[Survivors and DPs since 1945 - Vienna as a
refugee station 1956 and 1968]
Postwar Period. Shortly
after the end of World War II the number of Jews in Vienna was
estimated at about 4,000 people, who had survived either in hiding or
in concentration and labour camps. Their number decreased due to excess
of deaths over births, and emigration; the loss was soon more than
compensated for by the return of several thousands of Austrian Jews,
and the addition of a number of *Displaced Persons and refugees who had
settled in Vienna. The population of the community reached its postwar
peak in 1950 with 12,450 registered Jews, and decreased to 8,930 in
1965. It was estimated that there were at least 2,000 Jews living in
Vienna who did not register with the community.
Vienna was the main transient stopping-place and the first refuge for
hundreds
of thousands of
Jewish refugees and emigrants from Eastern
Europe after World War II. This applies to the greater part of
the
exodus of Polish Jews in 1946 (see *
Berihah),
and, to a lesser degree,
to Jews from Rumania [[Romania]] and Hungary in 1946-47, when the
Rothschild-Hospital of the Viennese community became the main screening
station on the way to the D.P. camps of Germany, Austria, and Italy.
In Vienna a series of transit camps
were clustered around the
Rothschild Hospital, receiving refugees passing from Bratislava to the
U.S. zone of Austria. From the U.S. zone of Austria transit was
effected either to Italy (until about May 1946), directed by Issachar
Haimovich, or to the U.S. zone in Germany.
(from: Encyclopaedia Judaica (1971): Berihah (Beriḥah), vol. 4, col.
630)
It was true also for the great stream of refugees from Hungary during
and after the revolt of 1956, when at least 18,000 Jewish refugees
found temporary shelter in Vienna, as well as for several thousand
refugees from Czechoslovakia after the Soviet invasion of 1968.
Emigration to Israel from Poland, the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia,
Hungary, and partly also from Rumania [[Romania]] passed through Vienna
as well.
[since April 1946: Jewish
community life with elections - rabbi Eisenberg - synagogue - schooling]
The Community was reconstituted shortly after the war, with a president
appointed by the occupation authorities, but by April 1946, elections
were held for the community council. As a result of these first
elections, David Brill of the left-wing Unity party was elected
president. In April 1948 the Unity party was defeated by a coalition of
the Zionists and the non-Zionist Social Democrats (the Bund
Werktaetiger Juden), and the Zionist, David Schapir, was elected
president. In the elections of December 1949, the Bund Werktaetiger
Juden gained the majority of seats on the council. Emil Maurer was
elected president, but retired in 1963, and was replaced by Ernst
Feldsberg, also a representative of the Bund.
Akiva Eisenberg served as rabbi from 1948. There is one synagogue
functioning, the old "Stadttempel" [["Town temple"]] in
Seitenstettengasse, the only synagogue that was not destroyed in the
Kristallnacht on November 1938. There are about 200 children who attend
a Jewish (col. 128)
day-school and two Talmud Torah schools, and about 400 additional
pupils who receive Jewish religious instruction in general schools.
Though the Zionists constitute a minority, there are intensive and
diversified Zionist activities.
Three weeklies appear. There exists a Jewish old-age-home with 120
residents, a Jewish hospital, and a youth house, inaugurated in 1966.
The Documentation Center, established and directed by Simon Wiesenthal
and supported by the Community, developed into an important institute
for the documentation of the Holocaust and the tracing of Nazi
criminals.
In 1949 the remains of Theodor Herzl, who had been buried at the
Doebling cemetery in Vienna, were reinterred in Jerusalem.
[ED.]> (col. 131)
<Bibliography
-- Germ Jud, 1 (1963), 397-425; 2 (1968), 886-903
-- M. Gruenwald: Vienna (1936)
-- idem: Samuel Oppenheim und sein Kreis (1913)
-- S. Krauss: Die Wiener Gersera vom Jahre 1421 (1920)
-- J. E. Scherer: Die Rechtsverhaeltnisse der Juden in den
deutsch-oesterreichischen Laendern (1901)
-- H. Tietze: Die Juden Wiens (1935)
-- Aronius, Regesten, index
-- A.F. Pribram: Urkunden und Akten zur Geschichte der Juden in Wien
(1918)
-- L. Bato: Die Juden im alten Vien (1928)
-- B. Wachstein: Die Inschriften des alten Judenfriedhofes in Wien, 2
vols. (1912/1917)
-- A. Zehavi-Goldhammer, in: Arim ve-Immahot be-Yisrael, I (1946),
176-289
-- D. Kaufmann: Die letzte Vertreibung der Juden aus Wien (1889)
-- J. Fraenkel: The Jews of Austria (1967), incl. bibl., 549-51
-- N.M. Gelber, in: JSOS, 10 (1948), 359-96
-- R. Dan, in: SBB, 9 (1970), 101-5
-- M. Kohler: Jewish Rights at the Congresses of Vienna and
Aix-la-Chapelle (1918), index
-- G. Wolf: Geschichte der Juden in Wien (1156-1876) (1876)
-- idem: Vom ersten bis zum zweiten Tempel ... (1861)
-- I. Schwarz: Das Wiener Ghetto (1909)
-- G. Fritsch and O. Breita: Finale und Auftakt ... (1964)
-.- H. Gold: Geschichte der Juden in Wien (1966)
-- L. Goldhammer: Die Juden Wiens (1927)
-- M. Letteris, in: Bikkurim, 2 (1865), 20-38, 244
-- B. Wachstein (ed.): Die hebraeische Publizistik in Wien (1930)
-- H.D. Friedberg: Toledot ha-Defus ha-Ivri be-Arim ha-Elleh
she-be-Eiropah ... (1937), 94-104> (col. 131)
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