Bernard Leonard Jack Litchman (originally Lichtman) was born on January 15, 1890. His father was Hirsh "Harry" Lichtman, a Lithuanian Jew who lived just off the Bowery in New York City. When Litchman was five, his mother died in childbirth and his father, unable to care for him and his younger sister Mary, placed them in the Hebrew Orphan Asylum. When Litchman's father remarried, the asylum insisted he remove the children. Bernard did not get along with his step-mother and spent more and more time away from home. At fourteen he was arrested at Coney Island and sent to the New York Juvenile Asylum, a Christian organization. There he had to attend church services and Sunday School. When he returned home, the situation was no better and his step-mother drove him from the house. He worked as a telegraph messenger for a while and then at sixteen he put himself under the care of the Children's Aid Society and was sent to work on a ranch in Texas.

Litchman stayed in Texas for about a year and then began a period of drifting from place to place working at a variety of menial jobs. He ended up in Los Angeles, without money and hungry. On March 24, 1912, Bill Mullin, a Bible Institute of Los Angeles (BIOLA) street preacher, invited Litchman to follow him with the promise of supper. He went with Mullen to a meeting where Dr. Reuben A. Torrey preached and after the meeting Litchman accepted Christ as his Savior. He then found work as a construction laborer, clearing away old buildings to make way for new BIOLA buildings. He also began speaking at meetings, giving his testimony. At a missionary conference, he heard a man speak about working with people who lived a thousand miles up the Congo River at that time and he felt called to go to Africa as a missionary.

After taking classes at BIOLA, he sailed aboard the City of Calcutta on August 20, 1917, bound for Durban, South Africa, together with twenty-five other missionaries of the Africa Inland Mission. Traveling by steamer, train, truck, and finally on foot, Litchman reached Bogoro, a town in the Belgian Congo (now Zaire) on an escarpment almost three thousand feet above Lake Albert. He stayed in Bogoro for several months, learning languages and helping build a mission house before moving on to his first assignment in the area inhabited by the Balendu, a tribe known for its fierceness, where he worked until his first furlough in 1925.

After his furlough, before he returned to Africa, Litchman went to Belgium, where he studied tropical medicine. Upon completion of the course, the Belgian government gave him the position of Health Officer. When he returned to the Congo, the government required him to provide vaccination against an outbreak of dysentery (In a period of six weeks, he gave thirty-two thousand injections). During the following years, "Bwana Jack," as he was known, led the way in providing better disease control as well as teaching agriculture, establishing schools, and evangelism and leading thousands to Christ. Litchman worked in the Congo until 1961, when he was ordered out because of the unrest and revolution. He and many other missionaries were escorted to the border of Kenya by United Nations Ethiopian solders. From there he returned to the United States and went to live at Media, the AIM retirement home in Clermont, FL. Litchman died at Media on January 16, 1972.