Services will be held tomorrow at Beth Yeshurun for David H. White, editor and publisher of the Jewish Herald-Voice for the past 38 years, who died early this morning at the age of 68, a week after undergoing an operation for cancer. Mr. White was a foreign correspondent for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in the 1930s, and since 1955 had been publisher of the Jewish Digest.
At his death, Mr. White was in his ninth year as a vice-president of the National Jewish Welfare Board and was on the board of the JTA. He was a past president of the Jewish Community Council, the Jewish Community Center, Congregation Emanu-El, the Southern region of the JWB, the Southern region of the Council of Jewish Federations and Welfare Funds, and B’nai B’rith District 7. He also served as a trustee of the Houston Community Chest, and was a past international vice-president of B’nai B’rith.
Mr. White was born in European Russia. His parents came to the United States while he was an infant and settled in Denver, Colo. He graduated from the University of Denver and earned a Ph.D. at Columbia University, New York. In 1865 he was one of several newsmen sent to Vietnam by President Johnson to report on American troop morale. The visit led to a series of nationally published articles by Mr. White that generally concluded that morale was good.
Mr. White campaigned in the Jewish Herald-Voice, the South’s oldest American-Jewish weekly, established in 1908, for a cooperative effort on funding Jewish education. One of his editorial targets was the Jewish Defense League. He led a drive, opposed by rabbinical elements, to have the local community center open Saturdays; the new policy took effect last Saturday.
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.
