Rewind: Jewish Vienna Walking Tour I & II

I took two walking tours of Vienna that began at Schwedenplatz right outside the McDonalds. Our guide began the tour by informing us about the tour in Vienna’s Bermuda Traingle, where tourists get lost in the bars.

The first documented Jew in Vienna’s history. Schlomo the master minter was the first Jew in Vienna in the thirteenth Century who handled the money Vienna collected from King Richard the Lionheart’s ransom. Returning crusaders however killed Schlomo on their trek home.

We were taken to the house, where the first Jewish family lived during the fourteenth Century In 1400 there was “some kind of a ghetto” built in the Leopoldstadt with the eruz walls. In 1671 Leopold expelled the Jews under the influence of the Spanish Inquisitions and the urging of his Spanish wife and who blamed the Jews for her four miscarriages. Then in 1870s Jews gained some rights in Vienna under the Tolerance Laws of Josef II.

Next we were taken to the Stadttempel. It was built under the toleration acts of Josef II, which regulated that any non-Catholic Church must not be seen from the outside. It is the founding synagogue of a choir led by Schöbert. Because of its hidden location, it was the only synagogue to survive the November Pogrom of 1938, suffering only occupation, pillaging and ransacking by the Nazis. In 1945 Rabbi Löf from Prague reactivated the Synagogue as a Jewish house of worship. Also in 1948 the synagogue held the exhumed body of Theodor Herzl, the founding father of Zionism, before his remains were brought to Israel for burial and final resting place. He was originally buried after his death in 1904 in the Döblinger Friedhof, in his parent’s grave.

Next on tour was the kosher corner. Kosher laws require the separation of meat and dairy. Representing this kosher law are the stores for meat and the bagel and cream store on opposite corners of Seitenstettengasse and Judengasse. It was the Kosher and cleanliness laws that kept the Jews slightly cleaner than other non-Jews, which resulted in a few less deaths during plague years. Jews were hence blamed for causing the plagues and suffered increased persecution.

After that we proceeded to the Niemals Vergessen memorial at the Gestapo house. The memorial is built on the adjacent corner of the location of the Gestapo house, which was destroyed during allied air raids in 1945. The Gestapo House was originally Das Hotel Metropol, a hotel owned by a Jew and confiscated by the Nazis in 1938. Seven hundred Nazis worked in the former hotel. The apartment house built to replace the destroyed Gestapo Hause ordained with a plaque to remember 1945 and the end of the cruel Nazis.

The memorial here was built to remember the political and Jewish victims of fascism. It was built of stones dug out of the Mauthhausen Labor Camp by its prisoners. There is a statue of a single prisoner to represent Austria’s resurrection, wiederauferstanden, from death and hell. There used to be an iron bar across the front that represented the homosexual victims but it has been removed as a form of protest, because the homosexual victims wanted their own memorial. Thence then established a mobile memorial (which I would like to find out more about, the guide could not expound on it).

The difference between the tours takes us from here to a different part of the city. One takes us to Judenplatz, the other across the Danube Canal to Leopoldstadt. In the Judenplatz we find the Resistance Archive close by, Rachel Whiteread’s Memorial to the 65,000 murdered Austrian Jews, the Art Forum and Lessing, the man on tolerance. The other tour takes us to Weg der Erinnerung. This second tour is a tour of plaques that mostly commemorate buildings, synagogues and people that are no longer in existence—victims of fascism. The copper plates of the Memory’s Way number over 120 (and always increasing) throughout the city, mostly in Leopoldstadt, One of the plaques is in a schoolyard, the Nazi’s used this schoolyard as the meeting place for Vienna’s Jew just before deportation. The headmasters of the school do not like the constant memory of Vienna’s cooperation with the Nazis and had it covered with the bike rack. An American complained to the city of Vienna and now the school must keep it viewable and accessible to viewers. The controversies of memory are very interesting: some are ashamed to remember and want to forget and others need to remember to gain closure.