August 12 1996

ARTICLE TOOLS

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Helmuth and Uli Eiwen stared in amazement at the ancient gravestones mounted on the old city wall where it meandered through a local park.

Helmuth, pastor of Ichthys Church in Wiener Neustadt, Austria, and his wife, Uli, had left a prayer meeting the night before convinced that the key to a mystery awaited them at the wall. For months church members had been praying for the city, asking God to show them what was blocking revival.

During prayer, the conviction had grown that the Lord had something to show them at the old city wall.

Confronted with gravestones with Hebrew inscriptions dating from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the Eiwens were intrigued by a city plaque indicating the stones had come from a Jewish graveyard closed in 1496. The revelation sent them to the library on a fact-finding mission. What they found was a brutal record of treacherous dealings with Jewish residents for many centuries, including an incident in 1496, when every Jewish citizen was forced to flee the city.

For centuries it was illegal for Jews to live in this city some 30 miles south of Vienna, but they gradually drifted back, and by 1938, Wiener Neustadt contained a lively Jewish community of about 1,200. In that fateful year of the Nazi Anschluss, there were nearly 200,000 Jews throughout the country. Those who had the means and the foresight to do so escaped to England, the Americas, or Palestine. About 65,000 of those who could not leave died between 1938 and 1945. Many of those who survived the concentration camps chose not to resettle in Austria. In Wiener Neustadt, the second-oldest Jewish settlement in Austria, no Jews are left.

Stirred by this discovery, the Eiwens and the church began to confess to God the ...