Austrian Press Agency (APA) (11/05/2007)
Elderly and nursing home is being erected next to the Hakoah recreation area
Vienna – The newly created “IKG campus” in Vienna’s Leopoldstadt is growing. Today the foundation stone will be laid for the Jewish Community’s Maimonides Center. Directly next to the Hakoah Sports and Recreation Center located in the Simon-Wiesenthal-Gasse will be a modern Senior Center and nursing home. It will replace the current IKG residential building in the Bauernfeldgasse in Döbling.
According to the IKG, the Maimonides Center will be comprised of a spacious Therapy and Out-Patient Center, a nursing home with 204 beds and a residential building with 145 individual units. In addition there will be a 1,500 sq. meter garden, a Day Center, shops and a cafe. A synagogue accommodating 380 people will occupy a building together with a school.
“The combination of a kindergarten, a school and the Hakoah Sports and Recreation Center, together with a nursing home represents an ideal symbiosis and should promote all generations living together within our Community,” as stated in the brochure which was published at the beginning of construction.
The nursing home will be in operation beginning December 2009. All projects will be completed by 2011 or 2012.
Entire estimated costs involved in building the Maimonides Center are assessed at fifty million Euros, one part of which will be taken over by the Ministry of Social Affairs, and the City of Vienna will provide loans. The proceeds from the sale of the property in the Bauernfeldgasse will go for the project. Some 14 million Euros will be taken out as credit.
Before 1938, Hakoah’s sport facilities stood where it currently stands on the IKG Campus. The foundation was established in 1909. After aryanization, the athletes fled abroad, but shortly after the end of the NS era, Vienna’s Hakoah began flourishing again. The “Washington Agreement” provided the basis for restitution in 2002 of the NS confiscated area housing the sports facilities. The property allowing for building the Maimonides Center was purchased in 2006.