Wiener Neustadt Synagogue

La comunidad judía

Jews returned to Wiener Neustadt in the middle of the nineteenth century, after an absence of more than 350 years. About 185 lived in the town in 1869, 0.8 per cent of the population, and 309 in 1880. In 1871 the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde Wiener Neustadt was constituted, with Benjamin Weiß, until then acting rabbi, as its first rabbi. He was followed by Jakob Hoffmann, Hermann Klein, Joel Pollak, David Friedmann and Heinrich Weiss. Moritz Friedenthal was an early head of the community. In the 1920s Jews from Burgenland, many of them Orthodox, settled in the city, and a small Orthodox group of about thirty men prayed separately in the Koppel prayer house at Haidbrunngasse. The 1923 count gave 686 Jews in the Kultusgemeinde; the 1934 census counted 685 in the city and 886 in the wider district that the community served, which also included a branch prayer house at Erlach. The community was one of fifteen Kultusgemeinden in Lower Austria. In 1938 it was led by Hugo Reininger, with Samuel Frankl as his deputy.

Arquitectura y diseño

The synagogue stood at Baumkirchnerring 4, next to the converted carriage house of 1870. Wilhelm Stiassny, a leading Viennese architect who designed several synagogues, chose a Moorish style, probably to recall the golden age of Spanish Jewry; it was a new idiom for Wiener Neustadt. The building covered about 340 square metres and cost 80,000 Kronen; Franz X. Schmidt was the master builder. The street front bore a large Star of David surrounded by windows and the inscription from Isaiah 56:7. A green strip and a fence separated the facade from the street. The interior had a women's gallery, and a former congregant later remembered a courtyard and an emergency staircase that children ran up and down. East of the synagogue stood a small prayer hall of about 70 square metres for weekday worship, religious lessons and festivals, with a slaughterhouse for poultry attached. The seating capacity is unknown, and no plans or photographs were examined for this entry.

La vida dentro de la sinagoga

Rabbi Heinrich Weiß resisted introducing the reformed Vienna rite of Isaac Noah Mannheimer, with its reduced Hebrew, shortened liturgical poems and mixed choir. After the First World War, as Orthodox newcomers from Burgenland joined the congregation, the traditional rite was kept, a grille was added to the women's gallery and the bima was moved to the centre of the hall. The staff before 1938 included Moritz Schulhof, chief cantor and ritual slaughterer; Leo Löwy, cantor; Heinrich Löwy, religion teacher; Karl Schlesinger, synagogue beadle; and Philipp Sinai, who looked after the cemetery. The small prayer hall beside the synagogue was used for daily services, teaching and celebrations. Families from Wiener Neustadt and the surrounding villages filled the main hall on the High Holidays and at Passover; the parents of one survivor interviewed by Centropa, Wilhelm and Johanna Schischa, came for those festivals, while their children played in the courtyard.

Destrucción

In March 1938 Nazi SA men on a march smashed the windows around the Star of David on the facade. An attempt to set the building alight failed when neighbours protested, fearing for their own houses. On the evening of 9 November 1938, local Nazis held a torch procession that ended at the synagogue. They forced their way in, smashed the windows and the interior, stole the ritual objects and hammered the Star of David off the facade. The building was not burned because the Nazi mayor, Edmund Scheidtenberger, wanted to use it. On 10 November at least 100 Jews were herded into it, robbed and beaten. The city took the building over on 15 November 1938 and bought it, with all community property, for 19,000 Reichsmark on 28 November 1940. It was long said to have been bombed, but the historian Werner Sulzgruber found its damage dated almost wholly from 1938; a 1947 report called it in relatively good condition. After 1945 restitution returned it to the Vienna Jewish community. It was leased to a timber merchant as a store and demolished in 1952 or, according to Lind, in April 1953. Who carried out the demolition is not recorded.

El destino de la comunidad

The Nazi takeover in March 1938 brought immediate persecution. Nazi SA and SS men forced Jews to scrub the streets and the main square, and the community head Hugo Reininger was taken to the Wöllersdorf detention camp. Shops were seized in 'wild' Aryanizations. About 711 Jews lived in the city in 1938; by October only about 450 remained. After the November Pogrom most of those arrested were sent on to Vienna within days, and the community's registers went there at the end of 1938. Leopold Bauer, elected head on 4 October 1938, ran what remained until the end of 1939, when only about 30 members were left. The Nazi provincial authority dissolved the Kultusgemeinde on 3 April 1940; in March 1940 just 21 Jews were counted in Wiener Neustadt and its surroundings. Deportations of Wiener Neustadt Jews, mostly from Vienna, ran from October 1939 to March 1944, chiefly in 1942. Sulzgruber documents 117 deportees, sent mainly to Auschwitz, Minsk and Riga; about one in six survived. At least 152 emigrated, mainly to Palestine, the United States and Britain. No community was refounded after the war.

El lugar hoy

Nothing of the synagogue survives. After the demolition the Austrian Trade Union Federation (ÖGB) built a union house, the Anton-Proksch-Haus, on the plot in the 1950s; that building has itself been replaced by a modern commercial and office building on the Baumkirchnerring. A memorial plaque was put up on the Baumkirchnerring in 1989. The city of Wiener Neustadt maintains the Jewish cemetery on the Wiener Straße. The medieval synagogue building on the Allerheiligenplatz, long since converted to other uses, still stands in the old town.

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