Draft:Josef Fraenkel (Journalist)



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

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

Ustrzyki Dolne was conquered by Russian troops at the beginning of the First World War and 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 The Jewish State 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 association Ivria and joined the revisionist Zionism of Vladimir Jabotinsky. He worked as an author in Vienna and published a popular biography of Theodor Herzl.

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

In London, Fraenkel, who had Anglicized 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 in Huyton as an enemy alien. After his release, he worked for the WJC and YIVO, publishing a press review and various books on the Jewish press, including a short outline of the history of the Jewish press. Alex Bein, the then head of the Zionist Central Archives in Jerusalem , 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 Austrian Jews did not come to fruition, and the institute planned ten years later by Hugo Gold was also a failure, both of which were also due to the Defense against the organizers of the Leo Baeck Institute. In 1967 he managed to win well-known authors to publish an anthology on the Jewish history of Austria. He did not have the means to translate the work into German.

Literature

 * Werner Röder, Herbert A. Strauss (ed.): Biographical handbook 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, S. 94–103