Yesterday I showed you the Borromeo Church in the Vienna Central Cemetery and promised a follow-up someday. But there's no time like the present, so here goes.
The cemetery is beautiful and perfectly maintained, as you can see in these two pictures:
The tombstones are laid out with military precision and everything is kept neat and clean. At least, that's the case in the Catholic and Protestant sections of the cemetery. It's a different story in the Jewish section:
When I saw this, I figured it must have something to do with Jewish traditions that I was unfamiliar with. But no. The cemetery originally had two Jewish sections: the older of the two was heavily damaged during the Kristallnacht pogroms of 1938 while the newer section survived the war more or less intact. But neither of them was maintained after that because, it turns out, each faith community is responsible for upkeep of its part of the cemetery. This wasn't a problem before World War II, but after the Holocaust there were only a few thousand Jews left in Vienna and they had nowhere near the resources to maintain their sections. Even today there are only about 12,000 Jews in the entire city.
At the same time—and I'm not sure whether to be surprised by this or not—neither the city government nor the national government was willing to offer any help. So the Jewish sections slowly declined over the decades.
Finally, though, in the 1990s Austria began facing up to its Nazi past, and as part of the 2002 "Washington Agreement" that funded restitution for Holocaust survivors and the return of looted art, a fund was set up to restore Jewish cemeteries in Austria. In 2010 work began, and in 2023 plans were drawn up for the Vienna cemetery. The funding is not huge, so it will probably take a while for the Jewish cemetery to be fully restored. But eventually it will finally get its due.
I went to the Jewish cemetery in Prague a few decades ago. It was worse.
Does it freak you out when you see a tombstone with a laser (or older hand) engraving of the deceased person's visage?
Of course the Christian faiths that were there all along could’ve done it themselves too, you know, in keeping with alleged Christian tenets like “help the poor” and “treat thy neighbor as you would treat me your savior.” But this assumes Christianity is an actual belief system, and not just a chummy club to establish insiders and outsiders, so that the insiders have a cudgel to beat the outsiders with.
I love it when atheists chide Christians for not being Christian enough.
Who else is going to do it? Certainly not the hypocrites themselves. Don't pretend as if atheists have a monopoly on judging someones Christianity. Christians themselves love to judge the worthiness of other Christians.
Vienna was once the largest and most prosperous Jewish city in the world -- over 200,000 in the early 1900's. About 5000 were thought to have survived the Holocaust, with only a few hundred initially returning to the city after the war. Most resettled elsewhere, particularly in the US or Israel, because all their property and wealth had been seized by the Nazis and sold off to new "Aryan" owners whose legal titles were recognized as valid by the new Austrian state. As Kevin notes, it's only been in the last 20 years or so that any attempt has been made to rectify any of this.
The lingering effects of Nazism. Still being seen and felt today.