Former Jewish House of Prayer
The only thing left reminding of Klagenfurt's Jewish community in Platzgasse 3, which counted between 250 and 300 members in 1938, is a memorial stone at the edge of a parking lot. The building was adapted as a house of prayer by the Carinthian Jews at the beginning of the 1920s. Community members from the whole province gathered here on festive days. The rabbi's dwelling was on the first floor. During the interwar period this position was held by Ignaz Hauser (as from 1923) and Joseph Babad (as from 1935). Both managed to leave the country and went to the USA in 1938. In the course of the November pogrom the building was the first target of maroding gangs which terrorised the Jewish community. Furniture and objects were systematically smashed and thrown into the streets, the books burnt. Immediately after the Anschluss the Gestapo had confiscated the building and the state-run anti-semitic terror had begun. Already in March 1938 many of Klagenfurt's Jewish men and some Jewish women were arrested, many of them were deported to Dachau and held for several weeks or months. Jewish youths were forbidden attend to higher schools, the systematic plundering of the propertied class began. Most of the Carinthian Jews were forced to relocate to Vienna in the course of the same year, where many of them were deported to concentration camps and extermination camps. An incomplete (!) list (Walzl 1988) shows that at least 48 of Klagenfurt's community members were murdered during the Shoa. Klagenfurt's Jewish community was never rebuilt after 1945 - too few Jewish men and women had survived in Austria or wanted to return to the anti-semitic climate. The building in Platzgasse 3 was destroyed by a bomb during the Second World War.