History of the Jews in Vienna
[2] In 1238, emperor Frederick II granted the Jews a privilege, and the existence of community institutions such as a synagogue, hospital and slaughterhouse can be proven from the 14th century onwards.
The centre of Jewish cultural and religious life was located here from the 13th to the 15th century, until the Vienna Gesera of 1420/21, when Albert V ordered the annihilation of the city’s Jews, leading to their murder, expulsion, and in some cases collective suicide.
Influenced by the Enlightenment, emperor Joseph II decreed his Edict of Tolerance in 1782, which granted civil rights to Jews in Austria.
In 1824, Michael Lazar Biedermann's recommendation led to Rabbi Isaak Mannheimer being brought from Copenhagen to Vienna.
With Lazar Horowitz, who was summoned to Vienna as a Rabbi in 1828, Mannheimer agitated for the abolition of the discriminatory Jewish Oath.
The merchant Isaak Löw Hofmann also played a leading role in Vienna's Jewish community from 1806 until his death in 1849.
The Jews that lived in these areas made up the majority of Vienna's Jewish population and belonged for the most part to the lower or middle classes – they were manual labourers, craftsmen, small-scale businessmen (e.g. café owners) and traders.
Wealthy Jews lived for the most part in the villa suburbs of Döbling and Hietzing, and in the city centre, the Innere Stadt.
Amongst the refugees were some 50,000 (according to the police) to 70,000 (according to the Arbeiterzeitung newspaper) Jews, who all arrived at Vienna's northern railway station in Leopoldstadt.
[12] Many of the refugees tried to earn their daily bread as peddlers or salesmen, and many charity organisations sprung up to coordinate clothes donations and other campaigns, but the “Ostjuden” (Eastern Jews) were the victims of many negative prejudices and because of their poverty were more frequently the targets of antisemitic attacks than wealthy assimilated Jews.
[5] The majority of Viennese Jews lived in this neighborhood, which had served as the Jewish ghetto prior to the 1670 expulsion by Emperor Leopold.
On the one hand, there were the Jews who had either lived for a long time in Vienna or who had been born there and who assimilated into Christian society.
All synagogues and prayer houses in Vienna were destroyed except one[14] – the Stadttempel was the sole survivor because its location in a residential area prevented it from being burned down.
Most Jewish shops were plundered and then closed down; over 6000 Jews were arrested in this one night, the majority were deported to the Dachau concentration camp in the following days.
Jews were gradually robbed of their freedoms, were blocked from almost all professions, were shut out of schools and universities, and were forced to wear the Yellow badge.
Following the Wannsee Conference in January 1942, where the Nazis resolved to completely annihilate the Jewish population, the majority of the Jews who had stayed in Vienna became victims of the Holocaust.
After World War II, it took a long time for Austria to come to a clear position with regard to its part of the responsibility for the horrors of the "Third Reich".
Many of the Jews who live in Vienna today came to the city as refugees from Eastern Europe to begin a new life in the Austrian capital.
In autumn 2008, the Zwi Perez Chajes school moved from the Castellezgasse to the Simon-Wiesenthal-Gasse next to the Messe Wien at the Prater.
There are eight Ashkenazi and three Sephardic synagogues or prayer houses in this district of the city,[19] seven Jewish educational institutions,[20] as well as numerous kosher shops, bakeries and restaurants.
