The Old Jewish Cemetery in the Seegasse
Why is it significant?
Pass through the lobby of the retirement home at Seegasse 9, and the back windows open onto something you would never expect: a garden of leaning gravestones, mossy and crooked, between the trees. This is the oldest surviving Jewish cemetery in Vienna.
Key Facts
| Place | The Old Jewish Cemetery in the Seegasse |
|---|---|
| Address | Seegasse 9, 1090 Wien, Austria |
| Geo Coordinates | 48.22370, 16.36300 |
| Part of Walk | Couches, Wax and Radium: Freud's Vienna and the Medical Quarter of Alsergrund |
| Generated | Generated |
Pass through the lobby of the retirement home at Seegasse 9, and the back windows open onto something you would never expect: a garden of leaning gravestones, mossy and crooked, between the trees. This is the oldest surviving Jewish cemetery in Vienna.
Burials here go back to the sixteenth century, and the oldest stones are from the 1500s. It served the Jewish community until 1783, when Emperor Joseph the Second banned new burials inside the city's outer wall for reasons of hygiene, one of the first public health laws of modern Vienna. Among those who lie here are Samuel Oppenheimer and Samson Wertheimer, the great court bankers who financed Habsburg armies around 1700. Even after the expulsion of the Jews from Vienna in 1670, the cemetery survived, and the community that slowly returned went on burying its dead here.
Look for a stone carved with a fish. Legend tells of a fish, caught for a Sabbath meal, that cried out in a human voice before it was killed, and was then buried here like a person. Historians suspect the carving simply belonged to a man named Fisch. But in Vienna, a good legend is never allowed to die.
During the Nazi period this cemetery was in danger of being destroyed completely. In 1943, members of the Jewish community managed to carry many of the gravestones to the Central Cemetery and bury them there, to save them. Decades later, in 1984, a large number were found again, and over the following years they were brought back and set up once more.
Some stand where they once stood, others where they could be placed. Not every stone has found its grave. And yet the old residents of the home sit at their windows above it every day, and the graves are no longer forgotten. Now walk west along the Seegasse and turn right into the Porzellangasse and then left, to the gates of a princely garden.