1954: The Former Fire Station in Hohenems

Volunteer Fire Departments (FF) belong to the most important non-profit community associations in present-day Austria. They originated in the second half of the nineteenth century, and found rapid dissemination as liberal associations. An association of this kind was also established in the Voralberg community of Hohenems in 1869. In this time period, the community had a Christian and a Jewish district: in 1862 the Jewish community of Hohenems had 564 members; Jewish residents also participated in the fire department association.

The population of the Jewish district, however, continuously shrank, and as a result of Nazi persecution, the last traces of Jewish community life eventually disappeared. In 1940 the community of Hohenems took over the synagogue, which was to be transformed into a fire station. With the completion of this plan in 1954/55, the Jewish traces of the place were also wiped out. Hohenhems’ Jewish past was gradually rediscovered only in the 1980s. The synagogue, rebuilt in 2004 as a historic site of Jewish culture, today serves in part as the home of a music school, while the FF has been housed in a new state-of-the-art building in the vicinity of the train station since 2001.