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Genealogy Hohenems—What is this?

For almost thirty years, biographical research on the Jewish communities of Tyrol and Vorarlberg—with the Jewish community of Hohenems as their long-time center—has been systematically conducted in Hohenems and Innsbruck.

For more than twenty years already, the museum is in an intensive exchange of information with the descendants of the Hohenems community about the families living in the “Hohenems Diaspora.” Thus, a large genealogical database has been created that provides an overview of the biographies of more than 40000 individuals who, for centuries, had a center of life and family networks here.

The Hohenems research had its point of departure with the pioneering publication of Rabbi Aron Tänzer. Around 1900, he painstakingly gathered everything that could be learned about the families who were already emigrating from Hohenems. Adding to this the research projects preparing of the museum’s founding and carefull studies of the birth registers, and other documentation from 1780 onward, expanded our knowledge about the Jewish families of Hohenems.

In Innsbruck, Prof. Thomas Albrich and his students conducted research at the Institute of Contemporary History, initially to obtain an overview of the persecution in the Third Reich. Beginning with the Anschluss in 1938 and moving backward (the Innsbruck Jewish Community as such came largely into being only after 1867), birth registers, residence registration forms, immigration files, and other extensive sources were searched through, as well as – regarding the Shoah – the documentation about the annihilation sites and the persecution files in Innsbruck and Vienna. Thus also the Jews of Tyrol are now included in our genalogical database.

The descendants, especially those who feel a sense of belonging to Hohenems, have already helped to close some of the gaps in the genealogical trees of the 20th century. New research projects are setting out in search of descendants in the female family line. In the future also the Jewish community of Meran, historically closely connected to Hohenems, will be added, as well as the data on Liechtenstein that will be included soon.

These biographical data are now accessible here to genealogical researchers from around the world—while keeping in mind the privacy of living persons at all times.

Genealogy is always a “work in progress.” Therefore, the publication also aims to obtain new, better, or entirely unknown details of our area of interest.

In case you have any information for us that is missing here or seems to be incorrect, we will be glad to receive your input!

The Genealogy Team at the Jewish Museum Hohenems

This post is also available in: German