Richard Straus, the Washington correspondent for two German language Jewish weeklies, died Saturday afternoon of injuries received in an automobile collision earlier in the day. He was 60 years old.
The Montgomery County police reported that the car in which Strauss and his wife, Elaine, were riding collided head-on with another car in Rockville, Md. Elaine Straus was reported in critical condition at Suburban Hospital.
The driver of the other car was charged with driving while intoxicated, driving at excessive speed for road conditions and failure to keep right of the center line.
Straus, who lived in Bethesda, Md., was the Washington correspondent for the Aufbau, the German-language Jewish weekly published in New York, and the Juedische Allgemeine in Dusscldorf, West Germany. He also worked for the International Visitors Information Service and was taking part, on behalf of the West German government, in a review of West German high school history texts to determine whether they described accurately the Nazi period.
Born in Germany, he came to the United States in the 1930’s. He served with the Army in Europe during World War II. A graduate of Georgetown University’s foreign service school, Straus was a State Department foreign service officer from 1948 to 1979. He was a recipient of an award from the West German government for efforts to reconciliate Jews and Germans.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
