Gedenktafel Moriz Kuffner

On April 25, 2017, the association "Steine der Erinnerung" unveiled a memorial plaque at the observatory in Johann-Staudt-Straße 10 in memory of the Jewish entrepreneur Moriz Kuffner. Alongside the mayor of Ottakring, Franz Prokop, the chairman of the Kuffner Observatory Association, Norbert Fiala, and the director of the observatory, Günther Wuchterl, also spoke the great-grandsons of Moriz Kuffner, George and Michael Eberstadt, who had traveled from the United States. Moriz Kuffner, entrepreneur, mountaineer, patron, and owner of the Kuffner Brewery (now: Ottakringer Brewery), financed the construction and ongoing operations of the Kuffner Observatory in Ottakring. After the Nazi takeover of Austria in 1938, the Gestapo exerted pressure on the Kuffner family to leave the country. The majority of their assets and properties, including the brewery in Ottakring and the observatory, were seized by Austrian National Socialists. On July 13, 1938, the seriously ill Moriz Kuffner, whose wife Elsa and son Ignaz had died just a few months earlier, was taken by his sons Stephan and Johann to Bratislava, from where they could flee to Switzerland. Shortly afterwards, on March 5, 1939, Moriz Kuffner died at the age of 85 in the Hirslanden Clinic in Zurich.