Austrian Communities Registry

The purpose of the Yad Vashem Communities Registry Project is to perpetuate the history of the communities destroyed during the Holocaust. The historiography of the communities focused on countries, and sometimes on districts, but not the history of the local communities. With the increase of interest in the local communities, this Record Group also serves as a very important source for historians and researchers working in this field.The task of preparation of the Austrian Communities Registry was assigned to Dr. Herbert Rosenkranz. To this end, he prepared the collection including historical documentation and correspondence gathered in anticipation of the preparations for the Registry. During the late 1970s and early 1980s Dr. Rosenkranz dedicated himself to the preparation of the Registry, however the Registry did not reach the writing stage, because Dr. Rosenkranz retired and no one carried on the project afterwards. The files were placed for safekeeping in the Yad Vashem Archives. The 404 files in the collection are devoted to various subjects, a minority to specific organizations, and a small number of the files to personalities. In some of the files there is documentation regarding general subjects such as the Jews in Music and Philosophers, however, the great majority of the documentation is devoted to specific subjects, some according to states and years, for example, identification of the names of the Jews who died in various places in World War I, correspondence of the Jewish institutions with specific governmental bodies (for example, the Niederoesterreichische Landesregierung [Lower Austrian state governments] according to the years. In the later files in the collection there are interviews conducted by Dr. Rosenkrantz with former Austrians on various subjects and general correspondence folders.Documentation of various kinds are included in the files: copies of historic documents, statistical summaries and surveys, letters from and to Dr. Rosenkrantz, periodicals and articles, statistical data, questionnaires of various kinds and more. The documentation is an anthology of the most detailed information regarding Austrian Jewry throughout the years of its existence until its destruction by the Nazis.