Welcome to Lead Niskor

How the Society was founded

On June 19th 2005 the dedication of the memorial for the vanished Jewish community of Laa an der Thaya will take place in front of the former synagogue at Burgplatz 1.

The first steps leading to this event were already taken more than a decade ago. When the then 16 year old Magdalena Muellner started to contact members of the vanished Jewish community in 1991, it became soon too clear how hard it was for the survivors that there was nothing in Laa to commemorate their relatives, who had been part of the town for so many years. At first we came up with all kind of ideas, but none of these were to be realized. For example, there were hopes that it could be possible to start a small museum in the first floor of the privately owned building, or to put up a commemorative plate next to the former entrance of the synagogue. It soon became obvious that such a project was more than single persons could handle. So the Society “Lead Niskor - Verein zum Gedenken an die vertrieben und ermordeten österreichischen Juden" was founded.

The project became much more concrete when the society made a request to the town governemten in Laa an der Thaya, in which it asked for the permission to errect a memorial on land owned by the town-community.

Only after this request was treated positively we were able to consider a closer look at planning the project. In March 2004 we asked Uri Yokel, the son of a former member of the Jewish community of Laa, who has a well-known architect bureau in Maryland - USA, if he could make a sketch. He accepted, what made us very happy. In July of the same year Uri Yokel and his father were in Laa to discuss the details with the stonecutter Mr. Thornton.

There are several reasons why granite was choosen for the material of the memorial. It is a very hard stone and therefore it can grant that the memorial will remain for a long time. We conciously picked granite from the area in Upper Austria (Muehlviertel), where the concentration camp Mauthausen was located. The prisoners had to do slave-labour there, cutting the granite, which often ended fatally for them. Choosing granite from there wants to commemorate this fact.

At this point the planning-phase is already finished and the actual process of putting up the memorial will start in spring 2005.

The costs will be fully covered by private donations to the Society.