Stadttempel

The Stadttempel (English: City Prayer House), also called the Seitenstettengasse Temple, is an Orthodox Jewish synagogue, located at Seitenstettengasse 4, in the Innere Stadt 1st district of Vienna, Austria. Completed in 1826, it is the main synagogue in Vienna. The congregation worships in the Ashkenazi rite.

History

The synagogue was constructed from 1824 to 1826. The luxurious Stadttempel was fitted into a block of houses and hidden from plain view of the street, because of an edict issued by Emperor Joseph II that only Roman Catholic places of worship were allowed to be built with facades fronting directly on to public streets.

This edict saved the synagogue from total destruction during the Kristallnacht in November 1938, since the synagogue could not be destroyed without setting on fire the buildings to which it was attached. The Stadttempel was the only synagogue in the city to survive World War II, as Nazi paramilitary troops with the help of local authorities destroyed all of the other 93 synagogues and Jewish prayer-houses in Vienna, starting with the Kristallnacht.¹²

In August 1950, the coffins of Theodor Herzl and his parents were displayed at the synagogue, prior to their transfer for reburial in Israel.³⁴

In the 1981 Vienna synagogue attack, two people from a bar mitzvah ceremony at the synagogue were murdered and thirty injured when Palestinian Arab terrorists attacked the synagogue with machine guns and hand grenades. On 2 November 2020, a near the synagogue left four civilians dead and 23 others wounded. It was not immediately certain if the synagogue was the target of the attack.