Karen Jeppe

Karen Jeppe ( born July 1, 1876 in Gylling, Denmark, † July 7, 1935 in Aleppo, Syria) was an evangelical missionary. She became famous by their outstanding humanitarian commitment to the Armenians on the territory of the former Ottoman Empire between 1903 and 1935.

Life

Karen Jeppe came in 1902 with 26 years at a company founded by Åge Meyer Benedictsen Relief Association for the Ottoman Armenians. In 1903 she traveled out to Urfa, where she worked in the social institutions founded by Johannes Lepsius according to the local Armenian pogroms in 1895.

During the 1915 early persecutions of the Anatolian Armenians succeeded Jeppe to protect the led of her charitable organizations from accessing the Turkish units. Franz Werfel she mentions in this context, notably in his novel The Forty Days of Musa Dagh.

After she had to return to Denmark in 1917 due to a typhus disease, she traveled to the Orient in 1921 again, this time to Aleppo in Syria, which was after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire during the French League of Nations mandate. There she served as official representative of the League of Nations facilities for Armenian refugees in the context of the then High Commissioner for Refugees, the Norwegian Fridtjof Nansen, guided activities. 1927, Nansen office as High Commissioner for reasons of age, and the activities in the East were then adjusted to a large extent. Jeppe led the activities still continue on their own and founded beyond the Euphrates an agricultural settlement, Tel Salmen Missak that has been named after an Armenian adoptive child from her, Misak Melkonian (deceased 1978).

Karen Jeppe died 1935 in Aleppo from the effects of malaria infection, and was buried by the Armenian- Gregorian rite there.

Work

It developed in Urfa, a new method to teach reading and writing to children. This led to attention because the looked after by their children to read and write much more quickly learned than children in other schools.