Simon Weber, a veteran Yiddish journalist who was editor of the Forward for 18 years until his retirement last May, died at Beth Israel Hospital of a lung ailment Tuesday. He was 76 and had been associated with the Forward for nearly 50 years.
At the time of his death he held the title of editor emeritus of the paper, which changed from daily to weekly publication in 1985.
Weber, born in Stasher, Poland, in 1911, wrote for Yiddish newspapers and periodicals in Warsaw before coming to the United States in 1928. He left almost immediately for South America to work for Yiddish newspapers in Buenos Aires.
Weber returned to the United States in 1936 and worked as city editor of the Freiheit, then the Yiddish language organ of the Communist Party. He quit after a year because he objected to its politics and went to work for the Yiddishe Welt, a daily published in Philadelphia.
He joined the Forward staff in 1939, working his way from reporter to assistant city editor, city editor and finally chief editor of what was then the largest Yiddish daily newspaper in the world.
Weber was a close friend of novelist Isaac Bashevis Singer. When Singer won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1986, Weber accompanied him to Stockholm.
Funeral services will be held Friday at the Plaza Memorial Chapel, 91st Street and Amsterdam Ave. in Manhattan.
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.
