Grave consequences in Vienna
Austrian volunteers say it is time to salvage Europe’s ‘worst-maintained’ Jewish cemeteries
IN JUNE, Beate Meinl-Reisinger, the leader of the liberal Neos party, visited an abandoned graveyard in the outer district of Währing that dates to 1784.
The site was partly destroyed by the Nazis, closed after the Second World War, and mostly left to seed until restoration work began ten years ago.
The condition of the cemetery is “really disgraceful”, she said afterwards, adding she failed to understand why Austria’s politicians did not seem interested in preserving the site as a memorial or museum.
Given Austria’s history, the country could not afford “to remain passive” on this issue, she said.
Währing was one of seven Jewish cemeteries in Vienna opened after Joseph II — who passed the 1782 Edict of Tolerance granting Jews religious freedom in the Austro-Hungarian Empire — decreed that, for reasons of hygiene, cemeteries had to be located outside the city walls.
It served as the city’s principal Jewish burial site for 100 years, a period including the emancipation of Austro-Hungarian Jews in 1867. The subsequent assimilation is reflected in the headstones: family crypts from later years are ever more elaborate and the German language is inscribed alongside — or sometimes instead of — Hebrew.
Unique among Jewish cemeteries in central Europe, Währing also has a Sephardic section, designated by the gravestones’ Ottoman-influenced design and ornamentation.
When Vienna’s city government was planning for massive population expansion in 1863 it founded the Central Cemetery, one of the largest in Europe, on the city’s outskirts. A decade later, a Jewish section opened in which great writers like Arthur Schnitzler and Friedrich Torberg rest — as do former heads of the Jewish community, rabbis and cantors, publishers and department store owners.
A second Jewish section at the Central Cemetery opened in 1916 and remains in use. Among the memorials here is a plot where the Torah scrolls, defiled and destroyed during Kristallnacht in November 1938, were buried. Vienna’s Jewish cemeteries, then, tell the story of the Jewish community itself — including, of course, that of the Nazi period.
Jennifer Kickert, spokesperson for the campaign group Save the Jewish Cemetery Währing, explained to the JC that although many of the gravestones were weathered by time, Vienna’s Jewish cemeteries are in such poor condition is because of the destruction wrought by the Nazis.
Between 1938 and 1945, thousands of Jewish gravestones were destroyed — not only in Währing but also in the Central Cemetery. During the war, the Nazis exhumed the bodies of entire families with a view to conducting racial scientific experiments to prove that Jews had certain inalienable traits and characteristics.
The Nazi authorities in Vienna also levelled part of the Währing cemetery with the intention of constructing an air-raid shelter, though it was never built, Ms Kickert said. After the war, Vienna’s city government purchased that parcel of land at below market value from the IKG, the Jewish Community of Vienna, and built council housing upon it. The resulting Arthur-Schnitzler-Haus was completed in 1960.
Having been locked up for over fifty years, it was only in 1999 that Währing opened again. For the past ten years, activists including Ms Kickert have worked to clean up the site, meeting monthly to clear away the overgrowth around the tombstones and pathways, presenting the possibility that some gravesites could be restored.
The Austrian government does make funds available for the preservation and restoration of Jewish cemeteries, and former chancellor Sebastian Kurz visited the cemetery this year and spoke of the need for investment in the site.
But that money is contingent on the IKG matching contributions on a one-toonw basis — something it cannot afford to do, Ms Kickert said.
In total, the IKG is responsible for over 60 cemeteries in Austria. Like other post-Holocaust European Jewish communities, its duties are far more extensive than it can reasonably take on.
“Almost all the gravestones [in Währing] are in bad condition,” IKG president Oskar Deutsch said. Stronger words came from B’nai B’rith’s president in Austria Victor Wagner, who has called the state of Vienna’s Jewish cemeteries among the worst in Europe.
The Save the Jewish Cemetery Währing group hopes firstly to restore and repair the cemetery to the point where the city government can reasonably take on responsibility for day-to-day maintenance — as is the case with parts of Vienna’s Central Cemetery.
It also wants the Währing cemetery become a museum, which would be an alternative avenue to receiving financial support.
But for now, until a political solution can be found, the cemeteries’ future depends on volunteers.
The Nazis exhumed bodies of families for experiments