Josef Fraenkel

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Josef Fränkel's signature 1937
Book cover 1938

Josef Fraenkel (born June 11, 1903 in Ustrzyki Dolne , Austria-Hungary ; died 1987 ) was an Austro-British association functionary of Zionist organizations and journalist.

Life

Josef Fränkel's father, Moses Fränkel, was the mayor of Stetl Ustrzyki Dolne, a community with 4,000 inhabitants, half of whom were Jews, and he was involved in oil production in the region as a manufacturer. Moses Fränkel was interested in Zionism. Josef Fränkel's mother fell victim to the Holocaust, his siblings had to emigrate and escaped being exterminated by the Germans.

Ustrzyki Dolne was captured by Russian troops at the beginning of World War I, it became Polish in 1918. Josef Fränkel attended school in Vienna and then in Bielitz with the teacher Michaël Berkovitz, the translator of Theodor Herzl's Der Judenstaat into Hebrew. He did not complete his law studies at the University of Vienna , which he began in 1927 . As a student he was active in the Zionist student union Ivria and joined the revisionist Zionism of Vladimir Jabotinsky . He worked as an author in Vienna and published a popular biography about Theodor Herzl.

He became a supporter of Robert Strickers and with him in 1936 in Geneva a founding member of the World Jewish Congress (WJC). From 1936 he coordinated the European activities of the Joint Boycott Council, founded in the USA, on the economic boycott of National Socialist Germany. When Austria was annexed in March 1938, he fled to Switzerland and from there to Czechoslovakia . After Czechoslovakia was broken up in March 1939, he fled to Great Britain. Fränkel lost several family members in the Shoah , and he never returned to Austria. In England he married the immigrant Dora Rosenfeld (1912–) in 1942. Her daughter Ruth Lynn Deech , born in 1943, is a British lawyer.

In London Fraenkel, who had Anglicised his name, found a modest income as a correspondent for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) and from then on worked, partly on a voluntary basis, for various Jewish organizations and Zionist splinter groups. He was a member of the Association of Jewish Journalists and Authors in Great Britain. When war broke out in September 1939, he was interned as an enemy alien in Huyton . After his release, he worked for the WJC and YIVO , published a press review and various books on the Jewish press, including a brief outline of the history of the Jewish press. Alex Bein , the head of the Zionist Central Archives in Jerusalem at the time , thanked him for his work with a tribute on the occasion of his 70th birthday in the Jüdische Allgemeine . A project planned by Fraenkel for a Chajes Institute under the name of the Vienna Chief Rabbi Zwi Perez Chajes on the history of the Austrian Jews did not materialize, and the institute planned by Hugo Gold ten years later was also a failure, both due to the resistance of the organizers of the Leo Baeck Institute . In 1967 he succeeded in winning well-known authors for the publication of an anthology on the Jewish history of Austria. He did not have the means to translate the work into German.

Fonts (selection)

  • Palestine laughs! : Palestinian jokes . Vienna, 1934
  • Theodor Herzl: The Creator's First Will . Vienna: Fiba, 1934
  • Dr. Siegmund Werner: an employee of Herzl . Letters from S. Werner and T. Herzl. Selected and edited by Josef Fränkel. Prague: Zionist Propaganda Station, 1938
  • (Ed.): Robert Stricker . London: Ararat Publishing Society, 1950
  • The Jewish press of the world . World Jewish Congress. Cultural Department. 1953 and another six years.
  • Guide to the Jewish libraries of the world . London, 1959
  • Louis D. Brandeis (1856-1941): patriot, judge and zionist . London: Education Committee of the Hillel Foundation, 1959
  • Mathias Acher's fight for the "Zion Crown." . Basel: Jüdische Rundschau Maccabi, 1959, first in English 1954. Mathias Acher, that is: Nathan Birnbaum
  • Lucien Wolf and Theodor Herzl . London: Jewish Historical Society of England, 1960
  • Dubnow, Herzl, and Ahad Ha-am: political and cultural Zionism . London: Ararat Pub. Society, 1963
  • Simon Dubnow and the history of political Zionism , in: Aaron Steinberg (Ed.): Simon Dubnow, the man and his work: a memorial volume on the occasion of the centenary of his birth, 1860-1960 . Paris: French Section of the World Jewish Congress, 1963
  • Exhibition of the Jewish press in Great Britain, 1823-1963 . London: World Jewish Congress 1963
  • (Ed.): The Jews of Austria: essays on their life, history and destruction . London: Vallentine, Mitchell, 1967

literature

  • Werner Röder, Herbert A. Strauss (Hrsg.): Biographical manual of German-speaking emigration after 1933. Vol. 1: Politics, economy, public life . Munich: Saur 1980, p. 184 f.
  • Evelyn Adunka : Austrian Zionism in Exile: The Work of Josef Fraenkel , in: Edward Timms , Ritchie Robertson : Austrian exodus: the creative achievements of refugees from national socialism . Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, ISBN 0-7486-0612-2 , 1995, pp. 94-103

Web links

Commons : Josef Fraenkel  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g h Evelyn Adunka: Austrian Zionism in Exile: The Work of Josef Fraenkel , 1995, pp. 94-103
personal data
SURNAME Fraenkel, Josef
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austro-British association functionary of Zionist organizations and journalist
DATE OF BIRTH June 11, 1903
PLACE OF BIRTH Ustrzyki Dolne , Austria-Hungary
DATE OF DEATH 1987