The aim of the planned work is a comprehensive cultural and institutional history of the Vienna Jewish community
and its cultural, social and religious institutions and associations in the period from 1918 until 1938. The work
plans to describe the political and social structures of the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde (IKG), of i ts various
factions (Union Österreichischer Juden, the Zionists and the religouis lists), i ts leaders and main functionaries
(amongst them Robert Stricker, Desider Friedmann, Leopold Plaschkes, Anitta Müller-Cohen, Josef Ticho, Jakob
Ornstein, Mendel Singer and Wolf Pappenheim).
In one chapter the religious self-understanding of the IKG and of it s main rabbis and Chief Rabbis will be
described, for example Zwi Perez Chajes, David Feuchtwang, Israel Taglicht, Max Grunwald, Armand Kaminka,
Moses Rosenmann).
Another chapter will be the work of the cultural, religious and social institutions (library and archive of the IKG,
Jewish museum, Israelitisch-theologische Lehranstalt, Beth Hamidrasch, Pädagogium, Religionslehrereminar,
Maimonides Institut, Talmud Thora, Histadruth Ivrith, Toynbeehalle, B`nai B`rith lodge, students`associaltions etc.)
and of the main Jewish publicists, writers, historians and functionaries (for example Otto Abeles, Yomtow Ludwig
Bato, Nathan Birnbaum, Jakob Birnbaum, Salomo Frankfurter, Erna Patak, David Rothblum, Oskar Rosenfeld,
Bernhard Wachstein). Researched should also be the complex network of relations and connections between
persons, who were active in the IKG, in Jewish institutions or wrote for Jewish publications, and writers or
scholars, who today are only remembered and known for their contributions to the literature and science of the
world. They were both part of the spiritual self-understanding and life of the Jews of Vienna and their institutions.
This will be shown with many examples in the cases of Richard Beer-Hofmann, Arthur Schnitzler, Felix Salten,
Sigmund Freud, the philosopher Wilhelm Jerusalem and the art historian Max Eisler.