Portrait of Adolf Jellinek

The arrival of orthodox Jews, particularly from Galicia and present-day Slovakia, was eyed with suspicion by the established “tolerated” Jews. In the 1860s there were already eleven orthodox prayer houses, attended by around one quarter of the Viennese Jews. To maintain the unity of the community, the liberal rabbi Adolf Jellinek and his orthodox colleague Salomon Spitzer (there are no portraits of him in existence) had to find a compromise. The prayers considered obsolete by the reform Jews were to be said silently, and in return the reform Jews abandoned the use of the organ, borrowed from Christian churches.