Vienna - Jewish Museum

(Local Name: Jüdisches Museum des Stadt Wien) The Viennese Jewish Museum has various temporary exhibitions on specific themes. As well as general Jewish topics, e.g. exhibitions on Jewish Vienna, eastern Jewry and Viennese salon culture, literature, architecture, photography and modern art are featured. From 1996 a permanent Judaic Collection will be open to the public which will be based on three larger collections of inestimable worth already in existence: the Max Berger collection comprising over 10,000 works of art, the collection of the Israeli cultural community which was dispersed by the Nazis in 1938 and the Martin Schlaff collection, donated in 1993, of 5,000 objects on the topic of anti-Semitism, making the complete exhibition unique in Europe. The new Jewish Museum was opened in mid-November 1993 by Vienna's mayor Helmut Zilk and the mayor of Jerusalem Teddy Kollek, who was born in Vienna.

The museum is housed in a classical Baroque palace in the Altstadt, which dates back to the 11th C. when it was separated from the neighboring Dorotheer seminary. Aristocratic names are found in the register such as Harrach, Dietrichstein or Kaunitz. In 1823 it fell into the ownership of the banking house Arnstein and Eskeles which was one of the most respected institutions of its time and co-founder of the Austrian National Bank. The wives of the Imperial money lenders, the sisters Cäcilie Eskeles and Fanny Arnstein from Berlin, ran elegant salons where Viennese society and famous poets, musicians, painters and intellectuals rubbed shoulders. From 1827 the palace was owned by Count Nako de Szent Mikols; in 1896 the art dealer Hugo Miethke ran an art gallery here where, after 1900, Viennese artists such as Klimt, Scile, van Gogh and Picasso exhibited. Since 1936 the Palais Eskeles has belonged to the Dorotheum and for decades served as an exhibition hall for art auctions before it was given to the Jewish Museum to bring the history of the relationship between Jews and non-Jews in Austria and Europe closer to visitors and to provide a meeting-place where Jews and non-Jews can come together at symposia, films and musical events.