Return, renewal, and destruction
Following the expulsion of 1515, Jewish life disappeared from Carniola for nearly three centuries. A new chapter began during the period of the Illyrian Provinces (1809–1813), when the French administration encouraged the settlement of foreign merchants. At that time, Abraham Heimann became the first Jewish merchant to establish himself in Ljubljana, opening a shop and a money exchange while seeking formal residence rights. After the restoration of Austrian rule, his family's position deteriorated, but in 1817 Moses Heimann successfully secured recognition of the rights acquired under the French administration.
The adoption of the December Constitution in 1867 and the introduction of general civil rights within the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy removed the remaining restrictions on Jewish settlement. During the decades that followed, individual Jewish families gradually settled in Ljubljana. Although the community remained small and dispersed, and never established an independent Jewish congregation before the Second World War, it became an integral part of the city's economic and cultural life.
Among the most distinguished Jewish figures associated with Ljubljana was the composer and conductor Gustav Mahler, who, in 1881, served for less than a year as conductor and pianist at the Provincial Theatre. His brief stay marked the beginning of an extraordinary international career.
By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, fewer than twenty Jewish families lived in Ljubljana, with several others residing in industrial centres such as Kranj, Trbovlje, Kočevje, and Novo Mesto. Families including the Baumgartens, Bolaffios, Ebenspangers, Goldsteins, Heiligs, Heimanns, Lorants, Löser Moskovičs, Oblaths, Pollaks, Silbersteins, Steinbergs, Sterns, Turzanskis, and Wormsers worked as merchants, builders, entrepreneurs, industrialists, bankers, physicians, and lawyers, contributing to the city's commercial and professional life.
The years preceding the Second World War also brought a new generation of Jewish arrivals. Between 1933 and 1939, a number of Polish Jewish students came to Ljubljana to study medicine after anti-Jewish legislation in Poland restricted their educational opportunities, foreshadowing the persecution that would soon engulf Europe.
Jewish cultural life was enriched by notable women artists, including the painter and designer Helena Kottler Vurnik (1882–1964) and the dancer Katja Delak (Katya Pollak) (1914–1991), who became one of the pioneers of modern dance in Slovenia and later in the United States.
Before the First World War, the religious and educational life of Ljubljana's Jews was closely connected to the Jewish community and rabbi in Graz. From 1927 onward, they belonged to the Jewish Religious Community of Murska Sobota. Rabbi Lazar Roth regularly conducted Sunday classes in Ljubljana, reflecting an active communal life despite the community's modest size.
The German invasion of Yugoslavia in April 1941 transformed Ljubljana into a temporary refuge for Jewish refugees from other regions. Alongside local families, many newcomers passed through the city hoping to reach the Adriatic coast. Under the leadership of Eugen Bolaffi, the Ljubljana branch of the DELASEM relief organization provided assistance, while many members of the Jewish community also participated in the activities of the Liberation Front.
The decisive rupture came after Italy's capitulation in September 1943, when Nazi Germany occupied the Province of Ljubljana. Assisted by the collaborationist police, the occupation authorities systematically arrested and deported the remaining Jews who had not already been interned by the Italians. The final deportations took place in September 1944, when the last thirty-two Jews of Ljubljana and their non-Jewish family members were transported to concentration camps including Mauthausen, Dachau, Ravensbrück, and Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Within only a few days, a community that had slowly rebuilt itself over generations disappeared.
The return of the Jews to Ljubljana
From the Illyrian provinces to the end of the Habsburg monarchy (1809–1918)
The expulsion of the Jews from Carniola in 1515 interrupted the permanent Jewish presence in Ljubljana for almost three centuries. Although individual Jewish merchants occasionally visited the city for commercial purposes, they were generally not permitted to settle permanently in Carniola.
The first significant change came during the period of French rule.
The Illyrian provinces and the Heimann family
Following the Treaty of Schönbrunn, Napoleon established the Illyrian Provinces in October 1809, with Ljubljana as their capital. The French administration introduced legal reforms inspired by the principles of equality before the law. During this period, Jews were, in principle, granted the same civil rights as other inhabitants, including the right to reside and engage in commerce.
It was under these circumstances that Abraham Heimann, a Jewish merchant from Memmelsdorf in Bavaria, arrived in Ljubljana on 30 November 1809. Acting as a supplier to the French army, he and his nephew Simon established a textile and manufactured goods business. Heimann also became involved in exchanging Austrian banknotes that the French authorities were withdrawing from circulation.
Abraham Heimann and his relatives were the first Jews to settle in Ljubljana after an interruption of almost three hundred years.
Their arrival was not welcomed by everyone. Local merchants regarded the Heimanns as unwelcome competitors and attempted to restrict or terminate their commercial activities. The French authorities, however, protected the family and allowed them to continue their business.
The restoration of Austrian rule
Following the collapse of French rule, Ljubljana returned to Habsburg administration in 1813, with Austrian authority fully restored in 1814. As a result, many of the legal reforms introduced during the Illyrian Provinces became uncertain.
The municipal authorities attempted to revoke the Heimann family’s right to reside and conduct business in Ljubljana. Abraham Heimann appealed these decisions, and in 1817 the imperial authorities confirmed the rights that his family had legally acquired under French rule.
This decision did not, however, constitute a general restoration of Jewish settlement rights throughout Carniola. Rather, it protected the acquired rights of one particular family. For decades afterwards, the Heimanns continued to face resistance from the municipal authorities and local merchants.
Their experience illustrates that the return of Jews to Ljubljana was not a single event but a gradual and often difficult process, shaped by legal disputes, economic competition, and persistent attempts to restrict Jewish settlement.
From the revolution of 1848 to full civil equality
The Revolutions of 1848 brought important changes to the legal status of Jews throughout the Habsburg Monarchy. A number of restrictions affecting residence, occupations, and economic activity were abolished, although complete equality was achieved only gradually.
The decisive turning point came with the December Constitution of 1867. The Basic Law on the General Rights of Citizens guaranteed equality before the law as well as freedom of religion and conscience. Jews in the Austrian half of the Habsburg Monarchy thereby obtained full civil equality and could freely choose their place of residence, acquire property, establish businesses, and participate in public life.
Only after 1867 did stable legal conditions exist for the renewed settlement of Jewish families in Ljubljana and elsewhere in Carniola.
A small but visible Jewish presence
During the second half of the nineteenth century, the number of Jewish residents in Ljubljana gradually increased. Most were merchants, entrepreneurs, professionals, or members of the growing urban middle class. Nevertheless, their overall numbers remained small.
Unlike Trieste, Gorizia, Graz, or Vienna, Ljubljana never developed into a major Jewish centre. The city’s Jewish residents had neither their own synagogue nor an independent, permanently organised Jewish congregation before the First World War.
According to the 1910 census, approximately 116 Jews lived in Ljubljana. Across the territory of present-day Slovenia, excluding Prekmurje, there were about 146 Jews altogether. These figures underline how small the Jewish population of Ljubljana remained on the eve of the First World War.
Between integration and antisemitism
Legal equality did not eliminate prejudice. During the second half of the nineteenth century, modern forms of political, religious, and economic antisemitism also spread throughout the Slovene lands.
Jews were frequently portrayed as outsiders, economic rivals, or symbols of unwanted social change, even in places where the Jewish population was extremely small. Antisemitism therefore developed largely independently of the actual size of the Jewish community, functioning instead as an ideological and political phenomenon.
Despite these attitudes, several Jewish families became integrated into the commercial and social life of Ljubljana. Although their numbers remained modest, their presence represented the first enduring Jewish community in the city since the expulsion of 1515.
The end of the Habsburg era
The outbreak of the First World War and the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy in 1918 brought this chapter of history to a close.
By then, the Jews of Ljubljana had achieved legal equality, yet the city still lacked a large and independently organised Jewish community. With the establishment of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, Jewish life in Ljubljana entered a new political and legal framework.
The year 1809 therefore did not mark the immediate restoration of a Jewish community in Ljubljana. Rather, it marked the beginning of a long process. Initiated by the arrival of the Heimann family, continued through the gradual removal of legal restrictions, and consolidated after 1867, this process eventually re-established a modest but lasting Jewish presence in the Slovenian capital after nearly three centuries of absence.
The Heimann family
The Heimann family, a Jewish family of Bavarian origin, settled in Ljubljana in 1809. They are regarded as the first Jewish family to establish permanent residence in the city after the Middle Ages; other Jewish families followed only later. Their arrival in Ljubljana was connected with an invitation first addressed by the Captain of the Ljubljana Gendarmerie to Abraham Heimann and his nephew Simon. The following year, Abraham’s brother Moses joined them.
The Heimanns lived in one of the city’s most important streets, near the main entrance to the town, on Špitalska ulica in the town district. They rented several premises at what is today Stritarjeva ulica 7, where they ran a shop selling manufactured goods and operated a currency exchange. In 1810, the brothers also bought a house with a courtyard on the opposite side of the street. The building measured approximately 340 m² and corresponds today to the corner building at Stritarjeva ulica 4 / Mačkova ulica 2. Both buildings were altered or rebuilt after the earthquake of 1895.
The arrival of the Heimann family coincided with the period of the Illyrian Provinces, established by Napoleon on 14 October 1809. From the very beginning, this new administrative entity faced serious financial difficulties. A large quantity of Austrian paper banknotes remained in circulation, while inflation was high. For this reason, the Heimann currency exchange played an important role. In addition to it, two other shops in Ljubljana accepted Austrian paper money and exchanged it for coins.
In the autumn of 1813, the Illyrian Provinces were dissolved and the Slovene lands once again came under Austrian rule. As early as 1814, a decree was issued ordering the members of the Heimann family, together with their employees, to leave Ljubljana and sell their real estate. The regional governor partially granted Moses’s petition and allowed them to remain until 1 January 1815. The brothers then appealed to the royal court in Vienna. The appeal was decided in their favour, but too late: in the meantime, Abraham had returned to Germany for a while and then moved to Trieste, where Moses also joined him. Simon remained in Ljubljana, where he continued to run the shop; he was joined there by Izrael Heimann.
In 1820, the city committee, through the Ljubljana magistrate, asked the provincial council to prohibit Jews who had settled in Ljubljana after 1814 from residing in the city. In September of the same year, the magistrate informed Moses that he had to leave the area together with his family and employees. Altogether this involved six people: a niece, two nephews, an assistant and two apprentices. Moses appealed to the court again, and once more the decision was favourable to him, but on the condition that their number must not increase. The city committee and the Ljubljana merchants then appealed again to the Emperor, but all their appeals were rejected. Towards the end of the 1840s, most of Heimann’s employees converted to Christianity, as this enabled them to remain in the city.
Simon Heimann played a particularly important role in Ljubljana. He contributed greatly to the city: every year he donated 50 guilders to the poor institution and also employed prisoners. On behalf of the local clergy, he acted as an intermediary in the purchase of government documents in Graz and Vienna. He was the first merchant in Ljubljana to introduce fixed prices for goods sold, and at the same time the only person in the city who traded in bonds. He was also connected with the construction of the Vienna–Trieste railway and with the Casino. Despite his many contributions to the city and the wider region, his residence permit was slow to arrive. He received it only in 1842, together with a permit to trade in broadcloth and fabrics. After the death of his only daughter in 1849, he moved to Vienna and left the shop in the hands of his assistant, Aleksander Schneider.
The Heimann currency exchange also played a particularly important role during the Congress of the Holy Alliance in 1821. At that time, many important rulers, statesmen and diplomats from ten European countries stayed in Ljubljana. Since local currency had to be provided for the members of the Congress, the Heimann family’s exchange office became an important part of the city’s economic life during the event. Among the participants was also the Rothschild family, more precisely Carl Rothschild, the fourth son of Mayer Amschel Rothschild, who arrived in Ljubljana at the beginning of March 1821. At the time, he was 33 years old and had not yet achieved the success of his brothers. After the Ljubljana Congress, after which today’s Congress Square is named, he left for Naples, where he founded a distant branch of the Frankfurt Rothschild house. This branch became financially very successful, and Carl’s participation in the Ljubljana Congress contributed significantly to its development.
Gustav Mahler
Gustav Mahler, a composer and conductor of Jewish descent, was born in 1860 in Kaliště and died in 1911 in Vienna. After completing his studies in Vienna, he obtained his first regular conducting position in Ljubljana. In September 1881, he began working as conductor at the Theatre of the Carniolan Provincial Estates, opening the 1881/82 season with Beethoven’s overture Egmont. In the months that followed, he conducted numerous opera and operetta performances.
Mahler’s Ljubljana period was brief but remarkably intense. Between September and April, the twenty-one-year-old conductor led as many as 86 public performances. Nevertheless, the theatre management did not renew his engagement. For the following season, they hired a less expensive conductor, but the result was far less successful than the season under Mahler’s direction.
Mahler’s work in Ljubljana was also noted by the newspaper Laibacher Zeitung. On 24 March 1883, writing about one of Mahler’s opera performances, the paper reported that the opera had been well rehearsed and well performed. When the conductor appeared before the audience, he was received by a large and select public with applause and a festive flourish from the orchestra. As a sign of recognition, he was presented with a laurel wreath. The newspaper emphasized that the young, well-trained musician took his duties seriously, although he had faced many difficulties and concerns during the season.
During his time in Ljubljana, Mahler lived with his friend and colleague Anton Krisper at Mestni trg 26. Today, a statue on the façade of Krisper’s house commemorates his stay there. Mahler was a vegetarian, but after performances he liked to stop for a pint of beer at the Roža pub on Židovska ulica 6.
The Krisper family also occupies an important place in Mahler’s Ljubljana story. It was a wealthy merchant family in Ljubljana, dealing in colonial goods, haberdashery and paint. Anton Krisper studied music in Vienna between 1876 and 1878 together with Gustav Mahler. Other notable residents of Krisper’s house included Frederic Baraga, a Slovene Roman Catholic missionary in the United States, as well as a grammarian of the Slovene and German languages. Julija Primic, the muse of the Slovene poet France Prešeren, also lived in the house.
In 1887, the theatre in which Mahler had worked burned down. The fire also destroyed all archival material connected with his Ljubljana period. A new building now stands on the same site — the Slovene Philharmonic, designed in 1892 in the Neo-Renaissance style by the architect Adolf Wagner. The year 1701 above the entrance marks the founding of the musical institution Academia Philharmonicorum Labacensis. The wavy extension at the rear of the building was designed by the Slovene architect Jože Plečnik. In the entrance hall there is now a bust of Gustav Mahler, created in 1982 by the sculptor Bojan Kunaver.
Mahler’s memory is preserved in several places in Ljubljana. In addition to the statue at Krisper’s house and the bust in the Slovene Philharmonic, the city also has a statue dedicated to Mahler, created in 2011 by Bojan Kunaver on the centenary of the composer’s death. The sculptor named it The Song of the Earth, after Mahler’s composition Das Lied von der Erde, composed in 1907. Bojan Kunaver, born in Ljubljana in 1938, is an academic sculptor and an admirer of Mahler; in addition to his Ljubljana works, he also created other statues dedicated to Mahler. Two are located in Italy and one in Maiernigg near Klagenfurt, Austria.
Gustav Mahler was not the only artist of Jewish origin to work in Ljubljana. The city was also home to theatre entrepreneurs, actors and opera singers of Jewish descent. Some of them were members of the German theatre and performed in the Ljubljana theatre for one or more seasons.
