Frank Wundohl Dead at 56

Frank Wundohl, director of communications for JWB since 1981 and a member of the board of directors of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, died Saturday at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Elizabeth, N.J., after a lingering illness. He was 56. Funeral services took place Monday at Goldstein’s Funeral Home in Philadelphia.

Recently, Wundohl received the Joseph Polakoff Award of the American Jewish Press Association (AJPA). The presentation to him was made at the hospital.

Wundohl joined JWB’s executive staff on June 15, 1981, after eight years as editor of the Jewish Exponent of Philadelphia. He served both as JWB’s communications director and as publisher’s representative of JWB Circle.

A native of Philadelphia, Wundohl was in Jewish communal service since 1967. He was appointed Jewish Exponent editor after seven years as information director of Albert Einstein Medical Center in Philadelphia, the largest of the Philadelphia Federation’s five health care constituent agencies.

A VARIETY OF COMMUNICATIONS POSITIONS

Since receiving his bachelor’s degree from Temple University in 1951, Wundohl served in a variety of communications positions. His news appointment, CBS’ affiliate in Philadelphia; the Philadelphia Daily News; the Courier-Post in South Jersey; and the Daily Intelligencer in Doylestown, Pa.

In 1981, Wundohl was one of the recipients of the first Simon Rockower Memorial Awards For Excellence in Jewish Journalism, presented by the American Jewish Press Association in news writing for a series of reports on the Jews of Hungary and Austria.

In 1977, he received the Boris Smolar Award for Excellence in North American Jewish Journalism from the Council of Jewish Federations, for two series of feature articles written in 1976 on the Jews of South Africa and “Israel from the Golan to the Negev.”

Wundohl was president of the American Jewish Press Association from 1978 to 1981, a member of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency Board of Directors and a vice president of the American Jewish Public Relations Society (AJPRS). He had played a frequent liaison role between the AJPA and JTA, and represented the Jewish news syndicate on an AJPA-UJA mission to the French Jewish community, Israel and to war-torn Lebanon in February, 1983.

Prior to the Hungary mission, Wundohl had twice before been behind the Iron Curtain — to Poland, Rumania and Bulgaria in 1978, and to Russia in March, 1980.

JTA syndicated a series of six articles about the plight of refuseniks in Moscow, Kiev and Leningrad that Wundohl co-authored with Rabbi Herbert Tobin, now associate director of the Jewish Federation of South Broward (Hollywood, Fla.) but then associated with the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Philadelphia, upon their safe return to the West.

He led a pioneer AJPA mission to the remnant of the Jewish community of Morocco in 1977.