Grave consequences in Vienna

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 had been weathered by time, especially those made of sandstone, 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. 

All Vienna’s Jewish cemeteries were closed in January 1941. During the war, the devastation continued as the Nazis exhumed the bodies of entire families with a view to conducting racial scientific experiments on them, in order 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 from the IKG, the Jewish Community of Vienna, at below market value 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 was opened again. For the past ten years, activists including Ms Kickert have been working to clean up the site, meeting once a month 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 the fact is that money is contingent on the IKG matching contributions on a one-to-onw basis — something it cannot afford to do, Ms Kickert said.

In total, the IKG — which has around 7,000 members — is responsible for over 60 cemeteries in Austria. Like other post-Holocaust European Jewish communities, its duties in this respect are far more extensive than it can reasonably take on.

“Almost all the gravestones [in Währing] are in bad condition,” IKG president Oskar Deutsch has 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 groups hopes firstly to restore and repair the cemetery to the point where the city government can reasonably take on responsibility for its day-to-day maintenance — as is the case with 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, the cemetery’s future will depend on the group’s volunteers until a political solution can be found.