Every day, I watch as people pause to look at the four enormous white pillars in the street in front of my apartment building. These pillars represent the original pillars of the Leopoldstädter Temple, once the largest synagogue in Vienna with the capacity to hold services for over 3,000 congregants.

For the last five weeks, I’ve been living in a flat in what was once the right annex of the Temple. Walking into the building for the first time made me smile. It felt like it was meant to be – a Holocaust researcher staying in a site of memory.

The magnificent temple, designed in the Moorish Revival style, was completed in 1858. The building was designed by Ludwig Christian Friedrich (von) Förster, who was not Jewish but his work on synagogues in both Budapest and Vienna gave him a seat on the Vienna city council.

 

It was more than a synagogue; it was a place for the community. The complex also included a mikvah, meeting rooms, learning rooms, and a library.

Every day walking by what used to be a grand complex of Jewish life, I imagine what it looked like back then. I imagine what it would have sounded like walking in on a Friday evening for Shabbat prayers, what it would have felt like sitting in the great library.

Today as I walk by, I can still hear the laughter of children. I hear Hebrew, Yiddish, and German all mixed into voices of the new, revived Jewish community of Leopoldstädt. These young vibrant children, rushing by in the morning on their way to school, are a modern echo of a community that once was.

The Destruction of the Leopoldstädter Temple

The Anschluss: the annexation of Austria into the German Reich on March 12, 1938. The day that changed everything for the Jewish community of Vienna.

On the Eve of the Anschluss, the Jewish community in Vienna was vibrant, assimilated, and acculturated. Many of the 206,000 Jews living in Vienna were registered as members of the community. During the Great War (WWI), many Jewish men served in the imperial army.

The Anschluss changed all of that. The German anti-Jewish laws that went into effect almost immediately caught the community by surprise. Within five days of the Anschluss, the central offices of the Jewish community were closed. The 1935 Nuremberg laws were instated. Jewish humiliation and forced labour became a daily sight in Vienna. Jewish men and women, caught in the street, were forced on their hands and knees to clean and scrub the sidewalks.

By August of 1938, the Central Agency for Jewish Emigration (Zentralstelle für jüdische Auswanderung in Wien) was established. The agency, overseen by Adolf Eichmann, forced as many able Jews as possible to emigrate out of Austria.

On the night of the 9th of November 1938, Jewish synagogues, businesses and shops were vandalised, destroyed, and set on fire all over the Reich, including in Vienna. The Leopoldstädter Temple was not spared. On the morning of November 10, the synagogue was set on fire. The main building was completely destroyed. The annexes on both sides remained mostly intact but were ransacked and vandalised.

One of the few recordings from the event, a radio report made from outside the temple, is a disturbing insight into the rampant hatred of Jews of the time. “The outraged inhabitants, Aryan inhabitants of this district, did not miss the opportunity, after this heinous crime in Paris, to show their abysmal hatred towards Judaism here too. The Jewish Temple was engulfed in flames in a matter of minutes.”[1]

What was left

The Israelitische Kultusgemeinde Wien (IKG, the Jewish Community of Vienna) cleared away the rubble of the main temple building. For some time, they tried to keep the school running in the still intact left annex, but the anti-Jewish laws soon forced the school to close. For some time afterwards, the building was used as a day nursery. From 1942, it was a children’s home. Some of the teens from the home found work nearby and for a while, were protected from deportations.

A children’s hospital was established in the right annex in 1941. It was the only place where Jewish children could receive any kind of healthcare during the war years.

Today

Today, the left annex is home to a synagogue, a Jewish religious school, and a mikveh. The right annex was destroyed at the end of the war and rebuilt in 1955. Now it serves as an apartment building – the very building in which I have been staying. There is a plaque in the main entrance corridor commemorating the beautiful temple that once graced this site.
The four white pillars outside are a monument erected in 1998 by the Jewish Austrian architect Martin Kohlbauer. The square in which the original main building stood was left empty, a contemplative courtyard between the two annexes.

Photos and texts explaining what once stood here are laced in the metal gate in front of the courtyard. On the side, stumbling stones have been placed in the street, representing some of the people who lived in the left annex during the war.

People stop and read the writings on the gate, looking at the pillars and taking their time with this place of memory. Sometimes I hear them talking quietly about what they have just read. Sometimes they are silent.

Once in a while, a guided tour stops to contemplate the monument. These mainly Jewish groups listen as their guide tries to describe the grandeur of the complex that once stood here, the vibrancy of Jewish life that occurred within it, and the scale of the destruction.

Holding on to Jewish memory

In the weeks before coming to Vienna, I attended a conference in Upper Silesia in Poland. After the conference, I explored some of the many sites of memory located in that region, including some of the Auschwitz subcamps. I was unsettled by the extent to which the Jewish presence is being erased there. Many of the plaques at Auschwitz subcamps mention Polish prisoners but not Jews, and a local activist who created one of them told us that it didn’t matter. In some places where Jews died in death marches, they are buried under crosses.

Living inside a preserved site of memory in Vienna immediately after that experience created a dissonance I’m still trying to process. In Austria, the relationship to their Nazi past is complex and in many ways still unresolved. Nonetheless, I found myself surrounded by visible, deliberate efforts to preserve Jewish memory and keep Jewish life present.

In Poland, especially in the region of Upper Silesia, the absence of Jewish memory often felt overwhelming. Now, after a series of recent acts of memory distortion – like in the town of Jedwabne, where a plaque commemorating a massacre of Jews by their Polish neighbors was replaced with one that falsely claims Germans were to blame – that absence feels even sharper.

Yet here in Vienna, I woke each morning to the sound of Jewish schoolchildren racing past the monument of a once-grand synagogue. It didn’t feel like irony. It felt like insistence. It felt like Jewish memory refusing to be erased.

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[1] https://youtu.be/AUap7WXTqtE?si=o4JsWoeUBYn_3sN8. The “heinous crime in Paris” refers to the murder of Nazi diplomat Ernst vom Rath by Hershel Grynszpan, the excuse used by the Reich to start the long-planned pogrom.

In the heart of the Yad Vashem memorial mountain stands a monument to the Warsaw ghetto uprising, created by sculptor Nathan Rapoport. An almost identical monument stands in the heart of what used to be the Warsaw ghetto in Poland. 

The monument presents two tableaux. In one, seven figures of Jewish fighters are surrounded by flames. The figures all seem to surround one main figure, which may be a representation of Mordechai Anielewicz. Although the figure does not bear any resemblance to the young man who died in the Bunker of Mila 18 at the end of the uprising, it represents the symbolic characteristics of the Jewish fighter, of the fighting youth and the underground movement. 

The second tableau presents the hardships and the victims of the ghetto. This is referred to as the last march, resembling the march of the spoils of Jerusalem on the Arch of Titus in Rome. In Rapoport’s march, the Jewish people carry a Torah scroll, rather than a Menorah.   

Rapoport began sketching the monument in 1943, the moment he learned of the liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto. Rapoport was born in Warsaw, and by 1943, he was already a noted artist. His art began to be noticed only five years after he started his studies at the Art Academy in Warsaw. In 1936, when Rapoport was only 25 years old, one of his statues won a competition to be sent to Germany and showcased at the Olympic games. Rapoport refused to take the prize money, and refused to send the statue to Berlin, insisting that his art could not be disconnected from his Jewish heritage. With the outbreak of war, Rapoport fled to the Soviet Union. Here, he continued working as a sculptor, mainly on commissioned works by the Soviet regime. It was here he learned of the destruction of the ghetto, from a Polish newspaper printed in the Soviet Union. 

Rapoport returned to Warsaw in 1946 to find a very different city to the one he had left a decade earlier. In the ruins of his hometown, he learned that almost all his Jewish family and friends had been murdered. Only a few months after his return to Warsaw, Rapoport was called to the Ministry of Infrastructure, which was planning the rebuilding of the city, and the first of many conversations for a monument to the Warsaw Ghetto began.  

On the 5th anniversary of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, the 19th of April 1948, Rapoport’s monument was unveiled in front of twenty thousand people. Many of the attendees were survivors, coming from all over Europe for this commemoration and unveiling.  

In 1963, on the 20th anniversary of the uprising, discussions began on the creation of a replica of this monument at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem. The idea did not come to fruition until 1971, with the beginning of Dr. Yitzhak Arad’s post as the Director of Yad Vashem. Dr. Arad was a Holocaust survivor and a Holocaust historian who served as the director of Yad Vashem for 21 years. The monument in Yad Vashem was unveiled in 1976, 30 years after Rapoport created the original monument in Warsaw.    

There are subtle differences between the two monuments, reflecting the values and desires of the two countries. In the tableau of the seven Jewish fighters, a woman’s figure stands in the background, looking out into the distance. On the Warsaw monument, the woman’s breasts are exposed, perhaps referencing the iconic Liberty Leading the People painting of the French revolution by Eugène Delacroix. In Israel, the woman’s breasts are covered, reflecting, perhaps, a difference in social mores between the two countries. 

The two monuments are also laid out differently, and this is not by accident. In Warsaw the two tableaux are back-to-back. To view both, one must physically walk around the monument. In 1948, the monument stood on its own, surrounded by the ruins of the ghetto. Today, the western side, with the figures of the fighters, faces the entrance to the Polin Museum, a museum dedicated to the 1000 years of Polish Jewry, which opened in 2014. The eastern side, with the figures of the victims, faces the neighborhood of Muranów, built in the 1960s.  

The monument in Yad Vashem has both parts of the sculpture side by side, like an open book. The tableaux are connected by the words of the prophet Ezekiel, “in thy blood, live,” added at the request of Dr. Arad. The right side of the monument, with the tableau of the victims, presents the hardships of the ghetto life. At first glance, these people appear weak or old, especially in comparison to the strong fighting youth on the left. However, the placement of these two side-by-side was deliberate. The two parts together remind viewers that resistance was demonstrated by all who remained in the ghetto in its final months, whether in hiding or in joining the resistance movements.  

Arad requested to have this specific quote here to highlight the command to live and with it, the symbolism of rebirth. This monument serves as a backdrop to all the national Holocaust memorial ceremonies in Israel. The open book motif demonstrates the movement from the hardships of the Holocaust to this place on this mountain in this country, Israel. Connected by the quote, the monument portrays the movement from Holocaust to strength and bravery, from the Holocaust to rebirth, emphasizes the message that despite the Holocaust, the state of Israel exists and the people of Israel remain strong.