Simmering Synagogue, Vienna (Simmeringer Tempel)

הקהילה היהודית

Jews are recorded in the Simmering area as early as 1308, when a Viennese Jew named Lebmann received a rent on the mill at Ebersdorf in pledge, but the modern community grew only in the nineteenth century as Simmering industrialised. An Israelite prayer association (Israelitische Betgenossenschaft) was founded in 1863, and a Jewish religious school was set up in 1875. The Israelitischer Tempelverein Simmering, founded on 19 August 1891, was a private synagogue association within the Vienna Jewish community (Israelitische Kultusgemeinde Wien); building the Braunhubergasse synagogue was its first goal. The association also ran a women's charity. No membership figures or list of officers were found in the sources read. The association served Simmering until 1938; the Nazi Stillhaltekommissar dissolved its women's charity in 1939, sending half its assets to the Nazi party in Vienna, and dissolved the association itself in 1940.

אדריכלות ועיצוב

Jakob Gartner designed a square, two-storey building, free-standing on three sides and set back from the street in a forecourt, at the corner of Braunhubergasse and Hugogasse. Its two street fronts, to the west and south, each had a projecting central bay (risalit) under a triangular gable. Unlike several of Gartner's other synagogues it had no dome and no towers. Ferdinand Zach's drawing of about 1900 shows a pale rendered building with a large rose window in each gable above a group of round-arched windows, round-arched doors, a pitched roof with a small turret at the ridge, and low railings and young trees around the forecourt. Inside, four cast-iron columns carried the women's galleries. The plans provided 249 seats for men and 133 for women. A smaller winter synagogue was attached on the Hugogasse side and the caretaker's flat on the Braunhubergasse side. The ANU Museum notes that Gartner liked Romanesque elements, which the round arches and rose windows reflect.

החיים בבית הכנסת

Services were led by rabbis and cantors employed by the Tempelverein. The Wien Geschichte Wiki names the rabbis Armin Abeles and S. Margulies, and a succession of cantors: Adolf Schäfer from 1896, Moritz Harendorf and J. Pordes until 1924, and Max Schidlo as chief cantor from 1926. The building was more than a prayer hall. A Hebrew language and Bible school was set up in the building, in a district that had had a Jewish religious school since 1875, and on 7 October 1904 a regular youth service was introduced. Besides the main hall, the congregation had a smaller winter synagogue attached on the Hugogasse side, and the association supported a women's charity. No description of the festival services or of the furnishings of the ark has been found in the sources read, and no photograph of the interior is known.

הרס

The synagogue was looted and destroyed on 10 November 1938, during the November Pogrom, by the Nazis; neither the Wien Geschichte Wiki nor Exenberger names the individual party members or units who carried it out. Demolition followed at the end of 1938. An official of the Nazi Stillhaltekommissar, the agency that seized and liquidated Jewish associations, agreed with the builder Franz Kabelac that he would take the building down to the ground-floor walls by 15 January 1939. Kabelac was paid 1,000 Reichsmarks and kept the materials; the bricks went to the local Nazi party group (NSDAP Ortsgruppe Herderplatz) and the firewood to the Nazi welfare organisation, the NS-Volkswohlfahrt. By December 1939 the city building authority reported the synagogue as demolished. The plot was valued at 7,650 Reichsmarks in January 1939, transferred in March 1939 to the Aufbaufonds Vermögensverwaltungs GmbH and sold in January 1940 to the builders Anton and Julie Duraz for 8,000 Reichsmarks, who used it as a storage yard.

גורל הקהילה

After the Anschluss of March 1938 the Jews of Simmering were pushed out of public life step by step. A police decree of 5 August 1938 banned them from the Braunhuberpark beside the synagogue, and on 16 May 1938 a Jewish pupil of the Braunhuberschule was transferred to a segregated Jewish school, his principal writing 'transfer to the race school' on his record. That boy, Erich Sicher, born in 1928, was deported with his mother from Vienna to Riga on 3 December 1941 and murdered. The Simmering doctor Leopold Abelles died a day after being interrogated by the Gestapo. Rosa Fischer, a Hungarian Jewish forced labourer at the Simmering gasworks, died on 24 August 1944. The total number of Simmering Jews murdered is unknown. Whether any Simmering Jews returned after 1945 is unknown.

האתר כיום

In 1946 the property passed to the Austrian Federal Railways, and the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde waived restitution in a settlement with the builder Duraz, recorded in 1948 by the Geschichte Wiki and in 1952 by Exenberger. In 1977 a residential building with owner-occupied flats was built on the plot, and it occupies Braunhubergasse 7 today. Nothing of the synagogue is visible. A memorial stone was unveiled on 9 November 2003 in the park at the corner of Braunhubergasse and Hugogasse, opposite the former synagogue.

שמות בולטים