Deep in Alpine Austria, a synagogue returns to life

IT MAY be one of the smallest synagogues in Austria, but the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde für Tirol und Vorarlberg is getting ready to welcome the country’s chief rabbi, no less, to preside over its Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur services.

“We have very good connections with Paul Chaim Eisenberg,” explains Anna Pfeifer, secretary of the tiny synagogue in the heart of Innsbruck. It’s an unlikely setting; the other side of the country from Vienna, an early 20th century hotbed of Jewish intellectual life, this is a chocolate-box town surrounded by the mountains of the Tyrol, a place where lederhosen, dirndl skirts and feathered hats still lurk in many a closet.

The modern community was founded in 1914 and, tragically, its prayer room on Sillgasse did not last long. Four board members were murdered on Reichspogromnacht in 1938 and the room destroyed, although its iron key was kept by a gentile neighbour in the hope it would one day be needed again.

It was thanks to community elder Rudolph Brull, one of just a handul of survivors who chose to return, as well as Esther Fritsch, dynamic past president for 30 years, that a post-war com- munity grew up and thrived. The draw of nearby ski resorts like St Anton (today a meeting point for Charedim from all over the world, who matchmake their offspring there in summer) has helped grow the Innsbruck congregation to its current complement of 150 members.

There is no permanent rabbi and rarely a weekly minyan, although there is a cantor and a prayer leader and, since being inaugurated in 1993 on the very site where its predecessor was destroyed, Innsbruck Synagogue does get its fair share of tourists. Many have heard about the display cabinet in the shul, a museum of the community in miniature. There are the silverplated shoes of Mr Brull’s daughter, Ilse, who was murdered in Auschwitz and is remembered as Austria’s Anne Frank. There are also the yellow stars worn by locals, and other relics belonging to the pre-war community.

In 1997, a Menorah-shaped memorial to the Jews murdered in 1938 was unveiled on the street where they died; Jewish Innsbruckers flocked in from the diaspora to attend. But this community is looking forward, not back. For the first time in 60 years, barmitzvahs and batmitzvahs of children born in the Tyrol are being conducted. If there is any downside, it means some face the onerous task of reading their portion beneath the exacting eye of Chief Rabbi Eisenberg, who visits Innsbruck at least once a year to celebrate with this most resilient and forgiving of communities.