Vienna - Jews’ Alley
Vienna. Jews’ Alley. Hans Götzinger (artist); Kohn Brothers Vienna I (publisher). Posted on 23 July 1918.
Known originally simply as the alley that leads from the main market (Hohemarkt) in central Vienna to the Kienmarkt (presumably named after the strips of resinous wood, Kienhölzer, sold there for lighting purposes; now Ruprechtsplatz), this narrow street has officially been known as Jews’ Alley (Judengasse) since 1795. It runs past Seitenstettergasse, where the emphatically non-Oriental City Temple was inaugurated on 9 April 1826, wedged in between two apartment buildings because Jews were still prohibited from building synagogues that were visible from the street. Although Jews increasingly preferred to live elsewhere in the city as the nineteenth century advanced, Jews’ Alley continued to be one of the streets in the heart of Vienna with a heavy concentration of Jewish business outlets—as it might well still be, had the Nazis not expropriated them and murdered most of their owners.
Salomon Kohn (1873–1945) ran Brüder Kohn Wien I (B.K.W.I., Kohn Brothers Vienna) with his brothers Adolf and Alfred. They specialized on Viennese motifs, portraits of prominent contemporaries and the reproduction of works of art and enjoyed considerable renown. Kohn also ran a salon attended by members of the city’s cultural elite including Gustav Mahler, Arthur Schnitzler, Bruno Walter and Max Reinhardt. Following the Anschluss in 1938, the enterprise was “aryanized”. Kohn continued to work for the firm as an employee until he and his wife, Gittel Kohn, née Rappaport, were deported to Theresienstadt in 1942 and from there to Auschwitz. Neither of them returned. Adolf Kohn was killed in the First World War, Alfred Kohn and another sister were also murdered by the Germans. Gittel and Salomon Kohn’s two children were able to flee and survived. Their daughter Minna Kohn-Pixner returned to Vienna in 1946 and reconstituted the enterprise. In 1998, their son Walter Kohn (1923–2016) won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
