Cityguide App: Take a Walk Through Jewish Vienna with “Ivie”
Kurier, October 24, 2024
German original: https://kurier.at/chronik/oesterreich/cityguide-app-ivie-wientourismus-juedische-wien/402961092
The Vienna Tourist Board's app offers a new city walk to 13 significant sites of Jewish Vienna.
On October 12, Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement and the highest holiday in the Jewish calendar year, falls on a Thursday this year. The Vienna Tourist Board is taking advantage of this to present an extension of its city guide app “Ivie”: the new city walk is dedicated to Jewish Vienna.
The app guides visitors to 13 places of great importance to Jewish Vienna, including the Jewish Museum, the Sigmund Freud Museum, the Jewish-influenced Carmelite Quarter, and the oldest Jewish cemetery in Austria, located in Vienna's Rossau district. You will be taken to the museum at Judenplatz, the Arnold Schönberg Center, the Jewish City Temple and the Shoah Wall of Names, Vienna's newest and largest Holocaust memorial.
The route also leads to Theodor Herzl's first resting place in the Döbling Cemetery – and Ivie also explains why the father of the State of Israel is no longer buried there.
Part of Vienna's identity
“Vienna is a cosmopolitan city that offers space for all cultures and religions. Jewish life is an essential part of Vienna's identity and an enrichment for the city. In the new 'Jewish Vienna Guide', the Vienna Tourist Board makes this diversity fully accessible to visitors and residents alike,” says Vienna Tourist Board Director Norbert Kettner, welcoming the new Ivie launch.
Without its Jewish residents, the history of Vienna would be unthinkable, says Barbara Staudinger, director of the Jewish Museum Vienna: “Traces of what was once the third largest Jewish community in Europe can be found everywhere: from the Ringstrasse to the municipal housing, from the 1st district to Floridsdorf. There are well-known and lesser-known places to discover in the city that not only tell the story of the four Jewish communities, but also, and above all, the diversity of Jewish cultures in the city of Vienna.”
The new walk complements the existing Ivie offering, which already includes more than 20 walks and tours. The topics are wide-ranging: from Freud to Beethoven, from Sisi to the city's LGBTIQ+ highlights.