[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 labor 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)
Encyclopaedia Judaica 1971: Austria, vol. 3, col. 887-888, map of the Jews in Austria (shape of 1945)
