Comments on: Living in the Site of a Remembrance

By: Jennifer Zunikoff

Jennifer Zunikoff — Thu, 31 Jul 2025 14:51:04 +0000

This is a beautifully written article that illuminates both history and your own experience as a historian who documents the shaping of memory. I am disheartened by the erasure of Jewish memory in Upper Silesia, Poland. I am uplifted by the highlighting of pre-Holocaust Jewish life in Vienna. You interwove the present and the history in both places. Thank you for sharing the primary source material. The radio announcement from Kristallnacht is particularly disturbing. So too is the Polish activist’s claim that it does not matter that the memorial plaque does not acknowledge that those murdered were Jews.

By: Maya Katzir

Maya Katzir — Sun, 27 Jul 2025 06:44:04 +0000

Wow, Lynne, what a beautiful text that weaves together poetry and history. In days filled with so much violence, it’s impossible not to think back to those times — and perhaps the most powerful way to reflect on them is the way you presented: through the lens of the individual, the people, the sounds of children, the small footsteps. Sometimes it feels like we’ve learned nothing, that the world has learned nothing — but you leave us with hope, and we’ll hold on to it, if only for a few moments.

By: Genie Glucksman

Genie Glucksman — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 21:39:24 +0000

I loved the piece. You informatively sketch out for the reader what the Leopoldstadter Temple once was until 1938 and what it meant to the Jewish community of Vienna, what happened to the Temple after the Anschluss and the subsequent Kristallnacht Pogrom and what has become of the property since the end of World War II. (I am wondering if the “right annex” apartment building is also restituted as part of Vienna’s Jewish Communal property and is reserved for Jewish residents.)

Equally impactful to the discussion of the Viennese Jewish experience, is the author’s observations of today’s Austrian citizens grappling with their Nazi past and her own personal feelings as she resides on the grounds what was once a crown jewel of the Viennese Jewish community.

Thank you for sharing.

By: Sonia Feldman

Sonia Feldman — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 11:11:28 +0000

Brilliant piece of writing so clearly describing the horrors perpetrated against the Jews, and the efforts made to preserve the memories of what was once a vibrant community in the middle of Vienna (applicable to all great cultural European cities). Thanks, Lynne, for this expose and sharing your personal experience