Bernard G. Richards, Jewish Leader, Founder of Ajcongress, Dies at 94

Funeral services were held today for Bernard G. Richards, a Jewish leader whose career spanned more than 50 years, who died Friday at the age of 54. He was a founder of the American Jewish Congress and a member of the executive committee of the Zionist Organization of America and served as a member of the American Jewish delegation to the Peace Conference in Paris in 1919. Ten years ago he had been honored on the 25th anniversary of the Jewish Information Bureau, which he had created and headed almost until his death. He had worked as an editor and correspondent for a wide variety of general and Jewish periodicals. He was widely known for his fictional character, Keidansky, embodied in his first book, “Discourses of Keidansky,” a wryly philosophical Jewish amateur philosopher. Born in Keidan, Lithushia, he followed his father, an earlier immigrant, to Idaho Spring, Colo., where he worked in his father’s drygoods store. He was then 13. He then went to Boston and eventually settled in New York City.