Kreppel-Jonas

Journalist and writer. Born in Drohobycz, Galicia, Yoyne (Jonas) Kreppel was educated as an autodidact in Yiddish, German, Polish and Hebrew and managed several newspapers in these languages. He also participated in the Czernowitz Language conference (1908) pledging for a compromise between Hebrew and Yiddish as national languages of the Jewish people. Beginning in 1914 in Vienna, he served for many years as an adviser for the Austrian Foreign Ministry. He contributed to "Der Yud" and other Yiddish publications in Galicia and from 1919 was a Vienna correspondent for New York's "Yidishes Togblat". A prolific Yiddish-language author of eastern Jewish legends and contemporay historical analysises in Poland and Austria, he published more than 100 small books of stories and novels that were popular among a mass readership. He composed a comprehensive statistical overview of contemporary Jewish life in German with Juden und Judentum von Heute(Jews and Judaism Today; 1925). Kreppel was taken in prison after the German occupation of Austria (1938) and deported to the Concentration Camps of Dachau and Buchenwald, where he was killed in 1940.