Welcome to Centropa’s Jewish walking tour of Vienna. My name is Edward Serotta, and this walking tour was produced by Centropa and the Jewish Heritage Network as part of the project Jewish History Tours, which is co-funded by the 'Connecting Europe Facility program of the European Commission’.  We’re going to take a walk through the heart of the Jewish quarter—along Taborstrasse in the second district but our app is going to start you off right in front of Vienna’s Stadt Temple on Seitenstettengasse. On our way, we’ll drop in some historical facts, but most of this walking tour is comprised of personal stories which makes this a very different sort of tour.In the shownotes, we’ll give you a link so you can find out when this synagogue is open for guided tours. And we do suggest it. After all, this synagogue is more than 200 years old and because it is housed inside of a building that had apartments for Jews as well as non Jews, it was the only synagogue—out of dozens-- not destroyed on Reichspogromnacht, or Kristallnacht, in 1938.So let’s start walking down this lovely cobbled alley toward the 2nd district.This first thing you’ll see next to the synagogue is the Singer Bookshop—an independent bookstore with mostly German language books on Jewish history and culture. But you’ll find a few English ones, too. The Vienna Wiesenthal Institute, a research center, is housed upstairs.