Meyer Joshua Nurenberger (1911 – August 11 2001) was a Jewish journalist, author and publisher. M.J. Nurenberger was born in Kraków but was raised in France and educated in Belgium where he began his career in journalism as a parliamentary report. He emigrated to the United States in February 1939, months before the outbreak of World War II. He was able to rescue his parents and 3 sisters from Europe before the war. They spent the war in England and Cuba and came to New York in 1945. While in New York City he was ordained a rabbi but decided to continue his career in journalism. He found a job with the conservative Morgen Journal (Jewish Morning Journal), a Yiddish daily published in New York, becoming its editor in 1947 and also wrote a column for the influential Yiddish weekly Algemeiner Journal. During World War II, Nurenberger was a war correspondent whose despatches were carried by the Jewish press throughout the world. Following the war he covered the Nuremberg Trials and later also covered the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Israel. In 1957, Nurenberger moved to Toronto, Canada, to become editor of the Yiddish weekly, Der Yiddishe Journal. Three years later, he and his wife Dorothy Cohn Nurenberger founded the Canadian Jewish News, an English-language weekly which became the leading newspaper of Canada's Jewish community. Following the death of his wife in 1971, Nurenberger sold the newspaper to a consortium of Jewish leaders connected with the Canadian Jewish Congress. Nurenberger was a Revisionist Zionist, having become involved with the Irgun in the 1940s. He was later a supporter of Herut and a friend of its leader, Menachem Begin, and supported Begin and his movement editorially. He also advised Progressive Conservative Party leader John Diefenbaker on Jewish issues. He soon regretted his decision to sell the CJN as the newspaper's editorial stance moved to the political centre and, in 1974, he founded the Jewish Times as a right wing rival and published it for more than a decade. He is the author of The Scared And The Doomed - The Jewish Establishment vs. The Six Million (ISBN 0-88962-289-2), published in 1985, which castigates Labour Zionist and American Jewish leaders for opposing Vladimir Jabotinsky's proposal that a Jewish army be mobilised and sent to Europe during World War II, and argues that European Jewry could have been saved.
External links
- Obituary in the Canadian Jewish News.
