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Jewish Vienna Walking Tour
About This Tour
From the Middle Ages, the Jewish community in Vienna was one of Europe's largest. This 2.5-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.
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.
What's Included
✓ Included
- 2.5-hour stroll through Vienna's relevant Jewish heritage and memorial sites with a historian guide.
✗ Not Included
- Metro fare. If you don't have a visitor pass, our guide helps you to purchase at the first station.
Itinerary
1
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.
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.
2
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.
3
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.
4
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.
Good to Know
- Suitable for all physical fitness levels
- Your tour guides are professors, doctoral students, historians, journalists, art critics, and published author