One hundred thirty years ago, in 1895, the first Jewish museum in the world was opened in Vienna.
The capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire was at that time home to the third biggest Jewish community in Europe, after Warsaw and Budapest, and the biggest German-speaking Jewish community.
Moreover, it was the most influential Jewish community, even beyond Europe. Wealthy Jewish industrialists, intellectuals, scientists, and artists were actively and largely participating in transforming Vienna into an international hub of modernity and creativity in all fields. They were proud to be Jewish and Viennese.
Due to the many museums opened across Europe and North America in the 19th century, prominent Jews in Vienna thought it was important to have a Jewish museum, too, to expose Judaism to the larger public. Today, there are more than 120 Jewish museums around the world.
Jewish Museum Vienna has a very turbulent history, reflecting the tragedy of Viennese and Austrian Jewry during the Holocaust and the slow and modest revival of the Jewish community in Austria after World War II.
Antisemitism affects museum visitor rates
The reestablished Jewish Museum opened its gates in 1993, in times when Austria was only beginning to come to terms with its Nazi past. While celebrating 130 years since the foundation of the first Jewish museum in the world, the Jewish Museum Vienna team recognizes how bad the situation of Jews has become again, not only in Austria.
“With the explosion of antisemitism around the world, visiting a Jewish museum has become unfashionable,” says Dr. Gabriele Kohlbauer-Fritz, the director of the museum’s collection and a leading curator.
Kohlbauer-Fritz possesses the necessary overview to estimate the influence of the current wave of global antisemitism on the number of visitors at the museum, which has expanded and now has a permanent place on the Judenplatz (Jewish Square). She has worked in the museum since it was reestablished 32 years ago.
“In the first years of the new museum, there wasn’t much tourist traffic to Vienna,” she recalls. “The number of visitors depended on the number of tourists who came to Vienna. Later, it became a tourist attraction, mainly for Americans, Israelis, and Germans. Nowadays, even in comparison with previous periods of tension in the Middle East, the decrease in the number of visitors is extreme.”
The effects of the Middle East wars in which Israel is currently engaged have led to people avoiding visiting the museum, since to do so might be interpreted as a gesture of sympathy with Jews.
This negative attitude is also felt in the museum’s pedagogical work. The museum has an extensive program for schools, aiming at bringing younger publics closer to Judaism and Jewish history, in a country where the chances of encountering Jews are minimal due to the smallness of the Jewish community (12,000-15,000 Jews, most of them in Vienna, among a population of over nine million).
“Our museum is not a Holocaust memorial,” says Hannah Landsmann, responsible for the pedagogic program, “We have another attitude. We want to tell stories that are not told in other places, like the story of the banker Samuel Oppenheimer, who financed the war efforts against the Ottomans who besieged Vienna, or the deep-rooted antisemitism of Queen Maria Theresa.”
However, since the outbreak of the war with Hamas, the number of school-class visits to the museum has drastically diminished. Teachers of classes in which Muslim and Arab pupils are 40% or more have no idea how they can include such a visit in their learning programs without creating chaos. There have been cases of Muslim parents forbidding their children from visiting the Jewish Museum.
“Every museum is political, but Jewish museums have become especially political,” stresses Landsmann.
“It is very important to bring school pupils here, if we want Vienna to remain a multicultural city,” adds Kohlbauer-Fritz. “If we want to reduce antisemitism, we must continue working in this direction.”
In light of the current explosive political context, the museum decided to run an exhibition presented as “an intervention about the world since October 7, 2023.” The exhibition’s title – “No Room for Discussion?”
Although the “intervention” does not focus on antisemitism, but on the “perpetuation of many forms of hatred – antisemitism, racism and islamophobia,” it was inspired by an incident relating to the current wave of antisemitism that took place in Great Britain in April 2024 and made headlines: the preventive covering of the Hyde Park Holocaust Memorial in London during a Palestinian solidarity demonstration.
The “intervention” invites the museum’s visitors to participate in a “curated dialogue” exploring different reactions and questions raised around the monument incident, questions such as “Is it possible to discuss Israel/Palestine?”
“Is the expectation that pro-Palestinian demonstrators would vandalize a Holocaust monument justified, or is it a prejudice?” This participatory approach takes care not to pick a side, emphasizing that “slogans, statements, and speeches incite violence and aggression toward particular groups of people” and are “not conducive to a peaceful resolution to the conflict.”
Visitors are asked to take the time to examine the opinions about the conflict expressed by different people, some of whom preferred to remain anonymous, to reflect on the way they react to these opinions, and to try to understand the perspective of the other person. But even this neutral invitation to an open dialogue does not attract more people to the museum.
JEWISH MUSEUM Vienna belongs to the city, not to the local Jewish community. The initiator of the museum’s reestablishment was the legendary Social Democrat mayor of Austria’s capital, Helmut Zilk, who, while trying to overcome the negative implications of the Waldheim affair, announced at the opening of a New York exhibition on “Vienna 1900” in 1986 his decision to open a Jewish museum of the City of Vienna.
The first exhibition was inaugurated in temporary premises – the former ceremonial room of the Jewish community of Vienna – in 1990. Three years later, the museum moved to a spacious building that once belonged to the private Jewish bank Arnstein and Eskeles and is therefore now named “Eskeles Palace.”
The original Viennese Jewish museum was founded by Jewish personalities and rich donors, and although dedicated mainly – but not only – to Jewish heritage, especially from Eastern and Central Europe, it had a strong Zionist flair under the direction of its second curator, Jakob Bronner.
Born in 1885 in Silesia, nowadays part of Poland, Bronner studied Jewish theology in Breslau before spending some years in Jerusalem. Later, he moved to Vienna, where he became a religion teacher in a secondary school to which many Jewish bourgeois families sent their children. When Bronner took over from his brother the management of the Jewish museum, which kept on moving from one address to another due to financial issues, he expanded the museum’s collection, adding to it many objects that he bought on his numerous travels to the Land of Israel.
“In 1938, right after the Anschluss – the annexation of Austria to Nazi Germany – the Gestapo shut down the Jewish Museum and forced Bronner to write down an inventory of all the objects the museum possessed,” recounts Dr. Daniela Schmid, director of the museum’s archive. “Bronner took a copy of this document with him when he fled Vienna and settled in Haifa.
“The first museum had around 6,000 objects of all sorts. The Nazis confiscated all of them and divided them between five different institutions, museums, and libraries, in Vienna. Some objects were selected to be shown in an antisemitic propaganda exhibition at the Natural History Museum. Almost 50% of the museum’s valuable objects disappeared during World War II.
“After the war, Bronner, who chose not to return to Austria, sent his wife with the inventory list to the Jewish community in Vienna. Thanks to this list, we know what was in the old collection.
“Some objects were returned to the Jewish community already in the ’50s; others only much later, in the ’90s. However, even today, we still discover objects from the old museum’s collection in auctions or flea markets. Just last year, three such objects were restituted. Sometimes we have to buy objects from those who possess them now.”
One of the new collections of the museum is of antisemitic objects collected by the Jewish Austrian businessman Martin Schlaff. This collection of around 5,000 objects, dating from 1490 to 1946, was donated to the City of Vienna to be exhibited in the Jewish Museum.
“Schlaff wanted at the time to make these objects disappear from the markets,” explains Landsmann. “That’s why he bought them. But at a certain point, he realized that there were too many of them, and he gave up his initial intention.
“The collection was exhibited in 2011 for the first time. It is interesting to see how visitors, mainly youngsters, react to it today.”