Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Breaking News

Historic Jewish Cemetery Uncovered in Vienna

Jewish gravestones unearthed at a small cemetery in Vienna were hailed on Wednesday as historically important cultural treasures that could rival the famed Jewish cemetery in Prague.

Restoration work at the 16th century Seegasse cemetery has discovered 20 gravestones that are centuries old and were buried by Viennese Jews in 1943 to hide them from the Nazis ruling the country, the IKG Jewish community organisation said.

Many Jewish cemeteries were destroyed during World War Two by the Nazis who stole headstones and desecrated graves.

The IKG said these gravestones were found carefully buried in two to three layers separated by earth and could be just the first of many other “hidden jewels” to be found there.

Their location had remained unknown as many of the people who hid the gravestones did not survive the war.

“Their significance in terms of cultural history is certainly comparable with Prague,” a spokesman for the Vienna city council’s cultural commissioner, Andreas Mailath-Pokorny, said on Wednesday.

IKG President Oskar Deutsch praised the city for confronting its past and helping to restore the cemetery, now located in the inner courtyard of an old people’s home.

Dozens of headstones have already been refurbished in a project that Vienna and the Austrian government started in 2004 and is slated to continue until 2018 but this was the first time that gravestones of this age were unearthed.

The project will make Seegasse the only Jewish cemetery in the world to have been restored to its pre-war state, an IKG statement said.

“After the extensive restoration of the original image of this cemetery, it could act like the Jewish cemetery in Prague as a cultural jewel of Vienna,” Deutsch added.

The Jewish cemetery at Prague was used from the early 15th century until 1787 and is one of the most important historic sites in Prague’s Jewish Town.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse..

Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.