Jewish Vienna: Culture, Cosmopolitanism & Crisis - 3 hour Small Group Tour

From the Middle Ages, the Jewish community in Vienna was one of Europe's largest. This 3-hour Jewish Vienna tour explores the tumultuous experiences of Vienna’s Jewish citizens through expulsion, genocide, and revival. Your historian guide will help you to discover the influential contributions of past intellectual and cultural icons and the fragile revitalization of Vienna’s Jewish community taking place today.

We begin outside the Jewish City Temple before winding through the second district to the destroyed Leopoldstädter Temple. Visiting the Nestroyhof Theater with its stunning Art Nouveau exterior, once home to Yiddish-speaking ensembles, we reflect on brilliant leaders of Vienna’s intellectual, political, and economic spheres from the Jewish community: Sigmund Freud, Theodor Herzl, Karl Krauss, Franz Werfel, and Gustav Mahler. Learning of the victims and survivors of Nazi genocide, we visit destroyed Ashkenazi and Sephardic synagogues and the Judenplatz Holocaust memorial.

Itinerary
This is a typical itinerary for this product

Stop At: Stadttempel Synagogue, Seitenstettengasse 4 Innere Stadt, Vienna 1010 Austria

Outside the beautiful doors of the Jewish City Temple, we consider the how the Viennese Jewish Community had to keep their synagogues barely visible from the street despite their influential role in their city's development over centuries. Few European cities have been so closely intertwined with Jewish history as Vienna. Outside this important temple, we learn of Jewish life and increasing settlement in Vienna from the Middle Ages, despite dramatic expulsions.

We don't visit the interior but we recommend that you contact the synagogue to arrange a tour with their own guides, open April to October, Monday to Thursday. If you take the 11:30 AM Monday synagogue tour and then enjoy your lunch, you are in the perfect place to begin our 2:00 PM tour of Jewish Vienna. If you take the 2:00 PM synagogue tour on Tuesday and Thursdays, it will fit well after our 9:30 AM Tuesday and Thursday tour with a lunch break.

Duration: 15 minutes

Stop At: Theater Nestroyhof Hamakom, Nestroypl. 1, 1020 Wien, Austria

We consider the influence of Vienna's modern Jewish community on every aspect of the city's cultural life from outside the Nestroyhof Theater with its stunning Art Nouveau exterior, once home to Yiddish-speaking ensembles.

Duration: 20 minutes

Stop At: Leopoldstadt, Leopoldstadt, Vienna

Winding through Vienna's second district, to visit the memorial site of the destroyed Leopoldstädter Temple. Today, it is symbolized by four imposing white columns reaching up into the sky.

Duration: 30 minutes

Stop At: Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial, Judenplatz 8, Vienna 1010 Austria

Learn of the victims and survivors of Nazi genocide and the phenomenon of antisemitism in Europe while visiting the destroyed synagogues of both Ashkenazi and Sephardic congregations and the Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial.

Duration: 25 minutes