The history of Jewish life in Innsbruck is, objectively speaking, unspectacular. The first Jewish settlers arrived in the city during the Middle Ages. At the beginning of the 16th century, the Jewish cemetery on the Judenbühel in St. Nikolaus was mentioned for the first time. In 1880, only 109 Jewish residents were registered in Innsbruck. In the days leading up to the First World War, during which Jewish soldiers regularly served as subjects of the Habsburg Monarchy, Innsbruck counted 500 Jewish citizens. This did not change the traditionally deeply rooted antisemitism that had always burned brightly in the "Holy Land" of Tyrol. Long before the rise of the National Socialists, political factions built their platforms on antisemitism. During the 1889 election campaign, the Partei Christlicher Mittelstand (Christian Middle Class Party) warned voters via flyers about "harmful Jews." In churches, antisemitic sermons and the ritual murder legend in Tyrolean disguise—the story of Anderle von Rinn—were commonplace. The popular Tyrolean theologian Josef Seeber even authored an epic, antisemitic ballad with his version of the Wandering Jew.

What was new about the National Socialist pogroms in 1938 was the open, institutionally ordered violence. Like many other German and Austrian cities, Innsbruck was a crime scene during the events that unfolded in November 1938, forming one of the saddest chapters of recent history known as *Reichskristallnacht* or the November Pogroms. The Nazi regime used the assassination of a German ambassador in Paris by a Polish-Jewish student as a pretext for the organized pogroms. Initiated by the party leadership around Adolf Hitler, orders were passed down to local chapters in cities across the German Reich to accelerate the "de-Jewification" of Germany and "Aryanization"—the expropriation of the Jewish population. Considering the ratio of its small Jewish population to the number of victims, Innsbruck was one of the most brutally acting cities in the German Reich during the November Pogroms. On November 9, a celebration was held at the municipal theater to commemorate the National Socialist coup attempt of 1923 in Munich. The audience was primed for the swearing-in of SS members at *Adolf-Hitler-Platz* in front of the theater with performances by the Hitler Youth and Richard Wagner’s *Lohengrin*. After midnight, Gauleiter Hofer and high-ranking members of the SS gathered to review the details of the upcoming "spontaneous uprising of the German people against the Jews." Apartments and shops belonging to Jews were destroyed. Jewish citizens were abused and beaten. Richard Berger, Wilhelm Bauer, and Richard Graubart were killed. Mayor Egon Denz (1899–1979) prohibited the fire brigade from extinguish... More or less the entire Jewish population was forcibly relocated to Vienna in the days following the *Reichspogromnacht*. The murder of Richard Graubart is well documented. He ran a shoe store on Museumstraße. With his family, he occupied a villa on Gänsbacherstraße in the Saggen district. Led by SS-Hauptsturmführer Hans Aichinger, his murderers—some of whom he knew personally—broke into the family’s apartment. Graubart was stabbed to death; the doctor who arrived an hour later could only declare him dead. The villa, along with the rest of the Graubart family’s property, had already been allocated to an NSDAP functionary prior to the crime. In the November 10 edition of the *Neueste Zeitung*, one could read:

"Synagogue in Innsbruck is destroyed... Similar to all cities in Germany, such protests also took place in Innsbruck.... With their anger, the crowd demonstrated their outrage at the cruel bloodshed and called for action against Jews.... To avoid further unrest, many Jews were arrested... Incidentally, the city of Innsbruck and our Gau are looking forward to being freed from the Jewish burden fairly soon, as a process of Aryanisation is being set in motion en masse."

When the riots were brought to trial before the People's Court at Innsbruck Provincial Court after the war, none of the defendants were convicted of murder. Rudolf Schwarz and Robert Huttig, two of the men who had murdered Richard Graubart, were sentenced to 11 and 10 years' imprisonment respectively in 1947, but were pardoned and released from prison in 1951. The trial against Mayor Egon Denz at the Innsbruck People's Court was discontinued in 1947. After his death in 1979, he was given a grave of honour at Innsbruck's West Cemetery. It was not until 1981 that the city of Innsbruck erected a memorial plaque at the site of the synagogue destroyed in 1938. In 1993, the new synagogue was opened on the same site in Sillgasse in the presence of Innsbruck's Bishop Reinhold Stecher (1921 - 2013). The small Jewish community of Tyrol and Vorarlberg received a special gift for the inauguration. In November 1938, the neighbours at the time had removed and kept the key to the destroyed door of the old synagogue, which was returned on this day.