III. The Synagogue My Grandfather Knew

“A synagogue is not a building. It is a room in which a community agrees, weekly, to be addressed.”

On the third morning I walked from Marchettigasse to Stumpergasse, which takes about eight minutes, and which my grandfather did on foot every Shabbat for thirty-four years.

I did it slowly, on purpose. This is the one piece of the trip I would defend to a sceptic on methodological grounds: you cannot understand a family’s religious life from a map. You must know whether the walk was long enough to argue on. It was. Eight minutes is enough for a man to correct his son’s Hebrew, or to say nothing at all, which in my family has always been the more common liturgy.

The synagogue is not there — only a police station.

I knew this before I came. I had read the record: the Israelitischer Tempel- und Schulverein built it in 1894 in the rear courtyard of Stumpergasse 42, backing onto the Schmalzhofgasse — the Stumper-Schul, not quite two hundred seats, a courtyard shul of the kind that filled the districts, unremarkable, sufficient. It was wrecked on the ninth and tenth of November 1938. It was never restored. The building came down in 1973; the city put up housing on the site between 1976 and 1978; and in 2010 the district council of Mariahilf fixed a memorial tablet above the street sign, made to match the street sign, so that at a glance you take the two for one object.

So, I stood in front of a residential block from the late seventies, of the kind that exists in every European city, faced in a colour I can only describe as municipal, and read a plaque. Two young police officers emerged from the station looking quizzically at us.

I want to say what this is like, because I have read a great many accounts of standing before Holocaust memorials and almost none of them describe the actual experience, which is one of inadequacy on both sides. The site is inadequate to the event. And I was inadequate to the site. I stood there for perhaps four minutes, which is not very long, and then I noticed that I had begun thinking about lunch, and I was appalled at myself, and then I understood that being appalled at myself was also a performance, and I stopped and simply stood in the street feeling nothing much, in front of a building where a shul full of people used to pray until a night when men came with petrol.

Here is what the absence taught me, and it took the rest of the day to arrive.

I have written a good deal about hester panim — the hiding of the face — and about the Lurianic tzimtzum, the divine self-contraction that makes room for a world by withdrawing from it. These are, in the literature and in my own essays, theological categories: they describe something about God. Standing on the Stumpergasse I understood for the first time that they also describe something about a street.

The absence of that synagogue is not a gap in the streetscape. There is no gap. The site is full — full of apartments, a police station, of people who have lived their whole lives there, of bicycles in the entryway and satellite dishes and the ordinary press of Viennese domesticity. The erasure is complete precisely because it is not visible. Nothing announces it. The city closed over the wound and healed without a scar, and the plaque, which is honest and well-intentioned and which I am glad exists, is a small sign informing you of an absence you could not otherwise detect.

That is what concealment looks like when it is achieved. Not a ruin. A functioning apartment block.

On this site stood the synagogue of the Israelite Temple and School Association, affectionately known as the Stumper Shul. It was home not only to a congregation but also to charitable organizations that cared for the sick and served the Jewish community of Vienna’s Sixth and Seventh Districts.

Following the Nazi annexation of Austria in 1938, these Jewish institutions were dissolved. During Kristallnacht, on the night of November 9–10, 1938, the synagogue was destroyed.

Today, only this plaque........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)