Herbert Pundik

Herbert Pundik was born in 1927 in Copenhagen

Herbert Pundik was born in Copenhagen in 1927 to a Jewish family that had come to Denmark from Ukraine. During the German occupation of Denmark, he escaped to Sweden, and in 1945 he joined the Danish Brigade there.

In Israel's War of Independence he came to Israel and volunteered to fight, serving in the 32nd Battalion of the Alexandroni Brigade. He married Ruth Ginzburg in 1953, and in 1954 the family settled in Tel Aviv.

He reported from abroad for the Danish paper Information and then joined Politiken, where he was executive editor from 1970 to 1993. He kept living in Tel Aviv during those years. He also edited Dvar HaShavua, the weekly supplement of Davar, and in 2010 he said he had been a Mossad agent in the 1960s.

After 1993 he was a senior foreign correspondent for Politiken, and in 2008 he became an adjunct professor at Aalborg University. He helped found the Parents Circle for bereaved Israeli and Palestinian families. His son Uri was killed in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, and his son Ron died in 2014. He died on December 8, 2019.