Israeli prominent journalist Dov Yudkovsky, a Holocaust survivor who became editor of Israel’s Yediot Ahronot daily newspaper newspaper, died last week after a long illness. He was 89.
Yudkovsky was born in Warsaw, Poland, in 1923 but grew up in Belgium.
After the outbreak of World War II, he fled with his family to France but the Nazis arrested them and sent them to Auschwitz. No one else in his family survived the war.
After the war, he moved to pre-state Israel, where he managed to get the paper printed in Jerusalem while the city was under siege during the 1948 independence war that surrounded Israel's creation.
He worked for more than 40 years at Yediot Ahronot.
The paper credited him with training younger reporters to write in a "simple, upfront, clear and colloquial" style.
In 2002, he was awarded the Israel Prize, the country’s highest honor, for his work in the media.
The Israeli daily Haaretz dubbed him the "father of modern Israeli journalism," and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu mourned his death.
"He crafted a journalism that reached out toward its readers, looked them in the eye and spoke their language," he said in a statement. "With his passing, an era in Israeli media has come to a close."