Judenplatz is a town square in Vienna's Innere Stadt that was the center of Jewish life and the Viennese Jewish Community in the Middle Ages. It is located in the immediate proximity of Am Hof square, Schulhof, and Wipplingerstraße. It exemplifies the long and eventful history of the city and the Jewish community focused on this place. Archaeological excavations of the medieval synagogue are viewable underground by way of the museum on the square, Misrachi-Haus. Two sculptural works, a carved relief and several inscribed texts are located around the square that all have subject matter relating to Jewish history. One of these sculptures is a statue of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. The other is a memorial to Austrian Holocaust Victims, a project based on an idea of Simon Wiesenthal and unveiled in 2000. Created by British artist Rachel Whiteread, the memorial is a reinforced concrete cube resembling a library with its volumes turned inside out. Inscribed at the base of the memorial are the names of the places where 65,000 Austrian Jews were murdered by the Nazis. With the realization of the Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial, Judenplatz has become a place of memory, but it is also an important center of Austrian law. The Judenplatz is the location of the Constitutional Court of Austria and the Administrative Court of Austria.

Holocaust Memorial

In the middle of the northern end of the square, the Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial stands for the Austrian Jewish victims of the Shoah, made by the English artist Rachel Whiteread. It consists of a 10 by 7 metre block that is 3.8 metres tall. It is located in the northwestern end of the square before the Misrachi-Hause, and faces the Lessing Monument in the southeast with its walls parallel to the length of the square. The memorial is site-specific in many ways and therefore it is dependent on the setting of Judenplatz. One facet of this site-specificity is that it was designed at a domestic scale. It was imagined as if one of the surrounding buildings had a room cast inside out and placed in public in the middle of the square. The walls of the memorial resemble library walls of petrified books, however, the spines of the books on the walls are not legible, they all are turned inwards. On a concrete plinth, the names of the 41 places at which Austrian Jews came to death during the Nazi rule, are written. Although this "nameless" library has a symbolic entrance, it is not accessible. The memorial stands in close relation with the exhibition of the Holocaust that is installed in the neighboring Misrachi-Haus. At the Misrachi-Haus, the names and data of 65,000 murdered Austrian Jews are documented and accessible at computer terminals.

Excavations were undertaken to establish the Memorial from July 1995 to November 1998, that are considered the most important urban archaeological investigations in Vienna.^[14] Uncovered on the eastern half of the square were quarrystone walls, a well and cellars of a whole block from the time of a medieval synagogue. Controversy arose over the placement of the memorial over the archaeological excavations, which resulted in movement of the memorial 1 meter from its original placement on the site. The complete reorganization of the square and its transformation to a pedestrian plaza were completed in the autumn of 2000 with the inauguration of the Holocaust memorial.

Lessing monument

In the center of the southern end of the square is the monument to the German poet Gotthold Ephraim Lessing created by Siegfried Charoux (1896-1967). Charoux won the commission in 1930 in a competition with eighty two other sculptors. The monument was completed in 1931/32, unveiled in 1935, and soon removed in 1939 by the National Socialists to be melted down for the purpose of making weaponry. Lessing was in Vienna in 1775/76, had an audience with Joseph II.,^[17] and was therefore in a position to influence and shape the Viennese cultural climate. Lessing's "Ringparabel" in the drama "Nathan der Weise" is considered a key text of the Enlightenment and helped in the formulation of the idea of tolerance. From 1962 to 65, Charoux created a second Lessing monument out of bronze, that was unveiled at Ruprechtskirche in 1968 and moved to Judenplatz in 1981. This is the monument that stands on the square today.

(source: wikipedia)