Rabbi Chapman – JUF Mission to Israel/Austria – Post 1

(picture credit Wikipedia)

This year’s JUF Nachshon mission begins in Vienna, a city with a Jewish history going back to the 12th century. In the early 20th century, around

200,000 Jews lived here, about 1/10th of the city’s population. During the Holocaust, the Nazis decimated Austria’s Jewish community, leaving only a few thousand here after the war.

During our walking tour today, we stopped in Judenplatz (Jewish Square), once the center of Viennese Jewish life in the Middle Ages. Here, we paid our respects at one of the most evocative Holocaust memorials I have ever visited. The Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial, also known as the Nameless Library, was designed by British artist Rachel Whiteread, and was unveiled in the year 2000.  At first, it appears to be a nondescript bunker or mausoleum. But on closer inspection, the “bricks” are actually books neatly lined up as though on a library bookshelf. In a brilliant artistic turn, the books are arranged with the “spines” facing in, so all we see are the edges with the pages. No titles, no authors, no specific information — just nameless books, representing each victim of the Shoah from this city, hence the “Nameless Library.”

The memorial evokes both the Jewish people’s moniker as The People of the Book, as well as the depth of the loss incurred during the Shoah. Each murdered Jew was a whole story, a whole world. And while we can remember their names, we can never recapture or recreate what was written on those pages. They are lost forever, like books carved from concrete with their titles hidden away.