Jewish Museum Vienna

The Jüdisches Museum Wien, trading as Jüdisches Museum der Stadt Wien GmbH or the Jewish Museum Vienna, is a museum of Jewish history, life and religion in Austria. The museum is present on two locations, in the Palais Eskeles in the Dorotheergasse and in the Judenplatz, and has distinguished itself by a very active programme of exhibitions and outreach events highlighting the past and present of Jewish culture in Austria. The current director is Danielle Spera and the chief curator is Werner Hanak-Lettner.

The first Jewish Museum in Vienna, founded in 1896, was the first Jewish museum in the world of its sort. It was supported and run by the "Society for the Collection and Preservation of Artistic and Historical Memorials of Jewry". The museum focused on the culture and history of the Jews in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, especially in Vienna and Galicia, while its collection of objects from Palestine also reflected the political debate about Zionism at that time.

By 1913, when it moved into the Talmud-Thora-School in Leopoldstadt with 3,400 objects, it had already moved premises several times. Immediately after the Anschluss by Nazi Germany in 1938 the museum was closed, and its contents were distributed among the Museum of Ethnology (Museum für Völkerkunde), the Natural History Museum (Naturhistorisches Museum Wien) and other repositories. The Natural History Museum used its new acquisitions to mount the anti-Semitic exhibition "The Corporeal and Spiritual Properties of the Jews". At the beginning of the 1950s, the majority of that stock was restituted to the Jewish community (Israelitische Kultusgemeinde Wien), with some additional objects being returned in the 1990s.

On 31 December 1964 a small Jewish museum was opened in the newly built Desider-Friedmann-Hof in Tempelgasse 3, but received scarcely any public attention. It closed for renovation work in 1967 and was never reopened.

...
Wikipedia