By Dsaved.com
VIENNA — It was 1943 when Vienna's Nazi overlords gave the order to
destroy the city's oldest Jewish cemetery, demanding it be leveled and
the tombstones attesting to centuries of Jewish existence there be
destroyed.
Desperate to save their heritage, the city's shrinking Jewish
community decided to act. Defying the possibility of prison, deportation
or execution, they buried the gravestones and kept them from Nazi
hands.
Some 70 years later, Jewish leaders in the Austrian capital
say the long-lost stones have been rediscovered. It is a find they say
could transform a small obscure graveyard into one that rivals the
significance of Prague's Jewish cemetery, the oldest known burial ground
of its kind.
The cemetery has no name and is hard to find, with the only entrance
through a city home for the elderly in Vienna's 9th district. Weathered
but restored gravestones poke through weedy, uncut grass, with faded
Hebrew inscriptions.
But beneath the ground, Jewish leaders say, are other tombstones piled layer upon layer.
The cemetery dates back to the 16th century and had about 900
tombstones until 1938, when the Nazis came to power and gave vandals
free reign to deface and destroy them.
Vienna's Jewish leaders say it is not clear exactly how many were
buried by the small group of Viennese Jews determined to save their
heritage from the Nazi bulldozers. They also say they have few further
details of the act, with none of the participants surviving the
Holocaust and their location unclear – until now.
After workers scored the ground with radar as part of restoration
work, they say they are sure there are hundreds beneath the grass. The
20 unearthed in the past few weeks have convinced officials they have a
historically significant find, they said.
Raimund Fastenbauer, a senior official with Vienna's Jewish
community, told The Associated Press on Wednesday that he believes many
of the up to 600 missing stones are still below ground and partially or
fully recoverable.
If so, he said, the find, "is totally comparable to the significance
of the Jewish cemetery in Prague," once the stones are restored and set
up again.
Community leader Oskar Deutsch said the stones are up to 500 years
old. While finding and restoring them is expected to last for years, he
said more will likely be dug up in the next few weeks.
More than 185,000 Jews lived in Vienna before Hitler's Germany annexed Austria in 1938.
Of the more than 65,000 deported to Nazi death camps, only about
2,000 survived. Most of the rest emigrated, with only about 25,000
remaining by 1946, most of whom then left the country.
Today, there are an estimated 15,000 Jews living in Austria, largely
in Vienna. After decades of officially sanctioned depictions of the
country as Hitler's victims, Austrian governments have growingly
acknowledged that their nation played a significant role in perpetrating
Nazi crimes, and the city of Vienna missed few opportunities in
attempts to make amends.
Restoration of the cemetery will serve as "another piece of the
mosaic in the total picture" of Vienna's attempts to reconstruct its
past, said a statement from Andreas Mailath-Pokorny, a city councilman
in charge of restoration work at the cemetery.
Source: www.huffingtonpost.com
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