just a week after the attack, there was already more solidarity with the Palestinians than with Israel. That means, immediately after the massacre, people started blaming Israel.’ ”

Nehammer says that no one realized just how much social media would change the way people consume information.

“Democracies weren’t prepared for the information revolution, and even now we still don’t really know how to deal with it,” he says. “Social media is flooded with massive amounts of unchecked information. Anyone can claim anything, fabricate lies, and create a certain atmosphere. And now there’s artificial intelligence, which adds a whole new dimension of fake news.

“The most worrying thing is that of all the Islamist terrorists we’ve caught in Austria, none of them became radicalized in a mosque. They became radicalized online. Everyone who pledged allegiance to ISIS did so after watching scripted propaganda on the Internet.”

So why, I struggle to understand, hasn’t the penny dropped?

“Because in Europe,” Nehammer explains, “we got used to peace. For years, people here thought terrorism was something that only happened somewhere else. There was no real understanding of the threat, and even when there were attacks in Europe, each country handled it separately. There was no unified effort by the EU to deal with it as a whole.”

And what needs to happen for that to change?

“Probably only a truly massive disaster will shake them awake.”

You Have My Word

IN

addition to meetings with political leaders on his trip to Israel at the start of the war, Nehammer also met with families of the hostages. Then came the name that personally shook him: Tal Shoham, an Israeli-Austrian citizen who was kidnapped from his home in Kibbutz Be’eri. Nehammer didn’t wait for someone else to take the lead: He immediately launched an intensive effort to secure his release.

The Shohams were visiting family on Kibbutz Be’eri when terrorists infiltrated and went on their bloody rampage. His wife, two children, and three other family members were also kidnapped, yet were freed a month later. His parents-in-law were among the approximately 1,200 people murdered by Hamas terrorists during the onslaught.

“When I received the report,” he says, “I ordered all systems to be activated on three fronts: diplomatic, intelligence, and media. To me, he wasn’t just a hostage. He was my citizen.”

“On the first front,” he recalled, “I held talks with leaders who have influence over Hamas, including Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and senior officials in Qatar, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates. To each of them I conveyed the same message: ‘Austria will not stay silent. We have a citizen being held in Gaza, and you must help.’ ”

The second front was intelligence and diplomacy: “We appointed a special envoy, Peter Launsky-Tieffenthal, and sent him to influential countries to meet key figures and ensure the issue didn’t fall between the cracks. After each of my conversations with foreign leaders, Launsky-Tieffenthal was already en route to the relevant country to knock on the right doors.”

On the public awareness front, Nehammer and his spokespeople made sure Tal Shoham’s name didn’t vanish from the headlines.

“We understood that the moment the media forgets the name, the pressure drops,” he says. “Tal became a symbol, not just of tragedy, but of responsibility. My responsibility as a leader was to fight for him, just as I would fight for any other citizen.”

Even when it became clear his term was nearing its end, he never put down the small flag bearing Shoham’s name.

“If one of my citizens is held by terrorists, that’s not a private matter for the family,” Nehammer says. “It’s a national matter.”

Shoham was released in February after 505 days in captivity. Behind the publicized efforts to release the hostage stood a man who worked quietly behind the scenes: Daniel Kapp, Nehammer’s close advisor, an Austrian Jew and one of the most experienced and leading political strategists in the country.

Kapp, who has worked with Nehammer since his days as Secretary-General of the People’s Party back in 2006, is considered a key figure in shaping the former chancellor’s public policy, especially on sensitive issues like Austria-Israel relations, the fight against anti-Semitism, and Vienna’s foreign relations with the Jewish world.

In Tal Shoham’s case, Kapp flew to Israel and personally accompanied the family, provided them with media support, coordinated between political figures and major media outlets, and ensured the story remain in the public consciousness, not just in Israel, but internationally. Press briefings, family member appearances, and behind-the-scenes pressure all passed through his desk.

Another important figure who has accompanied the former chancellor is Rabbi Yaacov Frenkel, a member of the Jewish Council in Vienna — Austria’s official Jewish leadership body — and who deserves a large share of the credit for the growth of the Vienna’s frum community.

Frenkel tells me about the complex relationship between the Jewish community in Austria and the People’s Party (ÖVP): From the time the People’s Party was founded, even in its previous incarnation before the Holocaust, it was a well-known anti-Semitic party, and after the Holocaust, Kurt Waldheim, who was an undesirable figure throughout the world due to his Nazi past, served as president of Austria on the party’s behalf. Therefore, Jews were traditionally not big fans of this party, to say the least.

That changed in 2013, when Rabbi Frenkel met former chancellor Sebastian Kurz by chance at an event, when Kurz was serving as secretary of state and running for a position in the Austrian parliament.

“He then asked for my open support for his candidacy and his party, as I was the representative of religious Jews in the Jewish government in Austria,” Frenkel recalls. “When we were about to say goodbye, he suddenly asked me, ‘What do you want me to do for the Jews?’ I told him that I had only one request: ‘Open your door to the Jewish community in Austria.’ He immediately told me, ‘You have my word.’ This is how relations began between the People’s Party and the Jews of Austria.

“Since then,” Rabbi Frankel continues, “the attitude toward Jews in this party has changed 180 degrees, and with Chancellor Nehammer it was the peak of loyalty to the Jews and the State of Israel, more than we’ve ever experienced from any other Austrian party.”

It’s not so simple today, with far-right parties sweeping across Europe gaining electoral power on one hand, and Muslim immigration on the other, bringing in a mix of a new type of anti-Semitism.

Nehammer, for his part, will still follow his conscience, even if it’s outside the limelight, pulling strings from the other side of the curtain. When asked if he sees himself returning to politics, he says, “I’m not ruling anything out. But right now, I prefer to stay behind the scenes. I’ve done my part, at least for now. I hope I’ve left some lessons for others to follow.”

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1059)