Shattered Dreams     

While earnest tourists take photos against the backdrop of the opulent Hofburg Palace, a magnificent remaining symbol of the Hapsburg dynasty, Reb Yissachar Dov, 94, has a more immediate agenda than the Austrian monarchies. Together with his son Reb Shmuel Shlomo, we’re going back 83 years and beyond, to Kristallnacht and the time preceding that horror-filled night, to learn what it was like for an 11-year-old boy facing the unimaginable.

Despite his advanced age, Reb Yissachar Dov is one of the very few survivors who can still tell this dreadful story from its earliest days. He remembers Jewish life in Vienna before the war, the desperate efforts to escape, the escape routes, the concentration camps, and his own brushes with death. His living testimonies are recorded in his heart-stopping book, Lamrot Hakol (Hebrew).

We’re spending an unforgettable day together, as he — with his youthful spirit and vibrant demeanor — brings Vienna of the 1930s to life. Before the war, Austria was home to some 190,000 Jews, about 90,000 of them Orthodox — and the city of Vienna itself was about ten percent Jewish. Today, like then, it is the gateway from Eastern Europe to the West, and thousands of persecuted Jews found themselves a home there in the interwar period.

Vienna became home to a number of chassidic rebbes, and the city boasted some 40 shuls, dozens of chassidic shtiblach, and an array of chinuch institutions. Jews engaged in all types of professions, and some established huge retail chains (such as the still-popular Delka shoe store chain, whose name is actually an acronym for its founder, a Jew named Dovid Leib Keinan). On Rosh Hashanah, both banks of the Danube River (which served as part of an eiruv that encircled the largely Jewish Second District) were filled with Jews reciting Tashlich.