Ida Landau Dead at 86

Ida Bienstock Landau, widow of Jacob Landau, founder and managing director of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, died Sunday at her home here at the age of 86. She had been in ill health for many years.

Ida Landau was born in Hartford, Conn., and attended public schools there. She was admitted to the New York Bar after graduating New York University Law School in 1920 and practiced law in New York City.

Her marriage in 1921 to Jacob Landau who had not then been naturalized, resulted in loss of her U.S. citizenship and the right to practice law. The case attracted national attention and led to the adoption by Congress of the Case Act which restored her citizenship and provided that American women would not forfeit their American citizenship by marriage to foreigners.

Ida Landau gave up the practice of law to work with her husband as business manager of the JTA and, from 1942 to 1951, as manager of the Overseas News Agency (ONA) which he had established with Herbert Bayard Swope, former editor of the New York World, and other personalities. Accredited as an American war correspondent, she covered the Bermuda Refugee Conference in 1943 and toured the liberated countries of Europe in 1945 to report on the plight of the Jewish refugees.

She organized the Transworld Feature Syndicate in 1950 and developed it into a worldwide agency with offices in a dozen countries. III health, the result of injuries sustained in a car accident in Holland while travelling for the ONA forced her partial retirement in the mid-1960’s and her complete retirement a few years later.

Ida Landau was the sister of Victor Bienstock, former editor and general manager of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency who now resides in Boca Raton, Fla.