Victor Bienstock, Vice-president for Editorial Services of Jta, Retires After 37 Years

Victor M. Bienstock, Vice President for Editorial Services of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, will retire on August 31, it was announced today by Robert H. Arnow. President of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. Mr. Bienstock joined the JTA as its managing editor in 1933 after the advent of Hitler to power in Germany and was directly affiliated with the agency for most of the past 37 years. Mr. Bienstock began his journalistic career on the old New York World in 1929. He served as New York correspondent of the London Morning Post and was editor of the Herald Tribune News Service when he joined the JTA as managing editor in 1933. He also became managing editor of the Jewish Daily Bulletin, a tabloid-size daily newspaper published by JTA. After establishing a network of correspondents covering the United States, Mr. Bienstock went abroad in 1935 as chief of the JTA foreign service to reorganize its overseas news services and communications system. He established the first scheduled transmission service from London, using Morse code transmitters. After the war. the JTA central transmission service was shifted to New York and gradually was converted to radio printer.

In 1940 Mr. Bienstock also became chief of foreign service of the Overseas News Agency which was set up by JTA in cooperation with Catholic and Protestant elements to provide news service to the world press. He returned to the United States for six months in 1941 to establish a foreign-language division for the Office of War Information and returned to Europe later that year as a war correspondent for JTA and ONA. From London and Lisbon, Mr. Bienstock provided some of the first reports to reach the United States of the systematic mass murder of Jews by the Nazi regime. Later, as a war correspondent in the Middle East, Italian and French theaters, he provided a running account of the fate of the Jews in the occupied areas and of their liberation. He returned to the United States in 1945 to become foreign editor of the Overseas News Agency and in 1951 became general manager of the JTA. He assumed the editorship in 1968 on the retirement of Boris Smolar and was named vice president in charge of editorial operations in 1969.