Jewish Heritage

VIENNA - A Place of Remembrance

Now that Simon Wiesenthal's idea of erecting a memorial for the Austrian victims of the Shoah has been realised on Vienna's Judenplatz in October 2000, a place of remembrance was created that is unique in Europe. It combines Rachel Whiteread's Memorial and the excavations of the medieval synagogue with the Museum on Medieval Jewish Life to form a commemorative entity. The Memorial by Rachel Whiteread is a reinforced concrete cube with a base of about 30 by 20 feet and a height of nearly 13 feet, the outer sides of which are in the form of library shelves. Around the bottom of the monument are engraved the names of the places in which Austrian Jews were put to death during the Nazi regime.

The Memorial is linked to the Information Rooms on the Shoah on the ground floor of the new museum in the Misrachi house (1st district, Judenplatz 8), whose contents have been provided by the Documentation Archives of the Austrian Resistance. The multimedia presentation consists of the names and data of 65,000 Jews, together with the circumstances that led to their persecution and death. Another room on the ground floor is dedicated to the artist herself, illustrating the artistic development of the Memorial with sketches, models and preliminary studies.

The main section of the new Museum Judenplatz Vienna, which is run as an annex by the Jewish Museum Vienna, is made up of three permanent exhibition rooms on medieval Jewish life in Vienna and the excavations of the medieval synagogue. The exhibition features a multimedia presentation of religious, cultural and social life of the Viennese Jews of the Middle Ages until their expulsion and death in 1420/21 during the First Viennese Gesera, as it is called.

The Medieval Synagogue (Exhibition Room): The late medieval synagogue was built around the middle of the 13th century. In the following 150 years it was enlarged and remodelled on several occasions and ultimately had a surface area of around 4320 sq.ft., making it one of the largest synagogues of its time. After the pogrom in 1420/21 the synagogue was systematically destroyed so that only the foundations and the floor remained. These were excavated by the City of Vienna Department of Urban Archaeology from 1995 to 1998. The archaeological exhibition room shows the remnants of the synagogue, which consisted of three rooms, before the last major enlargement. A few ceramic floor tiles have also survived.