Jewish traces in Vienna

Theodor Herzl, Siegmund Freud, Gustav Mahler, Hedy Lamar, Billy Wilder, Arnold Schönberg, Teddy Kollek... the list of famous and well-known Jewish Austrians is long. In Vienna, more than in almost any other city in Europe, the history of its Jewish citizens is so closely linked to its rise as a metropolis of science and the arts. Painting, music, science - Vienna at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries was the heyday of the Jewish community. Until 1938, Vienna had an active Jewish community with dozens of synagogues and prayer houses. However, the Nazi terror brought this flourishing era to an abrupt end: two thirds of Vienna's Jews were expelled and more than 65,000 were killed in concentration camps. Join me on a walk along the history of Jewish Vienna. We will experience and talk about the beginnings of the Jewish community in the middle-ages, its heyday at the time of the fin de siecle and the near extinction of the once flourishing community through the crimes of National Socialism.