The retirement of Boris Smolar after 43 years with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, the last 26 of them as Editor-in-Chief of the world-wide news service, was announced today by Robert H. Arnow, JTA president. Mr. Smolar, who is 70, will continue to write his popular column distributed by JTA to the American Jewish press and will carry the title, Editor-in-Chief Emeritus.
Victor M. Bienstock, who was JTA editor in 1933-35 and has been its general manager and director of operations since 1951, has assumed the editorial direction of the agency.
Mr. Arnow also announced the appointment of John Kayston as Business Manager of the JTA. Mr. Kayston, who joined the JTA organization in 1936, has been responsible for JTA administrative affairs, circulation and production for many years. He will continue these activities in his expanded new capacity. Mr. Arnow said that Jack Seigel, Director of Development, would also assume added responsibilities in the financial area.
Mr. Smolar studied journalism at Northwestern University, in Chicago and was on the staff of the Chicago Daily Forward until he joined the JTA in 1924. He later became chief European correspondent for JTA and covered most of the world’s major news stories involving the Jewish people over a period of nearly two decades.
He was one of the JTA team which provided the world press with its major coverage of the 1929 Palestine riots. He covered pogroms in Poland and Rumania. His dispatches from Moscow to the JTA and the New York World during a critical period in the evolution of the Soviet Revolution did much to inform the world as to the fate of Russia’s Jews. Perhaps his longest and most arduous assignment was to report the growth of the Nazi movement in Germany which ultimately led to Hitler’s accession to power. He was expelled from Hitler Germany in 1937. He remained on European assignment after the outbreak of the war until 1941 when he returned to New York and assumed the editorship of JTA.
Mr. Bienstock, a native of Hartford, Conn., came to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency after serving on the New York World, the New York Herald Tribune and the London Morning Post. He resigned as an editor of the Herald Tribune News Service in 1933 to join the JTA staff as editor of the news service and managing editor of the Jewish Daily Bulletin. He went to Europe in 1935, with headquarters in London, as chief of foreign service, to reorganize its operations and direct its news service.
In 1940, he became chief of the foreign service of the Overseas News Agency with headquarters in London and served as war correspondent in the Middle East and European theaters. He became foreign editor of ONA in 1945 and general manager of JTA in 1951.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
