Richard Wurmbrand

Origins and early life

Richard Wurmbrand was born in Bucharest on 24 March 1909 into an Orthodox Jewish family, and this fiche states plainly that he left Judaism: he was baptised as an adult in 1938, first as an Anglican and then as a Lutheran, after meeting a Romanian carpenter who gave him a Bible.

Work and career

He is listed here on the ground of birth, as the site does for everyone born Jewish who later followed another faith, and his own writings never hid that origin. During the Second World War he and his wife Sabina, also born Jewish, hid Jews in Bucharest and smuggled others out; Sabina lost most of her family in the Holocaust. Under the Communist regime he preached in the underground church and to Soviet soldiers, was arrested in 1948, and spent fourteen years in prison, three of them in solitary confinement in a cell below ground at Jilava.

Ransomed and expelled from Romania in 1965, he testified before a United States Senate subcommittee, showing the scars of his torture, and published Tortured for Christ in 1967. With Sabina he founded the organisation now called The Voice of the Martyrs, which supports persecuted Christians worldwide and which grew into a network across dozens of countries. He wrote more than a dozen books, kept close ties with Jewish communities, and died in Torrance, California, on 17 February 2001.