Medieval Synagogue of Vienna (Or Sarua)

הקהילה היהודית

The first Jew documented in Vienna is recorded in 1194, and Jewish families soon settled around the present Judenplatz, on ground where wooden buildings of the ducal court had stood. The square, first mentioned in 1294 as the Schulhof, was the centre of the Jewish quarter until 1421. Around it stood the synagogue, a hospital, a bathhouse and the rabbi's house; a slaughterhouse and a ritual bath are also mentioned. The quarter had gates but no surrounding wall. The Jewish Encyclopedia records attacks on the Jews in 1337, in which the duke and nobles intervened, and says that in 1370 they were seized and stripped of their possessions but soon returned. Leading members were moneylenders to the dukes: the same source names David the Steuzz and his son Jonah, and Baruch of Vienna, the 'Judenmeister'. By 1420 the community is estimated at 1,400 to 1,600 people. Over two centuries it produced or attracted rabbis known across the Ashkenazi world, among them Isaac ben Moses Or Zarua, Meir ben Baruch ha-Levi and Abraham Klausner; Israel Isserlein later wrote that Meir had brought the customs of the Rhineland to Vienna.

אדריכלות ועיצוב

Nothing of the synagogue stands above foundation and floor level apart from a few taller stumps of wall, so its form is known from the excavation. The first building, of about the mid-thirteenth century, was dated by a coin minted in 1236-39 or 1246-51 that lay in the oldest floor of the men's prayer room. The ark stood against the east wall, reached by steps whose foundation survives; a further room lay along the north wall and a narrow women's room against the south wall, linked to the main room by slit windows. Shortly before 1294 the men's room was enlarged into a hall of two aisles and three bays carried on two pillars, with a hexagonal bimah between them. From about the mid-fourteenth century the building was extended east and, above all, west; the north room was lengthened and given a floor of coloured tiles, and the women's room was enlarged. The complex then covered about 465 square metres. Its plan belongs with the two-aisled medieval synagogues of Worms, Regensburg and Prague. The walls are of rubble stone, and the bimah base still carries part of a tiled surface. The builders are unknown.

החיים בבית הכנסת

The main hall was the men's 'shul', used for prayer and study; women followed the service from their own room on the south side through slit windows in the dividing wall. The Torah scrolls were kept in the ark on the east wall and read from the hexagonal bimah in the middle of the hall, which was entered from east and west. Light came from hanging oil lamps of glass, fragments of which the excavators found around the bimah, and from candles. The room on the north side may have housed the yeshiva of Vienna, which made the city a centre of learning: Isaac ben Moses Or Zarua led the rabbinical court and the school in the thirteenth century, Meir ben Baruch ha-Levi headed the yeshiva from 1392, and Abraham Klausner, who also held the Vienna rabbinate, wrote down the community's synagogue customs (minhagim). Small finds from the excavation give a glimpse of daily use: a wooden comb, a toy horse and rider, a key, coins, lead tokens and a metal writing stylus that may have come from the school.

הרס

On 23 May 1420 Duke Albert V had the Jews of Austria arrested. The poor were expelled down the Danube; the wealthy were held, tortured to reveal their valuables and pressed to accept baptism. According to the Wiener Gesera, a Jewish account in Yiddish thought to have been written soon after 1421 and preserved in sixteenth-century copies, young people were shut in the synagogue and starved to force their conversion. At the end of September 1420 the prisoners chose death; Rabbi Jonah, picked by lot to carry out the act, was the last alive, set the fire and died in it. The text is one-sided but is generally treated as reliable. Later retellings speak instead of free Jews who took refuge in the synagogue and held out for three days. In March 1421 the Jews still held in Vienna, 92 men and 120 women, were burned at Erdberg. The duke confiscated Jewish property and had the synagogue demolished. A university document of late 1420 already planned to reuse its stones, and in December 1421 Albert gave them to the University of Vienna for its new building. The demolition was organised to recover material and left little but foundations and floors.

גורל הקהילה

The Vienna Gesera ended the first Jewish community of Vienna. Of an estimated 1,400 to 1,600 people, the poor were made to swear never to return and were put into boats without oars on the Danube in 1420; they drifted downstream to Pressburg and survived. Children were taken from their parents and baptised, although Pope Martin V, appealed to by Italian rabbis, forbade forced baptism under pain of excommunication. Many prisoners died of ill-treatment or by their own hand in the winter of 1420-21. The last 212 were burned on the Gänseweide at Erdberg on 12 March 1421, charged with desecrating a host at Enns and helping the Hussites; the university's own history calls these charges pretexts and names financial and missionary motives. Albert decreed that no Jew might live in Austria in future, a ban renewed in 1453. The houses of the dead and expelled were sold or given away, and the Theological Faculty asked the duke for the Jews' Hebrew manuscripts. Jewish tradition afterwards called Vienna the 'city of blood'. A lasting community formed again only in the seventeenth century.

האתר כיום

The site is the Judenplatz in Vienna's first district, which took its present form only in the fifteenth or sixteenth century. The excavated remains are kept in an underground room below the square, reached from the Museum Judenplatz in the Misrachi-Haus at Judenplatz 8, a branch of the Jewish Museum Vienna opened in 2000. Visitors see low rubble-stone walls, the base of the hexagonal bimah with part of its tiled surface, the foundation of the Torah ark and the tiled floor of the women's room. A Holocaust memorial stands on the square above, and the outline of the bimah is marked in the paving beside it. The museum's permanent exhibition on the medieval community was redesigned in 2021, when the remains were conserved with the help of the city's archaeology service.

שמות בולטים