Jacksonville publisher Feldman is dead at 73

Garrick Feldman, a Central Arkansas newspaper publisher and the son of Holocaust survivors, died Sunday in Jacksonville. He was 73.

He founded the twice-weekly newspaper The Arkansas Leader in 1987 and ran it with his wife, Eileen, and their son, Jonathan. The Jacksonville paper covers northern Pulaski County and Lonoke and White counties.

Jonathan serves as editor, while Eileen is managing editor.

Before founding The Leader, Feldman had an interest in the Van Buren Press-Argus.

Feldman’s death was noted Monday on Griffin Leggett Healey & Roth Funeral Home’s website and in news reports. His family couldn’t be reached for comment on Tuesday.

Feldman was an advocate for the freedom of the press, and he wrote of the importance of local news outlets.

As a young journalist in Chicago, Feldman interviewed Elie Wiesel, the famously shy author who survived the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps. Feldman wrote in the Arkansas Gazette in 1986 that he suspected Wiesel agreed to the interview in part because he detected Feldman’s Hungarian accent.

Feldman was born on Aug. 30, 1948, in what is now Hungary to Jewish parents who survived forced labor during the Holocaust.

His mother, Ilona, survived Auschwitz as a teenager, and his father, Ferenc, lost his parents and siblings to the same death camp, Feldman wrote in The Leader in 2017.

He was eight years old when the Soviet Union invaded Hungary in 1956, and he remembered fleeing the country with his family, crossing the Austrian border in the middle of the night while holding his mother’s hand and watching his father carry his younger brother.

The Feldman family immigrated to the U.S., and Ferenc lived until 2007 while Ilona lived until 2017.

Feldman recounted the departure from Hungary in 1983 in the Arkansas Gazette.

“I realize that I will be that 8-year-old boy forever,” he wrote.

A former colleague, Arkansas Business Assistant Online Editor Sarah Campbell-Miller, said Feldman was a perfectionist and a brilliant interviewer.

“He loved and believed in community journalism and its ability to make a difference,” she told Arkansas Business this week.