Hitler Balcony

Should Vienna’s ‘Hitler Balcony’ Be Opened to the Public?

On the morning of March 15, 1938, Adolf Hitler left his room at Vienna’s Imperial Hotel for the short ride down the Ringstrasse to the Neue Burg, the final wing added to the sprawling Hofburg imperial palace completed in 1919. The Neue Burg is situated on Heldenplatz (Heroe’s Square) where some 250,000 Austrians had gathered to hear him speak. Standing on the large balcony overlooking the square, Hitler proclaimed the Anschluss, the annexation of Austria into the greater German Reich: “The oldest Ostmark”—the Nazi name for Austria, meaning its eastern borderland—“of the German people shall be the youngest bulwark of the German nation and thus the German empire.” Since 1945, the balcony has been closed to the general public. Now, with the opening of the House of Austrian History, Vienna’s contemporary history museum, in 2018, the...

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Milan Jewish Community United to Battle COVID-19

In the days leading up to the lockdown, the Milanese Jewish community behaved “like good soldiers,” Gadi Luzzatto Voghera, director of the Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation (CDEC), tells Moment, respecting public health ordinances and avoiding scenes reminiscent of those coming out of Brooklyn and Bnei Brak of minyanim gone rogue.

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COVID-19 Disrupts European Jewish Life

Though the number of Jewish births in the UK has outpaced the number of deaths since 2006, the community continues to skew older. Those over 60 are at a far higher risk of becoming sick or dying from the coronavirus. In addition, the majority of British Jews live in and around London, where the outbreak in Britain has been most pronounced. The city remains weeks away, reports suggest, from the coronavirus’s peak.

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