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Helmuth and Uli Eiwen stared in amazement at the ancient gravestones mounted on the old city wall where it meandered through a local park.

Helmuth, pastor of Ichthys Church in Wiener Neustadt, Austria, and his wife, Uli, had left a prayer meeting the night before convinced that the key to a mystery awaited them at the wall. For months church members had been praying for the city, asking God to show them what was blocking revival.

During prayer, the conviction had grown that the Lord had something to show them at the old city wall.

Confronted with gravestones with Hebrew inscriptions dating from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the Eiwens were intrigued by a city plaque indicating the stones had come from a Jewish graveyard closed in 1496. The revelation sent them to the library on a fact-finding mission. What they found was a brutal record of treacherous dealings with Jewish residents for many centuries, including an incident in 1496, when every Jewish citizen was forced to flee the city.

For centuries it was illegal for Jews to live in this city some 30 miles south of Vienna, but they gradually drifted back, and by 1938, Wiener Neustadt contained a lively Jewish community of about 1,200. In that fateful year of the Nazi Anschluss, there were nearly 200,000 Jews throughout the country. Those who had the means and the foresight to do so escaped to England, the Americas, or Palestine. About 65,000 of those who could not leave died between 1938 and 1945. Many of those who survived the concentration camps chose not to resettle in Austria. In Wiener Neustadt, the second-oldest Jewish settlement in Austria, no Jews are left.

Stirred by this discovery, the Eiwens and the church began to confess to God the sin of the city and to pray for God's blessing on the community.

Soon, however, they became convinced that it was too little simply to ask God for forgiveness. It was necessary to go to those directly offended and face to face confess the sin of the city and ask them for forgiveness. A worldwide search was initiated for Jews born in Wiener Neustadt and driven from their homes in 1938.

Eventually, the church located about 65 of Wiener Neustadt's Jewish former citizens. Some were too old or ill to return for the all-expense-paid one-week visit offered by the church and its 150 members. After intensive correspondence, however, most made plans to attend either the first two gatherings last year or the third in May.

"We invited you," Helmut Eiwen told the returning Jews, "because we want to receive you in this city in a completely different spirit than the one in which you were forced to leave."

During each Week of Engagement, as the events were called, the Jewish guests were honored by the mayor of Wiener Neustadt. They served as "eyewitnesses" in local schools and were invited guests at special events. Accompanied by church members, they were taken on a tour of the city's old Jewish quarters, led by the city archivist.

But the central event of each Week of Engagement occurred during a day-long church gathering when Eiwen, as a representative of the church and community, asked forgiveness for the "unbelievably great wrong done to you personally, to your family, and relatives in this city."

Although the primary reason for the gatherings was the recognition of guilt and the request for forgiveness, an important second reason for the Weeks of Engagement was the desire of the church to communicate the love of God to people whose lives had been devastated by their experience at the hands of the community.

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August 12 1996, Vol. 40, No. 9