Laufer, Leopold 1925-2007 (Leopold Yehuda Laufer)

OBITUARY NOTICE—

See index for CA sketch: Born December 27, 1925, in Aussig, Czechoslovakia (now Usti nad Labem, Czech Republic); died of cardiac and respiratory arrest, April 23, 2007, in Jerusalem, Israel. Government official and author. Laufer worked for the U.S. Agency for International Development (AID). Fluent in ten languages, he graduated from Queens College in 1949, earned his master's degree from Columbia in 1951, and finished a Ph.D. there in 1968. His early life and how he arrived in the United States was a dramatic tale. A Jew, he was forced to flee Prague as a teenager when the Nazis invaded. He and his mother and sister made it to Italy, but were imprisoned for a year before they were released and allowed to immigrate to Spain. From there, they found passage to Shanghai but were unable to leave port after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor restricted sea travel. They found another ship and sailed to Cuba and finally to New York City. After completing his education there, Laufer gained a Washington, DC, job with the U.S. Information Agency, where he was a policy advisor from 1952 to 1962. He then moved to the AID and was a development officer until 1981. While with the AID, in 1971 he was posted in Jerusalem, where he worked on nonmilitary development projects. He also was on the faculty of Tel Aviv University and a research fellow at the Davis Institute for International Relations at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. After retiring, Laufer founded Israel Foreign Ministries, which continued his work on development aid projects with other nations. He remained in Jerusalem after retirement. Laufer was the author of such titles as Israel and the Developing Countries: New Approaches to Cooperation (1967) and Western Europe and the Palestinians: The Socio-Economic Dimension (1990).

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Washington Post, April 28, 2007, p. B6.