In 2020 the Austrian constitution celebrated its 100th anniversary. Praised by the Federal President Alexander Van der Bellen for its ‘elegance and beauty,’ its contents are not well enough known, and the devotion to the constitution that in countries such as the USA is rare in Austria.

The Zionist-oriented SC Hakoah inscribed a “Jewish football” success story in the history of Viennese football during the interwar period: the club won the first professional football championship in Austria in 1925. Little is known, however, that other Viennese and European football clubs likewise have a “Jewish history,” and that Jewish sports officials, coaches, and players contributed to the clubs’ early successes.

The photographer Maria Austria, actually Marie Östreicher, was born in Karlovy Vary in 1915 and came to Vienna in the mid-1930s to study at the Higher Federal Institution for Graphic Education and Research.

The image of Jewish women and men is shaped by misunderstandings in large sections of the majority society. Whether it concerns the exaggeration of the “Jewish sense of family,” “Jewish learning,” a clichéd notion of “Jewish life,” or the sadness inherent in anything “Jewish,” all of this is based on misconceptions that later translate into prejudice and express stereotypical images.

As of October 13, the Jewish Museum Vienna is presenting the video installation Apologies (Entschuldigungen) at the Museum Dorotheergasse. In the work of Taiwanese-American film artist James T. Hong, world leaders apologize for crimes ordered or sanctioned by the state.

The artistic work of Friedl Dicker-Brandeis (1898-1944) is marked by production across media, ranging from graphics and paintings to designs for costumes and stage sets, toys, interiors and modular furniture, through fabrics, bags, and book covers to politically engaged art. Throughout her short career she also worked as an art teacher – a practice she pursued even after she was deported to the concentration camp Terezín and up until her murder at Auschwitz in 1944.

The new exhibition at the Exilarte Center, which will be open to the public starting September 17, 2022, illustrates Kreisler’s family history, his time in Vienna and his special ability to communicate with the media (record companies, newspapers, radio) through numerous pictures, musical materials and life documents. His violin style (in connection with the major concertos and the Beethoven sonatas) is also thematized, as are his arrangements and compositional style.

When the then chairman of the Jewish Community, Paul Grosz, was asked many years ago what he thought of the establishment of a Jewish Museum, he asked a bitter counter-question. Whether Jews should be marveled at there “like taxidermied Indians“?

Café Arabia opened in 1951 on Vienna’s Kohlmarkt, in the middle of the city center. It imported the Italian espresso culture into the traditional coffee-making metropolis, which caused heated debates. Equally spectacular was the coffee house’s demise: In 1999 it had to give way to a boutique, which both regular guests and architecture connoisseurs regretted. The history of the café and its founder, the entrepreneur Alfred Weiss (1890–1973), has meanwhile faded into oblivion and is now to be brought back into consciousness.

The art collection of the Documentation Centre of Austrian Resistance in Vienna comprises around 200 prints, drawings, and oil paintings. This exhibition marks the first comprehensive presentation of those works. The story they tell is one of resistance, war and persecution between 1934 and 1945.

Judenplatz, right in the heart of Vienna, is a place where layers of Jewish history have built up over centuries. Beginning in the thirteenth century, a Jewish quarter with a magnificent synagogue took root here. Over the course of two hundred years, Vienna became a center of Jewish knowledge and learning, with several important rabbis living and teaching here.