Sabina Wurmbrand

Sabina Wurmbrand (; 10 July 1913 – 20 August 2000) was a Romanian missionary and human rights activist. The wife of the evangelical Lutheran priest Richard Wurmbrand, she and her husband became missionaries after converting from Judaism to Christianity in 1938. After experiencing persecution in Romania following the adoption of communism in 1946, both Wurmbrand and her husband were sent to gulags; while Wurmbrand was released in 1951, her husband was not released until 1964, following which they fled Romania, eventually settling in the United States and establishing the Voice of the Martyrs, a non-governmental organisation that aided Christians experiencing persecution around the world.

Early life Wurmbrand was born on 10 July 1913 in Czernowitz in what was then the Duchy of Bukovina within Austria-Hungary which was subsequently annexed by the Kingdom of Romania in 1919. She was born into an observant Jewish family; at that time, Czernowitz was a centre of Jewish education and culture. Wurmbrand moved to Paris, France, for two years as a young adult, where she studied languages at Sorbonne University.

Upon returning to Romania, Wurmbrand moved to Bucharest, where she first met Richard Wurmbrand, a fellow Romanian Jew who at that time was a communist and an agent for Communist International. The two married in 1936, and had a son, Mihai, in 1941.

Following the outbreak of World War II, Wurmbrand and her husband continued with their missionary work while also offering practical support, including rescuing and concealing several Jewish children from ghettos and teaching in bomb shelters. During the Holocaust, that occurred in Romania following its occupation by Germany between 1940 and 1943, Wurmbrand's parents and siblings were all murdered in concentration camps; while the Wurmbrands were considered Jewish under Nazi racial ideology, it has been suggested that they were saved from being sent to concentration camps themselves due to their conversion to Christianity and subsequent links with prominent and influential Christians in Romania. Wurmbrand and her husband continued to work as missionaries; following the war, they had converted to Lutheranism, and Richard had retrained as a Lutheran priest.

On 29 February 1948, Richard Wurmbrand was arrested, and he was subsequently sent to various gulags over the next fourteen years. In 1951, Wurmbrand herself was sent to a gulag on the Danube–Black Sea Canal for three years; during this time, her son Mihai lived with a family friend. Wurmbrand was conditionally released in 1954 as part of the post-Stalin amnesty following his death the previous year, though she remained subject to house arrest for several years afterwards. In 1967, the Wurmbrands established Jesus to the Communist World, a missionary organised based in California with a focus on completing missionary work in communist countries. Its international organ, the Voice of the Martyrs, was vocally anti-communist in nature. and won the Best Feature Film category at the 2021 Christian Worldview Film Festival.