Behind the Headlines Kayston Honored by JTA Board for 48 Years of Service; Stresses Jta’s Importance

John Kayston, retiring exective vice president of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, was presented with a plaque at the annual JTA Board of Directors meeting in Atlanta for his 48 years of “outstanding and dedicated service to promoting the dissemination of Jewish news around the world.”

Martin Fox, JTA president, in presenting the plaque to Kayston, praised him for his many years of service to the JTA. “To work in one job for 48 years is quite rare in our society today.” Other comments from Board members included Philip Slomovitz, editor and publisher of The Jewish News of Detroit and JTA vice president. In a letter to the Board he wrote that Kayston “is a pioneer in Jewish journalism who has earned every blessing and honor that can be accorded him.”

Board member Hy Vile of Kansas City stated: “Dedication and sincerity such as demonstrated by John Kayston is far, far too rare on the public scene. From 1936 to the present has evolved a different world. John Kayston has helped to shape that world.”

Following the meeting, Kayston expressed some thoughts on the world he helped to shape. He expressed his belief that the past half century is the most momentous period in Jewish history. The two most important events during that period which profoundly affected Jewish life, he said, were Hitler’s murder of six million Jews, the Holocaust, and the birth of the State of Israel.

SOME BEHIND-THE-SCENES STORIES

There is general agreement, Kayston observed, that the JTA played an important and vital role during these turbulent years in collecting and disseminating news affecting Jewish lives everywhere. Little is known, however, of some behind-the-scenes stories in which JTA was involved.

One such story, Kayston recalled, was the deportation of Boris Smolar, then JTA’s chief foreign correspondent, from Berlin in 1937. He went to Nazi Germany in 1933 to stay for a few days to do a series of articles on the plight of the Jews in Germany and stayed for four years. His stay there was fraught with danger. Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels alluded to this when he said that Smolar was a “courageous man” for daring to send out reports about the Nazi regime. The JTA office in Berlin was closed in 1933. In their deportation order against Smolar, the Gestapo stated that his presence in Germany was “a danger to the Third Reich.”

Kayston also recalled that in 1945, immediately after the Allied victory in Europe and the liberation of the concentration camp inmates, JTA was able to obtain lists of survivors in various countries under Nazi occupation and sent them for distribution in the United States and other countries so that relatives could get in touch with the survivors.

There is no question, Kayston siad, that the excellent reporting of Smolar, JTA’s chief foreign correspondent during the 1920’s and 1930’s, from Europe and the Middle East helped to a large extent to establish JTA’s credibility with the general media.

THE ROLE OF THE ONA

Kayston also reminisced about the Overseas News Agency (ONA), founded in 1940 as a subsidiary of the JTA. At that time, some of the daily newspapers which subscribed to the JTA news service, especially The New York Times, felt they no longer could use the “Jewish Telegraphic Agency” slugline, because the name was too “parochial” and implied biased news reporting.

Partly as a result of this, Jacob Landau, founder of the JTA and its managing editor, enlisted the help and expertise of such prominent journalists as Herbert Bayard Swope and William Allen White in establishing a general “non-Jewish” news agency. Hy Wishengrad, JTA editor at the time, became editor of the ONA and Victor Bienstock its chief foreign correspondent.

Within a year, ONA news was carried by more than 50 daily American and Canadian newspapers. Its reporters and correspondents included outstanding journalists and writers such as Theodore White, Meyer Levin, David Schoenbrun, Elie Abel, and Gabe Pressman.

ONA’s correspondent in Stockholm was Willy Brandt (later to become Chancellor of West Germany) who used the assumed name of Karl Frahm. He made several undercover trips to Nazi Germany in the early 1940’s and was the first correspondent to report on Hitler’s “final solution” of the Jewish question, the Nazi slaughter of European Jewry.

During World War II, ONA established a foreign language news service where ONA news was translated into more than 20 languages and distributed to the foreign-language press in the U.S. and Canada and overseas. Regrettably, Kayston pointed out, the ONA was dissolved in the early 1950’s.

“What an important function it could perform today to counter anti-Israel propaganda and Jew-hatred so rampant in the world today, ” Kayston said. He expressed his belief that serious thought should be given to establish again a news agency for the general media based on the JTA worldwide news network.

JTA’S STRUGGLE FOR INDEPENDENCE

“Throughout all my 48 years with JTA,” Kayston said, “JTA had to fight for its independence. Hardly a day passes when one or another Jewish organization, or some political faction in Israel, does not want to dictate to JTA editors how to run the agency and what news to print and which stories to suppress. JTA’s independence and its impartial reporting is its most valuable asset. If it should ever deviate from this policy, it would lose its effectiveness.”