The Rev. Richard Wurmbrand; Evangelist

The Rev. Richard Wurmbrand, 91, an evangelist who founded an international ministry to support persecuted Christians in Communist countries. Wurmbrand was a native of Romania and a Jew who converted to Christianity in the late 1930s with his wife and fellow evangelist, Sabine, and became a Lutheran minister. After being arrested several times by Nazi authorities, he began an underground ministry, hiding Christians and surreptitiously distributing church literature to Russian soldiers during the Soviet occupation of Romania. He was imprisoned again in 1948 and was held in Romanian jails for much of the next 14 years until a Norwegian Lutheran church bought his release. After settling in America, he gained worldwide attention in 1968 with the publication of his book “Tortured for Christ,” which exposed religious persecution under Communism. He and his wife, who died last year, founded the Voice of the Martyrs, which distributes Bibles and tracks persecution of Christians around the world. On Saturday in Glendale.