Vienna, after World War II, was a wasteland for Jews. Sixty-five thousand Austrian Jews had been killed in the Holocaust, and Jewish institutional life in Austria had been eradicated by the Nazis.
The great Viennese Jewish community, which had produced figures like Sigmund Freud, Arthur Schnitzler, Arnold Schoenberg, Gustav Mahler, Bruno Walter and Max Reinhardt, was no more than a memory in the smoking ruins of the Austrian capital.
Forty-one years after the collapse of the German Third Reich, of which Austria was part, Austria is home to a Jewish community that is infinitely much smaller and far less significant than the one which existed before World War II.
“It is a community of displaced persons, completely unlike the prewar community,” observed Avraham Hodik, the executive director of the community’s umbrella organization, the Israelitischen Kultusgemeinde.
AN IMPORTANT TRANSIT POINT
In the wake of Nazi Germany’s defeat, Vienna became an important transit point for East European Jewish survivors of the Holocaust on their way to Israel and North America. By 1947, there were about 45,000 Jewish DPs in Austria, the majority from Poland, Rumania and Hungary.
Virtually all of them left the country, then administered by the U.S., the Soviet Union, France and Britain, and the Few thousand Jews who elected to stay had very little in common with the 2,000 or so Viennese Jewish survivors.
In the past 10 to 15 years, several thousand Russian Jews who rejected Israel as a final destination have also found a refuge in Vienna, thereby strengthening the East European flavor of Austrian Jewry. No more than 15 percent of the Jews here are Austrianborn, making this a relatively new, immigrant community.
A PERMANENT HOME
Until about a decade ago, most Jews here lacked any genuine desire to sink roots. There was no real sense of permanency. Everything seemed transitory. “There was a subconscious tendency on the part of Jews to sit on their suitcases,” says Hodik, a native of Vienna. “We were always told, when we were children, that we’d be leaving next year,” explains Doron Rabinovici, a 24-year-old medical student who spent the first 21/2 years of his life in Israel.
That attitude no longer holds, Hodik believes. “People have settled down and now consider Austria their home.”
Ivan Hacker-Lederer, the president of the Israelitischen Kultusgemeinde, and a survivor of Auschwitz and Dachau, says this change of heart is apparent in the community’s priorities. “In the 1950’s, I was told we would need a cemetery. Today, we have Jewish schools with several hundred pupils.
Austria’s Jewish population, numbering some 200,000 in 1938, now consists of 6,000 registered Jews who hold Israeli passports, and some 2,000 unaffiliated Jews.
The number of people of partly Jewish origin cannot be determined. But in 1942, when the Viennese community was officially dissolved by the Nazis, there were about 7,000 Jews in mixed marriages whom the Nazis did not deport. Many of their descendants have not identified themselves as Jews.
As in the prewar period, nearly all of Austria’s Jews live in Vienna, with a sprinkling in Linz (Hitler’s birthplace), Graz, Salzburg and Innsbruck.
COMMITTED POSTWAR GENERATION
Today’s community is geriatric, with the average age being in the mid-50’s. “For every 25 deaths per month, we have five births,” said Hacker-Lederer, who is 78. Despite the fact that two-thirds of its members are over the age of 60, the community has been revitalized by what appears to be a committed postwar generation.
There are several Jewish day schools and kindergartens, one high school that was opened in 1984, two functioning synagogues (one which was constructed on the site of a synagogue destroyed by the Nazis in 1938), 15 prayer rooms, two kosher butchers and a baker and a restaurant that observes the laws of kashrut.
“Our community is small, but it has everything it needs,” says Paul Eisenberg, the 36-year-old Chief Rabbi who was born in Vienna and studied in Israel.
The Austrian government, together with the Vienna municipality, has assisted in the rebuilding of the community center and two schools, and by paying salaries to its teachers.
DIVISIONS WITHIN THE COMMUNITY
The community may be Lilliputian, but the divisions within it are not. Its governing board, composed of 24 members, is deeply split along political and ideological lines, pitting conservatives against progressives, Zionists against Bundists and religiously-oriented Jews against secular Jews. In the religious camp, there are fissures as well.
The newest additions to the community, the Russians do not constitute a monolithic group either. The Sephardic Jews from Georgia and Bokhara have little, if anything, to do with the Ashkenazim from the European areas of the Soviet Union. And the Russians, in turn, have resisted integration into the community at large, says Dov Sperling, the director of the Jewish Agency office here.
In general, the Russians have not enjoyed any recognizable degree of economic success in Austria. They do a variety of odd jobs, and many of them can be found in the vicinity of Mexico Square, on the banks of the Danube River, where Eastern Bloc ships discharge their passengers and cargoes. They guide East European tourists around, change currency and buy and sell smuggled goods.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
