Nov. 9 (Bloomberg) -- With its locked gate and high walls topped off by barbed wire and glass shards, Vienna's Jewish Wahringer Cemetery is a brooding presence bordered by opulent villas and a busy park in the hilly 19th district.

Few gain entrance to this 20,000-square-meter enclave, which dates back to the late 18th century when the hygiene-obsessed Emperor Joseph II ordered the dead from the city center. The cemetery closed a century later with the opening of the immense Zentralfriedhof, or Central Cemetery, which offered space to Jew and Gentile.

Wahringer's Christian section was turned into the park, with its assortment of dachshunds and children. The Jewish community maintained the Jewish part as mandated by religious law until the Nazis arrived in 1938. Tombstones were vandalized and bones removed for study at the Museum of Natural History, including those of the cherished Jewish hostess of early-19th-century Vienna, Fanny von Arnstein.

Tina Walzer, who specializes in Jewish Austrian history, is trying to bring attention to this disturbing piece of Vienna. I spoke to her about the condition of the cemetery, which even after decades of depredation contains unusual Sephardic tombs from the Ottoman era.

Hoelterhoff: Why is the cemetery in such poor shape?

Walzer: The Jewish community is very small and doesn't have the financial means to care for it or the several other cemeteries outside Vienna. Today, virtually all the money the Jewish community gets from the government goes to maintaining the still used Jewish section in the Zentralfriedhof.

Number Buried

Hoelterhoff: How many people were buried at the Wahringer Friedhof?

Walzer: We have detailed documentation for about 8,000 persons, but new research results make it possible that up to 30,000 people were once buried there. This was the official cemetery for every Jew who would die in Vienna from the late 18th century through the opening of the Zentralfriedhof, when the city government decided to close the little cemeteries scattered throughout the city and create the big cemetery for all acknowledged religious communities.

The older part of the Jewish cemetery by the first gate of Zentralfriedhof already became too small in the 1920s, so the Viennese city government purchased another big area east of the Zentralfriedhof and established a second Jewish cemetery. This is the only still-working Jewish cemetery in Vienna.

A Little Village

Hoelterhoff: Was the surrounding area affluent Jewish?

Walzer: Wahring, at the time when the cemetery opened, was a little village outside Vienna's city walls. By the second half of the 19th century, it had become bourgeois. It was well preserved until the Nazis came.

Jewish entrepreneurs who had social-climbed built their villas here, which were then expropriated by the Nazis in 1938. And very few were restituted.

Hoelterhoff: The walls are topped off by cut glass and clumps of barbed wire. Why?

Walzer: I used to do guided tours of the cemetery and hundreds of people joined them. There was real interest because many people passed by the walls and wondered what's on the other side. Yet there were serious damages caused by graffiti with sentences like All Jews Should Die and the swastika.

Most of the tombstones are sandstone or limestone and they are very fragile in terms of preservation. You try to remove and wash off graffiti, the whole surface is destroyed. At a certain point, the Jewish community decided that they would create this martial wall. Everyone is making a connection to a concentration camp.

Basically it is kids, young people climbing over the walls.

Unique Tombs

Hoelterhoff: What about the Sephardic tombs?

Walzer: They're in the shape of steles and little houses. This architectonical form of tombs is unique in Western and Middle Europe, imported directly from the Ottoman Empire in the mid-18th century, by Jews who came here.

Hoelterhoff: Tell me about von Arnstein.

Walzer: Fanny von Arnstein, the most important Jewish woman in Austria for the first half of the 19th century. She brought the idea of the Enlightenment, especially the Jewish enlightenment, to Vienna from Berlin. She opened her house for a salon at the time of the Vienna Congress in 1812, when diplomats tried to find a solution for the new Europe after Napoleon. Everyone came to her house: politicians, diplomats, nobles, journalists, entrepreneurs.

Her tomb was destroyed during the Nazi era because the Nazis exhumed her and the bones of her family for the Rassenkunde -- race research -- to measure the bones for so-called scientific research. These bones, together with the bones of 200 other prominent Jewish families, were brought to the Museum of Natural History in Vienna and were stored there until 1945. After the end of the war, parts of these bones were given to the Jewish community who buried them at Gate No. 4 of the Zentralfriedhof in a mass grave.

Race Room

There was also the Rasse Saal, or Race Room, at the museum displaying bones. It was only closed in the late 1990s after heavy protest. Up to then all these bones were shown.

Hoelterhoff: Jewish bones were still displayed into the '90s? That's hard to absorb.

Walzer: Yes, along with other human bones. Then more bones were given back to the community. The question is: Are these all the bones? There is also an anthropological department at the museum. And there is a collection of skulls.

Hoelterhoff: They can't still be studying skulls?

Walzer: It is hard to think why they still keep this collection of skulls, which might partly consist of remnants of Third Reich forced laborers and destroyed Jewish cemeteries. For some time I am trying to find out what happened to Fanny von Arnstein. You'd think if everything was so scientific, they'd have lists and an inventory to trace the bones. They say they have so many documents and it would take years to study. So up to now the museum was unable to answer my question: Where is she now?

For more information about the Jewish community in Vienna, see http://www.ikg-wien.at or call +43-1-531-04-175. The executive director is reachable at e.jakubovits@ikg-wien.at. Tina Walzer is reachable at tina.walzer@utanet.at. She is the co- author of ``Unser Wien,'' a mordant documentation of expropriation of Jewish goods by the Nazis and postwar Austrians.

(Manuela Hoelterhoff is executive editor of Muse, the arts division of Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are her own.)

To contact the writer on this story: Manuela Hoelterhoff in New York at mhoelterhoff@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: November 9, 2006 00:11 EST