BINYUMIN VALD

BINYUMIN VALD (May 15, 1905-June 17, 1969)

            The adopted name of Yitskhok Gurfinkel, he was born in Warsaw.  He studied in a “cheder metukan” (improved religious elementary school) and later in a Ḥinukh high school in Warsaw.  He was a student of the humanities at the Wszechnica, the Polish university in Warsaw, and at the Sorbonne in Paris.  In 1923 he came to France where he was active in community and labor life, in the Medem Club, and other groups.  In 1936 during the Spanish Civil War, he was in Spain as a correspondent for Folkstsaytung (People’s newspaper) in Warsaw.  From 1941 he was living in New York.  Knowledgeable as he was of foreign languages, in November 1945 Vald was appointed by the American government as a translator of English, French, Russian, Polish, and German for the international tribunal in Nuremburg, which was trying the Nazi criminals from WWII (Hermann Goering, Rudolf Hess, Joachim Ribbentrop, and others).  Vald began writing for Naye folkstsaytung (New people’s newspaper) in Warsaw (1929), and until 1939 he was its regular Parisian correspondent.  He was also a contributor and co-editor of Der veker (The alarm) and Unzer shtime (Our voice) in Paris.  Over the period 1945-1946 he published a series of articles on the Nuremburg Trials in Forverts (Forward) in New York.  He also wrote a foreword to the French translation of Perets’s Khsidish (Hassidic tales) (Paris, 1935), published by Vald together with Y. Peskin and Y. Kivelovitsh.  He was living in New York until his death.

Sources: Interview in The Sun (New York) (late November 1945); A. Alpern, in Tog (New York) (December 20, 1945); Samedi soir (Paris) (July 13, 1946).