This is an evolving story and will be updated as we receive further news. A fatality has been confirmed in a shooting near Vienna, Austria’s Seitenstettengasse synagogue, the Jewish community’s main temple in the city. Vienna’s police force confirmed on Twitter that one person had been killed in the attack, and that the police had…
It was a sunny afternoon in March 2003. Birds were singing outside, and the first flowers had just started to blossom on our quiet street in Vienna. At that time, I lived in an old apartment built around the turn of the past century, with high windows and even higher ceilings. It was located in…
2018 is Austria’s Gedenkjahr, 12 months of landmarks, anniversaries and commemorations that reach their zenith and nadir in November. The 11th and 12th of this month mark 100 years since the abdication of the last emperor, Charles I, and the declaration of the Republic of German-Austria. November 9 and 10, however, will be 80 years…
Despite its origins in the work of the Jewish Karl Marx, and its early Soviet Jewish advocates, communism never served the Jewish people particularly well. Less than two decades after the Russian Revolution, Josef Stalin’s Great Purge made a particular — if unofficial — target of Jews. One decade after the 1938 end of the…
The name of Vienna’s former mayor Karl Lueger was finally expunged from a section of the city’s main boulevard, the Ringstrasse, in July 2012. Lueger was a modernizer who, at the end of the 19th century, established Vienna’s streetcar system and brought the city’s gas and electricity networks into public ownership. He was also a…
VIENNA (JTA) — Austria’s largest urban transport firm for the first time commemorated the Holocaust, in a subway art installation in memory of hundreds of victims who lived as prisoners on a single street. The Wiener Linien installation unveiled Thursday at the Herminengasse station features a graph scheme in which each identified victim that had…
The Austrian-Jewish author Stefan Zweig has been having a bit of a moment – he’s recently been the subject of a critically acclaimed film (“Stefan Zweig: Farewell To Europe”) and his experience as a refugee during World War Two has proven especially poignant in our time. Born in Vienna in 1881, Zweig, along with fellow writer…
(JTA) — President Reuven Rivlin of Israel said he will “never condone” Israeli representatives meeting with representatives of the European far right. Rivlin sent a letter to the Vienna Jewish community in response to a message from its head, Oskar Deutsch, and World Jewish Congress Vice President Ariel Muzicant in which they criticized Israeli politicians…
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