Michael Elkins, journalist and broadcaster: born New York 22 January 1917; married 1947 Martha Goldstein (one son; marriage dissolved); died Jerusalem 10 March 2001. Michael Elkins - later the BBC's award-winning Israel correspondent - began his radio career with the American CBS network in September 1956. The outgoing correspondent announced that he was returning to the United States because "nothing ever happens in Israel". A month later Britain and France invaded Suez and Israeli tanks rolled into Sinai.Things have been happening in Israel ever since. And from war to war Elkins covered it, first for CBS, then for Newsweek, and for 17 sonorous years for BBC radio. He scooped the world with the story of Israel's destruction of the Arab air forces on the opening day of the 1967 Six Day War The BBC ran it, CBS hesitated Elkins quit. If they didn't trust their correspondent, he didn't want the job.Elkins was rare, if not unique, among BBC correspondents as a New Yorker who never mid-Atlanticised his accent. Rather, his American growler's voice and his epic, 1940s American radio style became his trademark He was a master story-teller, a reporter with attitude.

Even in private conversation, he spoke in vivid, well-crafted sentences. The From Our Own Correspondent format - discursive, literate, personal - might have been made for him His writings translated less well to the printed page. Without the voice, they appeared a touch contrived.The Arab lobby campaigned against him. The BBC, they argued, should not employ a Jew and a Zionist to report the Arab-Israeli conflict. Elkins's answer was: "My reports are a matter of public record.

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If anyone can find a pattern of bias, let him say so." They never did, at least not to the satisfaction of the BBC, which stood by him until he reached retirement age in 1983. He exploited his exceptional contacts in the Israeli establishment, but he always insisted that he was no one's mouthpiece.Michael Elkins was born in New York in 1917.

His parents were East European Jewish immigrants, who worked in the tailoring sweatshops of the Lower East Side. Michael, the youngest of three brothers, was a rebellious child, embarrassed by his parents' "old country" ways - that they spoke Yiddish and that his father walked ahead of his mother in the street. He educated himself in the New York Public Library.The family was not particularly religious. In a memorable BBC broadcast, A Jew at Christmas, Elkins described his attempts to sever his roots after Santa Claus refused to give him a present at Macy's department store "This ain't for you, Jewboy," Santa told the eight-year-old. He began once again to be a Jew, he wrote in the same script, in April 1945.

As an American serviceman, he was present at the liberation of Dachau. When he told a skeletal survivor that he didn't understand Yiddish, the man persisted: "Don't you speak the mother tongue? Aren't you a Jew?" Elkins found that he did and he was.Before the Second World War, he was a socialist and militant antiFascist He worked as a union organiser on the West Coast He wrote scripts in Hollywood. During the war, he served in Europe in the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA. His Zionism came later.He was recruited in 1947 to procure American arms for the embryonic army of the embryonic Jewish state. The police were on to him, and he and his then wife, Martha, fled to Israel in the summer of 1948 They lived for a year on a kibbutz, then moved to Jerusalem. Elkins made documentary films, in Israel and Europe, before settling in Israel in the early Fifties.From the moment he joined CBS in 1956, journalism was his passion. He wrote one book, Forged in Fury, published in 1971, about Jewish avengers hunting Nazi war criminals But he was never at ease with the longer format.

After his retirement, he struggled with an autobiography, but returned the publisher's advance.An invitation to join the Jerusalem Report magazine as ombudsman and letters editor in 1990 gave him 10 more years of working life. Despite recurrent heart attacks and other ills of old age, he was at his desk there two days before his death. His editor, David Horovitz, cherished him as the magazine's "moral compass". To his young colleagues, he was a media legend, a beguiling raconteur, but that rare being, an egotist who was interested in others' histories, a father figure who never talked down.By Eric Silver.