November 3, 2025
Walking Tour: Jewish Vienna - Leopoldstadt
Our walking tour led through the historic and current heart of the Jewish community in Vienna, the II. district, Leopoldstadt. We visited former major religious sites, places of social life, spaces of persecution, and sites of social and political activism.
September 15, 2025
Walking Tour: Vienna Jewish History along the Ring
On the first week of the new Academic Year, we invited students from all departments and programs to join the Jewish Studies Walking Tour highlighting Jewish life and culture along Vienna’s most prominent street – the Ring. Among other places, we stopped at the State Opera to learn about the greats like Gustav Mahler but also the persecution of Jewish artists under the Nazis; by the great palace of the Epstein banking family; and we visited the University of Vienna to talk about historic Jewish university life and student antisemitism there.
January 28, 2025
Public Memory of the Second World War and the Holocaust in Austria
On the occasion of International Holocaust Memorial Day (the day before, 27 January), eighty years since the liberation of Auschwitz, we organized a walking tour through Vienna to see how Austria has dealt with its Nazi past, how this changed over time, and how it is reflected in the public space. The walking tour took us through the history of public memory of the Second World War, the Nazi regime, and the Holocaust in Vienna. We explored how Austria dealt with its Nazi past through the monuments that were erected to the memory of its victims from the immediate post-war period to the present. The tour was co-organized with the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute.
October 8, 2024
Leopoldstadt
On October 8, the CEU Jewish Studies Program organized a walking tour of Leopoldstadt, Vienna's 2nd district, and a center of Jewish life, first in the 17th century, then in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and again in the early 21st century. We started at Nestroyplatz, where Carsten Wilke gave a general history of the four major periods of Jewish history in Vienna, from the middle ages to the present. Then Michael Miller gave a tour of Tempelgasse, site of the (former) Leopoldstaedter Tempel and the current Bukharin and Georgian synagogue. We walked from the "beacon of light" (Lichtzeichen) on Tempelgasse to the "beacon of light" at Zirkusgasse 22, site of the former Turkische Tempel, and then Jan Rybak reflected on the "stumbling stones" (Stolpersteine) at the corner of Große Mohrengasse before taking us to Hotel Stefanie (Taborstraße 12), which is not only Vienna's oldest hotel but was also a hotbed of Yiddish radicalism in the early 20th century. We ended our tour at Kleine Sperlgasse 2a, where Ines Koeltzsch reflected on this site where Jews were assembled in 1941/42 before being transported across the city by truck to Anspang Train Station, and then to their deaths. Afterwards, we had an opportunity to contemplate the history of Leopoldstadt over beer, Sturm and sage tea at Karmelitermarkt.
September 13, 2023
Leopoldstadt
Students in Jewish Studies started the academic year with a walking tour in in the 2nd district of Vienna, Leopoldstadt, which has been the center of Jewish life in the Austrian capital since the seventeenth century. Faculty evoked the early modern Jewish ghetto on the island facing Vienna, the sites of synagogues and schools in the nineteenth century, the shelter for Jewish refugees during WWI, and various present-day Jewish institutions in the area.
May 4, 2022
Leopoldstadt
Students from the Nationalism Studies Program and the Jewish Studies Specialization were invited to a walk in the 2nd District of Vienna. The itinerary started at the memorial site where Vienna's main synagogue, the "Leopoldstädter Tempel," stood between 1858 and 1938, and included the sites of the Orthodox and the Sephardi synagogues, of the Nazi deportation collection point and of the Gestapo building. Jewish life in the district, once nick-named "Matzo Island," has revived after the Holocaust, most visibly in several Jewish institutions and the recently restored Jewish theater "Nestroyhof".
October 26, 2021
In the Footsteps of Herzl
In the framework of his class "Zionism and Other Jewish Nationalisms," Professor Michael Miller guided CEU students in Jewish Studies and Nationalism Studies to major stations in the life of the Viennese journalist and Zionist leader Theodor Herzl (1860-1904). We met in front of St. Stephen's Cathedral (Stephansdom), where young Herzl, prior to his "conversion" to Zionism, dreamt to counter the threat of antisemitism by a solemn mass conversion of Jews to the Catholic Church. We proceeded to the building where Herzl had his workplace at the liberal daily journal Neue Freie Presse, then to the concert hall of the Musikverein where two Zionist Congresses and Herzl's funeral ceremony took place. We stopped in front of the Burgtheater, where several of his plays were performed, and in Türkenstrasse, where the Executive Committee of the World Zionist Organization had its offices and edited its journal Die Welt. Herzl lived nearby in Bergstrasse, not far from where Dr. Freud's couch originally stood. Our excursion ended on Döblinger Cemetery, where Herzl rested in (relative) peace between 1904 and 1949. In that year, the newly founded State of Israel, in accordance with Herzl's last will, reburied his body in Jerusalem.
October 17, 2021
Judenplatz
The first Jewish Studies excursion after CEU's move to Vienna and the confinement during the Covid pandemic was to Judenplatz (Jews' Square) in the Viennese Inner City, center of medieval Jewish community and site of the Holocaust memorial by Rachel Whiteread. Students from Professor Wilke's class "Jewish Cultural Heritage" saw the exhibition on the medieval Jewish community and the excavated remains of its synagogue destroyed in 1421.