Leon Crystal, Jewish Journalist and Author, Dead; Was 37 Years on “forward”

Leon Crystal, prominent Jewish journalist and member of the editorial staff of the Jewish Daily Forward for 37 years, died of a heart attack early yesterday. He was 65 years old. He was the United Nations correspondent of the Forward for the last ten years. Earlier he was City editor of the newspaper.

Born in Shargorod, the Ukraine, he came to the United States when he was twenty years old. He studied engineering at the Cooper Union in New York but became interested in the Jewish theatre and translated a number of plays by Tolstoy, Moliere, Flandelo for the Yiddish Art Theatre. In 1919 he became manager of the Yiddish Art Theatre, but left it in 1922 to join the Jewish Daily Forward as reporter and feature writer. He is the author of a biography, in Yiddish, of President F. D. Roosevelt, and of a Yiddish book on the venerable Russian writer Lew Tolstoy.