The theatre behind the shelves

This apartment block has a theatre hall built into its lower floors, and that hall very nearly slipped out of everyone's memory.

The building is the work of Oskar Marmorek, an architect from the circle around Theodor Herzl, the founder of political Zionism, and he also designed the halls for the first Zionist congresses. Here in 1898 he built a theatre with Art Nouveau decor, and it became a house where plays were performed in Yiddish for an audience that came from the surrounding streets.

In 1938 it was taken from its owners. After the war it never regained its role as a theatre, and for decades a supermarket occupied the space, with shelves standing in the hall and the old decoration still sitting quietly in place above the shop's ceiling.

For the past fifteen years or so plays have been performed here again, under a name that includes the Hebrew word for the place. The part of the hall that survived is the part nobody thought worth rebuilding.

Two streets away stands the house where Europe's most famous waltz was dreamed up.