The Friends of the Jewish Museum Vienna
By joining the association you will help to preserve and expand the priceless heritage of the oldest Jewish museum in the world. Membership of the Verein der Freunde also entitles you to attend exclusive events and to take advantage of a number of benefits.
We offer:
- Free admission for you and a companion of your choice to the Jewish Museum Vienna
- 1 free catalogue per year
- Invitations to exclusive events
- Free admission to Wien Museum including its dependences
- Reduced admission to Haus der Musik, Mozarthaus Vienna, KunstHausWien, Globe Museum, Papyrus Museum, Esperanto Museum, and the Austrian National Library's State Hall
- 10% reduction Volkstheater Wien
Membership fees
Ordinary membership
€ 100/12 months from payment (incl. up to one guest) (membership € 10 / Donation to the Jewish Museum Vienna € 90)
The subscription is tax deductible as a charitable donation.
How to join
Get in touch, and we’ll send you an application form and if needed a pay-in slip.
Circle of Friends
Jewish Museum Vienna
Dorotheergasse 11
1010 Vienna
Tel: +43 (1) 535 04 31-120
Fax: +43 (1) 535 04 24
freunde@jmw.at
Membership fees are payable here:
Raiffeisenlandesbank Niederösterreich-Wien
Konto-Nr.: 109 317009
BLZ: 32 000
BIC: RLNWATWW
IBAN: AT 29 32000 00109 317009
Members' Events in Autumn/Winter 2013-14
Tuesday, February 18, 2014 - Arik Brauer offers a tour of his private museum
Painter, musician, Viennese, Jew, Israeli, Alpinist, and bicycle explorer: the life of Arik Brauer, who was born on January 4, 1929, has as many facets as his pictures. Unlike his father, he survived the Nazi era and studied painting after the war at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, where together with fellow students he founded the Vienna School of Fantastic Realism. Since then he has remained true to his unmistakable style. His favorite themes include dangers to the environment, devastation through war, and above all the Old Testament.
Parallel to the current exhibition of the Brauer Haggadah in the Jewish Museum, Arik Brauer offers Friends a personal tour of his private museum.
Exclusively for members of the Association of Friends
New Friends welcome!
Tuesday, March 18, 2014 - Do you have tone?! Guided tour of the Phonogram Archive
Un salúdu kalorózu a Espáña (a warm greeting to Spain). These were the opening words of a poem spoken into a strange trumpet by Avrahám Cappón in Sarajevo in 1908. The appliance was able to record sounds, and Cappón’s poem is thought to be the oldest sound recording in Ladino, the language of the Jews driven out of Spain in 1492. It is just one of countless historical sound documents in the Phonogram Archive of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, whose contents are on the UNESCO World Heritage list.
The linguist Christian Liebl will speak of his work in the Phonogram Archive and present treasures from the sound collection, including recitations by the Jews of Jerusalem from the years 1911–13, voice samples by celebrities such as Arthur Schnitzler and Emperor Franz Josef I, and singing by Russian prisoners-of-war in World War I.
Exclusively for members of the Association of Friends
New Friends welcome!
Wednesday, March 26, 2014 - Curator tour: Vienna and World War I
No major city in Europe underwent a similar metamorphosis during and after World War I. Vienna was demoted to being the capital of the remnants of what had been a powerful empire. It became synonymous with urban decline and was dubbed by Karl Kraus as a “laboratory of world destruction.” The sad daily life of the hungry inhabitants turned the former glittering metropolis, in which the emperor ruled over an empire encompassing 53 million inhabitants, into a “dying city.”
Alfred Pfoser, deputy director of Vienna Library and curator of “Epicenter of Collapse: Vienna and World War I,” introduces Friends to the complex story of the decline of the empire and offers a guided tour through the exhibition.
Exclusively for members of the Association of Friends
New Friends welcome!
Wednesday, March 26, 2014 - Podium discussion with Prof. Ernst Piper: Nacht über Europa. Kulturgeschichte des Ersten Weltkrieges
The historian Prof. Ernst Piper teaches at the Moses Mendelssohn Institute for European Jewish Studies in Potsdam and specializes in the cultural impact of World War I aside from the military, political, and economic aspects. How did this war change thinking and attitudes? In his new book, Piper describes the intellectual mobilization of nations, the development of total war, the splitting of the labor movement, and the difficulties faced by Jewish minorities.
In a discussion organized by Vienna Library, Prof. Ernst Piper and Dr. Alfred Pfoser explain how World War I presented the Jewish population in many countries of Europe with an almost insoluble choice between solidarity across borders and national patriotism. Against expectations, the war did not result in Jews being accepted as part of society but rather in their exclusion.
Exclusively for members of the Association of Friends
New Friends welcome!
Date to be announced - Guided tour of the exhibition “Jewish Living and Dying in World War I”
Emperor Franz Joseph I guaranteed his Jewish subjects legal security. They thanked him with their loyalty – 350,000 Jewish soldiers served in World War I, but they couldn’t prevent the collapse of the old order. In fact, for the Jews of Austria-Hungary the war had disastrous consequences.
In an exclusive preview, curator Marcus Patka offers Friends a guided tour of the exhibition. It shows how the war laid waste to the largest Jewish settlement in Galicia. Some 80,000 Jew refugees arrived in Vienna as a result and changed the structure of the community. It marked the failure of the attempted assimilation by the young generation and their espousal of Zionism in its place. But Jerusalem was also a theater of war.
Exclusively for members of the Association of Friends
New Friends welcome!
Sunday, May 10, 2014 - Our City! Tour of the Central Cemetery, Gate 1
Around 100,000 Jews are buried near Gate 1 at Vienna’s Central Cemetery, including many rabbis and prominent personalities from the world of culture, science, and business. The destination of the tour with Hermann Karplus is the war memorial to Jewish soldiers who fell in World War I.
The tour looks at Jewish burial rites and tombstone forms and symbolism, and takes in the graves of Salomon Sulzer, Arthur Schnitzler, Gerhard Bronner, Friedrich Torberg, and Ignaz Ephrussi.
Monday, May 19, 2014 - Guided tour of the French embassy
“Kalkutta liegt am Ganges, Paris an der Seine …” This evergreen is only partly true, because there is a little bit of Paris on Schwarzenbergplatz – or at least that is what many people think when they see the French embassy building for the first time.
At all events, as a foretaste of our trip to Paris, we have been invited by the French ambassador to visit a bit of Paris in Vienna. The Art Nouveau building designed by a Parisian architect was completed in 1909. Ironically, it was regarded for a long time as the epitome of bad taste and was almost demolished. Today it is recognized as a veritable jewel and reminds many a passer-by of the old evergreen “Kalkutta liegt am Ganges, Paris liegt an der Seine …”
Exclusively for members of the Association of Friends
New Friends welcome!
May 29 – June 2 - Trip to Paris
The whole world knows Paris. But do you know Jewish Paris – rue des Rosiers, the Marais, and other sites? There are 800,000 Jews living in France and almost half of them live in the capital. Many of them still live in the Marais, the heart of Jewish Paris, where Jews from East and West have congregated and found a home since the thirteenth century.
During the trip we will discover familiar and less well-known features of Jewish Paris and will take a fresh look at the French capital. The main attractions are on the doorstep of our comfortable hotel in the heart of the city. The Île de la Cité and Notre Dame played an important role in medieval Jewish Paris, as can be seen today in the Jewish Museum. On our walks through the city we will see iconic Metro stations by the Jewish architect and Art Nouveau artist Hector Guimard, who also designed the synagogue in rue Pavée. Palais de Beauharnais is the starting point for the Dreyfus affair. It was here too that Ernst vom Rath was shot by Herschel Grynszpan, offering a pretext for the November Pogrom in 1938. Poems by Heinrich Heine take us to his grave at Montmartre cemetery, where Émile Zola is also buried – one of the main protagonists in the Dreyfus affair. But for all the history, there will be no shortage of opportunities to enjoy the famed Parisian cuisine.
Exclusively for members of the Association of Friends
New Friends welcome!
Wednesday, June 4, 2014 - Guided tour of Palais Ephrussi: looking for the Hare with Amber Eyes
Ceramics by Edmund de Waal have been on show in the Visible Display at the Jewish Museum Vienna since summer 2013. In the bestseller The Hare With Amber Eyes he described his family’s history. His Jewish great grandfather and banker Ignaz von Ephrussi had the magnificent residence on the Ring built in 1871 by star Gründerzeit architect Theophil Hansen.
In response to popular demand, Prof. Robert Stalla, of the Institute of History of Art, Building Archeology, and Restoration at the University of Technology in Vienna, is offering Friends a second guided tour of the bel étage of this building, which is not normally open to the public. It was here that the Ephrussis staged their magnificent soirées and balls in which Viennese society danced under the ceiling paintings with Jewish motifs. The celebrations came to an abrupt end in 1938.
Exclusively for members of the Association of Friends
New Friends welcome!
Wednesday, June 11, 2014 - Jewish perspectives: Vienna and the World’s Fair 1873
The Gründerzeit is one of the most dynamic periods that Vienna has ever experienced. From the 1860s the capital of the Habsburg empire was radically rebuilt. The World’s Fair in 1873 was the driving force behind this modernization during the first period of globalization. But the stock exchange crash, which coincided with the opening, put a rapid end to this boom.
Gerhard Milchram, curator of the exhibition at Wien Museum, offers a tour of this epochal period from a Jewish perspective. Jews from different parts of the social spectrum were involved in the incisive changes that took place in Vienna at the time – from patrician entrepreneurs like the Rothschild family to the Jewish proletariat.
Exclusively for members of the Association of Friends
New Friends welcome!
Sunday, June 22, 2014 - Our City! A walk through Vienna’s 1st district
There are plenty of traces of the Jewish present and past in Vienna’s 1st district. Our city walk with Eduard Konrad shows known and less known sites, which together offer a colorful kaleidoscope of Jewish life in Vienna.
The walk will concentrate on daily Jewish life that has to do with the city’s history; from one of the most elegant former clothing stores on the Graben to a neighborhood quarrel about a chimney, which provides us with a rare vestige of the medieval Jewish community in Vienna. We will encounter the composer Gustav Mahler, the salon hostess at the Vienna Congress Fanny von Arnstein, and the cantor Salomon Sulzer, who reformed the Jewish liturgy.
Exclusively for members of the Association of Friends
New Friends welcome!
