Nine undergraduate students spent this past spring break traveling through Austria on a trip entitled, “Celebrate Jewish Life in Vienna: Past, Present and Future,” which was sponsored by the Hopkins Hillel. From March 13 to 23, the students explored Jewish life past and present throughout the city, learning about the impacts of the Holocaust as well as what life is like for Jews in Austria today.
Generous support from the Jewish Welcome Service made possible this opportunity for the Hopkins Hillel students. The Jewish Welcome Service, founded in 1980, is an Austrian-funded organization that has strived to maintain the historical narrative of the Jewish community in Austria alive in the years following the Holocaust.
“In front of every house where a Jew was expelled by the Nazis, there are bronze little plates in front of their homes. A lot of the apartment buildings have these bronze plaques in front of them, and that is where the Jewish Welcome Service started. It was to bring family of Austrian Jews, but at this point they also want to bring Jews from around the world to hear the story of the Austrian Jewish community,” Jonathan Falk, assistant director of Hopkins Hillel, said.
Jonathan Falk and Sam Konig, the executive director of Hillel at Towson University, led the trip together.
“Before the Holocaust there were about 200,000 Jews in Vienna, today there are about 8,500, so it’s a drastic difference. We learned a lot about what happened during the Holocaust, we also learned a lot about the rebuilding of the Jewish community,” Falk said.
This opportunity was available to all undergraduates and all years were represented on the trip. Hopkins Hillel has offered several other alternative spring break trips in past years, including a trip to Argentina in the spring of 2013. While previous Hillel trips were based on service work, “Celebrate Jewish Life in Vienna” was purely educational.
“The biggest strength of the Hillel-organized trips is the amount of planning that goes into them. Through this trip we were able to meet with some pretty incredible people that would have been impossible to set up if traveling without an organization. Another strength is the trips are highly subsidized (or free in the case of Birthright), which allows for the opportunity to travel at low cost,” sophomore Noah Landesberg wrote in an email to The News-Letter.
Falk, Konig and the students traveled throughout the city exploring important places such as the historic synagogue Stadttempel, Vienna’s Jewish Quarter, the famous Café Landtmann and the Austrian Parliament. They also engaged with speakers such as Chief Rabbi of Vienna Paul Chaim Eisenberg and Ari Rath, the former chief editor of the Jerusalem Post, among others.
“We got a chance to be in the only synagogue [Stadttempel] in Austria that wasn’t burned down, which is a synagogue that is gorgeous and is built into other buildings. So supposedly the Nazi’s couldn’t burn it down or they would have burned the entire first district, which is the center of the city,” Falk said.
Landesberg had the unique experience of meeting a distant relative in Vienna who spoke to him extensively about the strong ties his family had to the city.
“During the trip we visited a concentration camp called Mauthausen and I also learned that the camp my grandmother was liberated from was a sub camp of Mauthausen called Lenzing. I was really able to explore my Jewish and European roots, and learned that my family had more connection to Vienna then I had ever known,” Landesberg wrote in an email to The News-Letter.
Students also met and talked with Blackie Schwartz, a Holocaust survivor who grew up in Vienna and recently retired there.
“One interesting juxtaposition was that we visited Blackie Schwartz in the old age home, and right next door is the Jewish Day School, and they are actually on the same campus. Both the old and the new are learning and some are living there as well together,” Falk said.
The Jewish Welcome Service, along with Falk and Konig, highlighted both the negative and positive aspects of Jewish culture and history in Austria in the curriculum for the trip.
“Austria as a state declared themselves victims of World War II but eventually apologized in the 1980s for the role they played in supporting the Nazi party. Learning about the rise and fall and reemergence of the Jewish community in Austria was fascinating,” Landesberg wrote.
