Stephen Joseph Fraenkel was born in Berlin in 1917 as the son of Max Fraenkel, a banker, and Martha (Plessner) Fraenkel, a musician and piano teacher. Martha Fraenkel died in 1932 of cancer. After graduating from the Kaiser-Friedrich-Schule in 1936 Fraenkel decided to pursue the study of engineering. After applying to all eleven of the engineering schools in Germany, he was admitted to and enrolled at the Technical University of Hannover in spite of being Jewish.
In 1937 Stephen Fraenkel was contacted by a representative of the International Student Service, an organization that arranged scholarships in the United States offered by Jewish fraternities. He was granted such a scholarship by the Sigma Alpha Mu chapter at the University of Nebraska and immigrated to the United States in 1938. In 1941 he married Josephine Rubnitz; the couple had three children. Stephen Fraenkel studied engineering in Nebraska and Illinois and worked in the research and development departments of several engineering companies in Illinois. Most of his family, including his father, perished in the Holocaust. Stephen Fraenkel died in 2002.
Further biographic details, especially on Stephen Fraenkel's life in Nazi Germany, are available in his memoir "My Life - a Series of Notes and Observations on a Sequence of Improbabilities" (ME 1243/ MM III 1).
From the guide to the Stephen J. Fraenkel Collection, 1929-2007, bulk 1936-1960, (Leo Baeck Institute)
