Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial

The memorial commemorating Austrian Jewish Holocaust victims, created in 1998 by English artist Rachel Whiteread, has been on Judenplatz since 2000. In 1995, she won the tournament. The monument is a cube with library walls filled with petrified books that faces outwards and is hermetically sealed.No spine is discernible; they all point inwards, concealing the contents of the books.The wing doors, which signal the potential of movement, are closed.The shelves are lined with a seemingly infinite number of volumes of the same book, each symbolizing a different victim and their life story.Floor plaques bear the names of 45 locations where Austrian Jews were killed by Nazi murderers.

It is a reinforced concrete structure with a 10 7 meter base area and a height of 3.8 meters.This “nameless” library, despite having a symbolic gate, is inaccessible.An etching on the pavement next to the memorial reveals the location of the bimah of the medieval synagogue excavation site below.

The memorial’s content is closely tied to the exhibition on the Holocaust that was built up at the adjoining Mizrachi home.In collaboration with the Jewish community of Vienna, the Austrian resistance documentation archive has put up an information section on the Holocaust on the ground level.The public is given the names and dates of the 65,000 killed Austrian Jews, as well as the events that led to their persecution and death.

The installation of the memorial was condemned by certain members of the community, and locals formed a movement to protect the “beauty” of the area.The complaints and recommendations to show the synagogue discoveries (see above) instead of the memorial caused the work to be temporarily halted.

During his official visit to Austria in 2007, Pope Benedict XVI visited this Holocaust memorial with Chief Rabbi Paul Chaim Eisenberg and other Jewish, Catholic, and political dignitaries.