Judenplatz - Holocaust Memorial

Holocaust Memorial

For more information, see Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial

In the middle of the northern end of the square, the Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial stands for the Austrian Jewish victims of the Shoah, made by the English artist Rachel Whiteread. It consists of a 10 by 7 metre block that is 3.8 metres tall. It is located in the northwestern end of the square before the Misrachi-Hause, and faces the Lessing Monument in the southeast with its walls parallel to the length of the square. The memorial is site-specific in many ways and therefore it is dependent on the setting of Judenplatz. One facet of this site-specificity is that it was designed at a domestic scale. It was imagined as if one of the surrounding buildings had a room cast inside out and placed in public in the middle of the square. The walls of the memorial resemble library walls of petrified books, however, the spines of the books on the walls are not legible, they all are turned inwards. On a concrete plinth, the names of the 41 places at which Austrian Jews came to death during the Nazi rule, are written. Although this "nameless" library has a symbolic entrance, it is not accessible. The memorial stands in close relation with the exhibition of the Holocaust that is installed in the neighboring Misrachi-Haus. At the Misrachi-Haus, the names and data of 65,000 murdered Austrian Jews are documented and accessible at computer terminals.

Excavations were undertaken to establish the Memorial from July 1995 to November 1998, that are considered the most important urban archaeological investigations in Vienna. Uncovered on the eastern half of the square were quarrystone walls, a well and cellars of a whole block from the time of a medieval synagogue. Controversy arose over the placement of the memorial over the archaeological excavations, which resulted in movement of the memorial 1 meter from its original placement on the site. The complete reorganization of the square and its transformation to a pedestrian plaza were completed in the autumn of 2000 with the inauguration of the Holocaust memorial.