Benjamin Murmelstein

Benjamin Murmelstein
Photograph of Murmelstein from the Theresienstadt Konvolut, an historical booklet produced by the Jewish self-government in Theresienstadt, ca. 1944
Born	June 9, 1905 Lvov, Galicia, Austria Hungary (now Lviv, Ukraine)
Died	October 27, 1989 Rome, Italy
Title	Chief Rabbi of Vienna

Benjamin Israel Murmelstein (9 June 1905 – 27 October 1989) was an Austrian rabbi. He was one of 17 community rabbis in Vienna in 1938 and the only one remaining in Vienna by late 1939. An important figure and board member of the Jewish group in Vienna during the early stages of the war, he was also an "Ältester" (council elder) of the Judenrat in the Theresienstadt concentration camp after 1943. He was the only "Judenältester" to survive the Holocaust and has been credited with saving the lives of thousands of Jews by assisting in their emigration, while also being accused of being a Nazi collaborator.

Murmelstein spent his final years in Rome, repudiated by the Jewish community because of his role in the Holocaust. He was interviewed by Claude Lanzmann in 1975 and was the subject of a posthumous 2013 documentary, The Last of the Unjust, based on the interviews. He died in obscurity, but since the release of the documentary he and his role in the Holocaust have become the subject of increased media and scholarly attention.

A native of Lvov, Galicia, Benjamin Israel Murmelstein was raised Orthodox Jewish, like his family. After completing his education in Vienna, Murmelstein established himself there, becoming rabbi of a small synagogue, an occasional lecturer at the Vienna University on ancient Jewish history, and—following a speech on the Jewish soldiers whose names were effaced from German war memorials of World War I—a person of interest to the Viennese Jewish community organization, Israelitische Kultusgemeinde (IKG). As a Board member of the IKG, he began after the annexing of Austria into Nazi Germany producing reports which were presented to Adolf Eichmann as part of that man's work emigrating and seizing the property of the Jews.

Murmelstein became deputy chairman of the Jewish Council of Elders in Vienna, a group created by the Nazis, and for years was involved in Eichmann's work to remove Jews from Austria, witnessing the Nazi policies firsthand. In his interviews with Lanzmann decades later, he revealed that he had observed Eichmann, armed with a crowbar, organizing the destruction of Vienna's Seitenstettengasse synagogue during the Kristallnacht pogrom. He worked with the IKG to help over 125,000 Jews leave the country by 1941, but in that year the Germans began closing the borders as their emigration policies were evolving towards the ultimate end of internment. In 1943, Murmelstein was himself interned in the camp of Theresienstadt, or Terezin, in a former Czechoslovakian fortress