Jewish Vienna: Judenplatz, Leopoldstadt and a City's Memory

The short version

Jews have lived in Vienna for more than eight hundred years, and their history runs through the city in cycles of flourishing and catastrophe: a medieval community destroyed in 1420–1421, a ghetto in Leopoldstadt dissolved by expulsion in 1670, a slow return under the court Jews and Joseph II's reforms, an extraordinary golden age after full civil rights in 1867, and then persecution, flight and murder after 1938. Today's community is far smaller but alive, especially in Leopoldstadt. The key places are close together: Judenplatz with its Holocaust memorial and medieval synagogue remains, the Stadttempel, the Jewish Museum on Dorotheergasse, and the streets around the Karmelitermarkt. This guide gives the history and the practical way to see it, with the seriousness the subject deserves.

The medieval community and the Gesera of 1421

The first Jew documented by name in Vienna is Schlom, master of the ducal mint in the 1190s. Over the next two centuries a community grew around what is now Judenplatz, with a synagogue, a school, a hospital and houses enclosed by gates. It was one of the leading centres of Jewish learning in the German-speaking world.

It ended in the persecution known as the Wiener Gesera. In 1420 Duke Albrecht V had the Jews of Vienna and Lower Austria arrested, accused among other charges of aiding the Hussites. Poorer Jews were expelled, children were taken to be baptised, and some members of the community took their own lives inside the synagogue rather than convert. On 12 March 1421 around two hundred people were burned alive on the Erdberg, outside the walls. The synagogue was demolished and its stones reused.

Its foundations were rediscovered during excavations under Judenplatz in the 1990s and can now be seen in the underground rooms of Museum Judenplatz, a branch of the Jewish Museum reached through the museum's Judenplatz entrance. On the façade of the house at Judenplatz 2, a fifteenth-century relief still carries a Latin inscription celebrating the massacre as the purging of the city; a modern plaque nearby answers it.

Ghetto, expulsion and the court Jews

Jews were allowed back in small numbers, and in 1624–1625 Emperor Ferdinand II assigned them a walled quarter across the Danube arm on the "Unterer Werd" — the area of today's Leopoldstadt. It grew into a community of several thousand people. In 1670 Emperor Leopold I, under pressure from the clergy and the city, expelled them again. The main synagogue was replaced by a church dedicated to St Leopold, and the district took the emperor's name — a name it still carries.

The expulsion hurt the treasury so badly that within a few years wealthy court Jews were invited back to finance the state. Samuel Oppenheimer organised supplies for the army during the Ottoman siege of 1683, described in The Siege of Vienna 1683, and Samson Wertheimer served as imperial financier and rabbi. They lived under special privileges; ordinary Jews were still barred from settling. Sephardic Jews from the Ottoman lands, the "Turkish Jews", had their own small community under the protection of treaties with the Sultan.

Toleration, emancipation and the Stadttempel

The Tolerance Edict of 1782 issued by Joseph II, discussed in Maria Theresa and Joseph II, eased many restrictions: Jews could attend schools and universities, enter trades and wear the same clothes as other Viennese, though settlement was still tightly controlled and there was no officially recognised congregation.

The result is Vienna's most remarkable synagogue. The Stadttempel on Seitenstettengasse, designed by Joseph Kornhäusel and consecrated in 1826, sits invisibly behind the façade of an ordinary apartment house, because only Catholic places of worship were allowed to face the street. Inside is an elegant oval Biedermeier hall with a gallery on Ionic columns. Its preacher Isaak Noah Mannheimer shaped a moderate reform liturgy, and its cantor Salomon Sulzer, a friend of Schubert, transformed synagogue music across Europe. The hidden position that once expressed discrimination saved the building in November 1938, when setting it alight would have burned the neighbouring houses. Today it is the main synagogue of the community, visited on guided tours with strict security checks; bring photo ID.

1867–1938: a golden age in a hostile city

The revolution of 1848 opened the door, and the constitution of 1867 gave Jews full civil equality. People came from Bohemia, Moravia, Hungary and, increasingly, from Galicia in the east of the empire, often poor and religious. Vienna's Jewish population rose from a few thousand in the 1850s to about 175,000 by 1910, close to one in ten inhabitants, and many settled in Leopoldstadt, nicknamed the "Mazzesinsel", the matzo island.

The contribution to Viennese life was immense. Bankers and industrialists such as the Ephrussi and Todesco families built palaces on the Ringstrasse. Sigmund Freud practised at Berggasse 19, now the Sigmund Freud Museum. Theodor Herzl, a Viennese journalist, published *The Jewish State* in 1896 and founded political Zionism. The writers Arthur Schnitzler, Stefan Zweig, Karl Kraus and Joseph Roth, the composers Gustav Mahler and Arnold Schoenberg, the Wittgenstein family, and much of the coffee-house intelligentsia described in Vienna 1900 were Jewish or of Jewish origin. Some, like Mahler, converted, often to open doors still closed to Jews.

That doors were closed matters. Vienna was also a laboratory of modern political antisemitism. Karl Lueger, the popular Christian Social mayor from 1897 to 1910, used antisemitism as a vote-winner; the young Adolf Hitler, living in Vienna before 1914, absorbed it. In 2012 the section of the Ring named after Lueger was renamed Universitätsring.

1938–1945

In March 1938 some 200,000 people in Vienna were defined as Jews by Nazi law. Within months they were robbed of homes, businesses and jobs; in November synagogues across the city were burned. About two-thirds managed to flee. More than 65,000 Austrian Jews were murdered in ghettos and camps. The full story, and the memorials that record it, are in Vienna 1938–1955.

After 1945: a small community rebuilds

Only a few thousand Jews were in Vienna at the end of the war, most of them survivors returning from camps or hiding, joined later by displaced persons and refugees from Eastern Europe. For decades the community was small, ageing and often made to feel unwelcome, while restitution came slowly. Since the 1990s things have changed: Austria acknowledged its share of responsibility, a national fund for victims was created, and immigration from the former Soviet Union — including Bukharan and Georgian Jews — brought new life. The organised community today numbers several thousand members, with schools, kosher shops and a sports club, and a visible Orthodox presence in Leopoldstadt.

How to visit: a half-day route

1. Judenplatz. Start at Rachel Whiteread's Holocaust Memorial (2000), a concrete cast of a library whose books face inward and cannot be read, with the names of the places where Austrian Jews were murdered around its base. Then go down into the medieval synagogue at Museum Judenplatz. Allow an hour.

2. The Jewish Museum on Dorotheergasse. Ten minutes' walk south, the Jewish Museum of the City of Vienna in Palais Eskeles tells the story from the Middle Ages to the present. Among its collections are ritual objects that survived 1938, some of them visibly damaged.

3. The Stadttempel. Walk north-east to Seitenstettengasse, in the lanes behind the Ruprechtskirche, for a guided tour of the Stadttempel. Check tour times in advance.

4. Leopoldstadt. Cross the Schwedenbrücke into Leopoldstadt. Walk Taborstrasse to the Karmelitermarkt and look down as you go: small brass Stones of Remembrance in the pavement mark the last homes of deported residents. Around the market and along Taborstrasse you will find kosher bakeries and shops, and restaurants such as Mea Shearim on Schmelzgasse and Sababa further up Taborstrasse; back in the old town, Alef Alef is right beside the Stadttempel. Check current kosher certification and remember that kosher places close for Shabbat, from Friday afternoon to Saturday evening.

Further afield

• The Zentralfriedhof. The old Jewish section at Gate 1 of the Central Cemetery holds Arthur Schnitzler and tens of thousands of graves, many overgrown because no descendants remained to tend them. The newer Jewish section is at Gate 4. Men should cover their heads; the sections close for Shabbat and Jewish holidays.
• The Seegasse cemetery in Alsergrund, Vienna's oldest surviving Jewish burial ground, lies in the courtyard of a retirement home; ask at the entrance.
• The Shoah Wall of Names Memorial in the Ostarrichipark, also in Alsergrund, opened in 2021 with the names of more than 64,000 murdered Austrian Jews.

Throughout, dress modestly for synagogues and cemeteries, expect security checks, and ask before photographing people. For planning the rest of your stay, see our attractions and districts pages.