Daniel Bukantz

Daniel Bukantz (December 4, 1917 – July 26, 2008) was an American four-time individual United States national foil fencing champion, Maccabiah Games individual foil champion, four-time Olympic fencer, fencing referee, and a dentist.

[3][7][13] Bukantz was also part of nine national championship teams for the Fencers Club of New York, in the years 1949-62.

[3] Bukantz competed in foil in the Olympic Games four consecutive times—in 1948 in London at 30 years of age, 1952 in Helsinki, 1956 in Melbourne, and 1960 in Rome.

[16][4][17] He won the gold medal in foil at the 1950 Maccabiah Games in Israel, defeating teammate Allan Kwartler for the title.

[7] On April 29, 1956, Bukantz married Alice Ellenbogen Bukantz, a Holocaust survivor from Nové Zámky, a town in a part of Hungary that is now Slovakia, who had survived the Auschwitz concentration camp while her parents and 87 other relatives were killed in the Holocaust.

[26] Jeff also wrote a memoir entitled Closing the Distance: Chasing a father’s Olympic Fencing Legacy (Acanthus Publishing, 2006).