Noah Mozes Dead at 73

The Knesset Speaker, Cabinet ministers, Knesset members, rabbis and public figures were among the many hundreds who attended the funeral in Tel Aviv yesterday of Noah Mozes, editor-in-chief and chairman of the Board of Israel’s largest newspaper, Yediot Achronot, and a member of the Board of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

Mozes was knocked down by a bus on Sunday morning on the Tel Aviv-Petah Tikva highway outside his newspaper’s offices. He received grave head injuries from which he never recovered consciousness, and died in the hospital the next morning. He was 73 years old.

Born in 1912 in Kalisch into a Zionist home, he came to Palestine with his family in 1924 and studied at the famed Herzliya High School. Later he joined a kibbutz, studied agriculture in France, and spent many years working in agriculture until his father, Yehuda Mozes, asked him to come into a family business — the newspaper Hadashot Haerev.

Mozes was responsible for shepherding this paper (subsequently called Yediot Achronot) through a nearfatal crisis in 1948, when its top writers and editors left it enmasse, to become today by far the largest selling newspaper in Israel. According to a recent survey, 53 percent of all papers sold in Israel are that of Yediot.

Together with his cousin, Dov Yudkovsky, Mozes ran both the editorial and the business sides of this expanding empire until his death. He was responsible for the construction, in the late 1970’s of Yediot’s imposing modern building in downtown Tel Aviv.

STATEMENT BY PERES

In a cable to the bereaved family, Prime Minister Shimon Peres wrote that Mozes was one of the individuals who helped mold the characteristics of “our society …. His open approach, his warm personality and his sense of justice made Yediot more than just a record of events, but also a (paper which) expressed criticism, took positions, and favorably influenced our society. It would be fitting if in the future, too, the paper will continue on the path which the late Noah Mozes mapped out.”