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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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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Dead Sea Scrolls to go Online

The Guardian and New York Times report that Israel will display the Dead Sea scrolls online through a sophisticated process that will utilize technological advancements and help improve access to one of scholarship's most guarded documents. Even though the new technology is leading to new discoveries, the main goal of the project is to have all the scrolls visible to anybody. Says the Times: Equipped with high-powered cameras with resolution and clarity many times greater than those of conventional models, and with lights that emit neither heat nor ultraviolet rays, the scientists and technicians are uncovering previously illegible sections and letters of the scrolls, discoveries that could have significant scholarly impact. The 2,000-year-old scrolls, found in the late 1940s in caves near the Dead Sea east of Jerusalem, contain the earliest known copies of every book of the...

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