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Vienna woos Jews in wake of Nazi past
But Vienna as a destination of choice for Jews?
As it prepares to woo New Yorkers this week with a series of cultural and business events in the Big Apple, Vienna is putting the spotlight on its lesser known qualities - among them, a decades-long campaign to make Jews feel welcome in a city long associated with Hitler and the Holocaust.
It's one of an array of attractions Americans will hear about during the four-day "Vienna in New York" presentation sponsored by the city government beginning today.
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Austrian authorities have paid for the rebuilding of synagogues, Jewish schools, memorials and other institutions serving the capital's 7,000 Jews.
"Everything is OK. I feel good here," said Raphael Chai Malkov, who moved to Vienna from Israel in 1989 and owns a kosher bakery and grocery. "I hope it will stay this way."
Three of the 12 planned events deal with Jewish themes - a visit to a Brooklyn Hassidic community by representatives of Vienna's Jews; a discussion of "Contemporary Jewish Vienna," and a showing of "Zorro's Bar Mitzvah," a documentary about four Austrian Jewish youths preparing for their religious coming-of-age ceremony.
"The Jews who live today in Austria see Vienna's improving record on a day-to-day basis," said Paul Chaim Eisenberg, chief rabbi of the capital's Jewish community who will be on the tour.
"But Jews in America cannot feel this, so the Jewish part is basically to bring the message that Vienna is a lot different now than it used to be."
Still, as the delegation prepared its departure, the Austrians' image problem was highlighted anew. Word emerged that the governor of Austria's Tyrol province and other local politicians threw a 90th birthday party for a wartime Gestapo operative. Ferdinand Obenfelder, a former deputy mayor of Innsbruck, is suspected of having carried out atrocities against Jews in his city during the "Kristallnacht" pogroms in Austria and Germany in 1938.
On Thursday, the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center demanded the resignation of those responsible, voicing outrage "that individuals whose deeds during the Nazi period - who should be publicly repudiated - instead are honored by Austrian public figures."
The problems of overcoming the past lie less with Hitler's Vienna and more with the general aftermath of World War II.
Neighboring Germany was quick to recognize its guilt and make amends. It paid hundreds of millions of dollars in restitution to Holocaust survivors and their relatives. Property confiscated from Jews was returned, school books focused on the horrors of the Nazi regime, and political leaders were prompt in acknowledging their country's guilt.
Not so in Austria.
It was annexed by the Germans in 1938 - allowing it to claim after the war that it was Hitler's first victim. Never mind that the vast majority of Austrians supported the Fuehrer's claim to their country, and that on a per capita basis more Austrians than Germans were Nazis.
It was the scandal around President Kurt Waldheim's denial of his wartime service with a unit associated with Nazi atrocities that started the debate about Austria's past.
Since then, dozens of political leaders have acknowledged their countrymen's complicity, reparations have been paid, and apartments and art works returned.
"We have a strong moral responsibility to make amends," said Vienna Deputy Mayor Renate Brauner. "And we have to make sure it never happens again."
One convert is Kitty Goldberg of New York, who came in 2005 on a visit organized by the Jewish Welcome Service - her first since she fled Vienna as a 10-year-old in 1938.
"When I got off the plane I felt anger," she told the AP back then. "But I changed. The people are so friendly."
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AP correspondent Veronika Oleksyn in Vienna contributed to this report.
