Leopoldstadt Temple Memorial
Why is it significant?
In front of a modern building you see four tall white columns, standing on their own, holding up nothing. They are not decoration. They are a measurement: they show you how tall and how wide the building was that once stood here.
Key Facts
| Place | Leopoldstadt Temple Memorial |
|---|---|
| Address | Tempelgasse 5, 1020 Wien, Austria |
| Geo Coordinates | 48.21390, 16.38500 |
| Part of Walk | The Island Across the Canal: Vienna's Leopoldstadt, Augarten and Prater |
| Generated | Generated |
In front of a modern building you see four tall white columns, standing on their own, holding up nothing. They are not decoration. They are a measurement: they show you how tall and how wide the building was that once stood here.
This was the Leopoldstädter Tempel, the great synagogue of Leopoldstadt, opened in 1858. The architect Ludwig Förster, who also helped plan the Ringstrasse, designed it in a Moorish style, with arches and patterned brickwork recalling the synagogues of medieval Spain. It was the largest synagogue in Vienna, and for eighty years it was the pride of the Mazzesinsel, the place for great festivals, weddings and sermons.
On the night of the 9th to the 10th of November 1938, during the pogrom the Nazis called Reichskristallnacht, it was set on fire and destroyed. That night almost every synagogue and prayer house in Vienna was wrecked, thousands of Jewish shops and homes were looted, and thousands of Jewish men were arrested, many sent to Dachau. Of Vienna's many synagogues, only the Stadttempel in the old town survived as a building, because it was hidden inside a residential block and could not be burned without setting the houses around it alight.
In the years that followed, around sixty-five thousand Austrian Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. The ruins of this temple were cleared, and for decades the site was simply a plot with an ordinary building on it. In 1997 these columns were erected, a light, simple sign that lets you imagine the size of what was lost.
Today the building behind the columns serves the Jewish community again, and the street carries the temple's name. Take a quiet moment here. Then return to Praterstraße and follow it north-east to its end, where it opens onto a great roundabout and the column of an admiral rises from the traffic.