Journalist Alvin Rosenfeld Dead; Covered Nearly All Israel’s Wars

Alvin Rosenfeld, a former NBC bureau chief in Jerusalem who covered nearly all Israel’s wars since the birth of the Jewish state, died in Washington on Oct. 10 of cancer. He was 73.

He was to be buried in New Jersey.

Rosenfeld was a familiar and respected figure in the small community of veteran correspondents who covered Israel and the Middle East in the early days of the Jewish state.

A native of St. Louis and grandson of the late St. Louis Chief Rabbi Zachariah Rosenfeld, he wrote about the War of Independence in 1948 for the New York Post.

With his journalist wife, the former Judy Shepherd, Rosenfeld depicted the difficult early days of mass immigration and austerity in a weekly column for the Post.

He reported on the Sinai campaign of 1956 for the New York Herald Tribune and covered the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolph Eichmann for that newspaper and for NBC News, which he later joined as a correspondent.

As a correspondent for NBC, he was severely wounded during fighting in Cyprus in 1964. His injuries left him blind in one eye and deaf in one ear.

Rosenfeld became NBC bureau chief in Madrid in 1965 and returned to Jerusalem as Israeli bureau chief for the network in 1967, a few days before the outbreak of the Six-Day War.

He was the only Western reporter to enter the Old City of Jerusalem with the Israeli forces, led by Gen. Moshe Dayan, when they captured the Western Wall.

In 1971, Rosenfeld was posted to Washington as a State Department correspondent for NBC. After he left the network, he returned to war reportage for the last time as a special correspondent for The Washington Post, covering the Yom Kippur War and its aftermath. He also served for a time as spokesman for Keren Hayesod in Jerusalem.

In 1986, Rosenfeld joined the nascent U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, playing a major role in its early planning. He went on to become a consultant to the museum.