The Jewish Museum of Vienna, 1895–1906

CHAPTER 5 The Jewish Museum of Vienna, 1895–1906

1 The Museum’s Founders

The founding meeting of the Jewish Museum was convened on February 2, 1895 by a group of distinguished personalities from the Jewish community. They came from similar backgrounds, and for the most part, they represented the free professions, that is, they were architects, physicians, academics, rabbis, and artists. Most of them were in their forties, and were recognized as eminent members of the general society. They all sought to strengthen Jewish identity and arouse interest in the study of Jewish art and history. The group includ- ed Ludwig August von Frankl, poet, educator, and secretary of the Viennese Jewish community; the architect Wilhelm Stiassny (whose role in other such enterprises has already been mentioned); Max Fleischer, architect; the orien- talist David Heinrich Müller, who lectured at the University of Vienna; Adolf von Sonnenthal, actor; and Adam Politzer, physician and collector.1 Frankl and Stiassny were the men responsible for initiating the “Society for the Conservation and Preservation of the Historical and Artistic Monuments of Judaism.” Ludwig Frankl was born in Bohemia in 1810. He studied medicine in Padua, Italy, and was also taught by his relative, Rabbi Zecharias Frankel, who was one of the leaders of the Wissenschaft des Judentums movement and the founder of the Jewish Theological Seminary in Breslau. But Frankl’s princi- pal field of interest was literature. His first collection of poems—imbued with a patriotic spirit—was Song of the House of Habsburg (1832). It earned him a prize from the emperor. His next collection, Legends from the Ancient Land (1834), was devoted to Jewish matters. In 1838, Frankl was chosen to be the secretary and archivist of the Viennese Jewish community. He then began publishing studies on the subject of the history of the city’s Jews. One such study was a book about the Jews of Vienna, published in 1853. Frankl was primarily an educator, and in 1856, he was sent to Jerusalem by Elise Laemel Herz, daughter of the Czech-born businessman Simon von Laemel. Frankl’s mission was to establish a school for youngsters named after Simon Laemel, where secular studies would be taught alongside religious studies. Records of Frankl’s visit to Palestine were published in 1860 in the book Nach Jerusalem (To Jerusalem). In 1876, Frankl established the School

1 Erster Jahrebericht für die Jahre 1895 und 1896, 5.

Figure 5.1 Ludwig August von Frankl. Leo Baeck Institute, New York. Museum der Stadt, Wien. for the Blind in Vienna.(The building was designed by the architect Wilhelm Stiassny.) In recognition of his philanthropic work, that same year, Ludwig Frankl was bestowed with an aristocratic title.2 Wilhelm Stiassny was born in Pressburg (today Bratislava) in 1841. He studied at Vienna’s Akademie der bildenden Künste (the Academy of Fine Arts), and in 1862, along with his classmates from the academy, he helped found the Wiener Bauhütte, an association whose declared goal was to elevate the stan- dards of architecture in Austria. In 1867, Stiassny was invited by the Ministry of Trade to work with the Austrian committee preparing for the Paris World’s Fair, and in 1873, he participated in designing the buildings for the Vienna World’s Fair. Around the same time, Stiassny began working as an indepen- dent architect in Vienna, designing residential homes, schools, and factories. Among other projects, he designed buildings for the Jewish community, in- cluding the Rothschild Hospital (1870) and the Burial Society building in the Vienna Jewish cemetery (1877–78). Stiassny drafted plans for Viennese synagogues—among them the synagogue on Leoploldgasse and the interior of the synagogue on Tempelgasse—and also designed synagogues in other re- gions, specifically Bohemia and Hungary. From 1879 onward, Stiassny was a member of the directorate of the Viennese Jewish community, and in 1895 he became the first chairman of the Society for the Conservation and Preservation

2 “Frankl Ludwig August”, in: Encyclopedia Judaica, 7, 100–102.