A Jew from the little village of Sokolow who had never been on a horse and had suffered through violent anti-Jewish pogroms, he evaded authorities and escaped into Austria-Hungary, ultimately finding his way to Chicago via Canada.
In the mid-1930s, he traveled to the Middle East, North Africa, southwestern France and Spain, taking pictures of refugees from the Spanish Civil War and of Arab and Palestinian culture.
His documentaries covered many subjects including mental institutions, prisons, ("San Quentin," for CBS's "The Search" series), the flight of Jewish refugees to Israel after World War II ("Bricha: Flight to Security" for the ABC-TV News "Directions" series), legalized gambling ("The Business of Gambling," for the NBC White Paper series), vanishing passenger railroads ("Railroads: End of the Line," another NBC White Paper in 1961), the struggle for democracy in Venezuela ("Last Chance for Democracy," for National Educational Television, now PBS), the threat of neo-Nazism in Germany ("Germany and It's Shadow,"for NET/PBS, 1967), the Vietnam War ("Southeast Asia: The Other War," for NET/PBS).
NBC White Paper, CBS Search and the PBS documentaries were hour-long programs, network emblems of public spiritedness that were rolled out to reviews in the New York Times.
[3] Zegart, who for years had had a rare blood disorder with a poor prognosis, committed suicide by jumping off the Tappan Zee Bridge on February 2, 1989, at age 72.