When I started grammar school in my hometown of Vienna at the age of ten, Christian religion classes were part of the schedule. As a Jew, I was allowed to opt out and spend the two hours a week doing my homework in the school cafeteria. This peace only lasted a few weeks into the…
It is hard to imagine finding a line from the Talmud at the post-election celebration of Austria’s populist, far-right Freedom Party. The scene, in a tent on the glittering Ringstrasse right next to Vienna’s City Hall, was smoke-filled and dimly lit. The overwhelmingly male crowd sat at long rows of wooden tables and benches, drinking…
A life-size wax figure of Holocaust diarist Anne Frank has gone on display at Madame Tussauds in Vienna. The display shows Anne writing in her diary at a desk in the attic of the house in Amsterdam where the teenager’s family hid from the Nazis. The diary was discovered after the Holocaust and published. Anne…
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…
Forward Looking Back brings you the stories that were making news in the Forward’s Yiddish paper 100, 75, and 50 years ago. Check back each week for a new set of illuminating, edifying and sometimes wacky clippings from the Jewish past. 100 years ago 1913 Abraham Glickstein, a well-known physician who resides on Manhattan’s Lower…
Forward Looking Back brings you the stories that were making news in the Forward’s Yiddish paper 100, 75, and 50 years ago. Check back each week for a new set of illluminating, edifying and sometimes wacky clippings from the Jewish past. 100 Years Ago 1913 Morris Lustig, who was sent to death row at Sing…
The famed Vienna Philharmonic has acknowledged that many of its musicians were Nazi party members during Hitler’s rule and that its director may have delivered a prestigious orchestra award to a Nazi war criminal two decades after the end of World War Two. The orchestra, which has come under fire for covering up its history,…
Marina Plistiev, a Kyrgyzstan-born Jew, has lived in Vienna for 34 years but still doesn’t like to take public transport. She recalls the day in 1986 as a teenager when she and her four-year-old brother, whom she’d collected from school with a fever, were told to get off a tram for having the wrong tickets,…
דער ווידעאָ איז טשיקאַווע סײַ פֿאַרן אינהאַלט סײַ פֿאַר קאַסאָווס נאַטירלעכן ליטוויש־ייִדיש
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