Vienna - A short stopover from Israel - Last day!

Early this morning we left for the Schonbrunn Summer Palace, the main summer residence of the Habsburg rulers, built in the mid-1700's. It takes just 15 minutes by subway to get to the Palace. It is huge with 1441 rooms and vast gardens. Close to 4 million tourists visit annually.  

We began with a tour of the palatial interior of the palace.

And then we went outside for a tour of the amazing gardens, including the maze, the hilltop overlook, the outdoor hall of mirrors and the games area.

We ended our visit to the palace with a cooking demonstration of the correct way to make Strudel as taught by the chief palace chef - at the end of the demo, everyone was given a slice of the strudel, and we politely declined, exclaiming that we were lactose intolerant - figured it would be hard to begin explaining kashrut to him at that point (despite the fact that the flour had the word GLATT in big letters on the front of the bag)! It sure looked good and smelled good! And it was absolutely amazing just how elastic and stretchy his dough was....

We returned to the city, grabbed a quick lunch and then went to the Stadttempel synagogue for a tour of the shul. This was the only shul in Vienna not destroyed on Kristallnacht, simply because it was in the centre of a large apartment block in the centre of the downtown area. The shul is still used today. In the shul is a memorial to those who were murdered in the holocaust and names of individuals are etched on tablets in the memorial.

This ended our short visit to Vienna, as we returned to our apartment, collected our luggage and headed back to the airport for our flight to Toronto. We really enjoyed the beauty of the city and while there was a very bittersweet element in the realization that only a small percentage of Jews survived, what is clear is that they did survive against all odds and today live as a testament to the resilience of the Jewish people and the concept of AM YISRAEL CHAI!!!