Josette Molland, a French Resistance fighter during WWII, eventually captured by the Nazis, who deported her to concentration camps for women, died Feb. 17 at a nursing home in Nice. The horrors she endured took a visual form in the retelling. Many years after her liberation and return to France, she was worried that the story wouldn’t be told. She began to make a series of paintings depicting her life at Ravensbruck and Holleischen. “I [...]

David Seidler, a screenwriter whose Oscar-winning script for “The King’s Speech” — about King George VI conquering a stutter to rally Britain at the outset of WWII — drew on his own painful experience with a childhood stammer, died on March 16 on a fly-fishing trip in New Zealand. He was 86 and lived in Santa Fe, NM. On winning the Academy Award for best original screenplay for “The King’s Speech” (2010), Mr. Seidler said [...]

Ben Stern, a survivor of nine concentration camps, who spearheaded a defiance against a rally organized by a band of Nazis in Skokie, Ill., in 1977, died on Feb. 28, at his home in Berkeley, CA, where he had moved from his residence in Illinois. He was 102.           The threat of Nazis rallying in his midst was intolerable to him, to many of his fellow Skokie residents, and to local government leaders. Efforts to [...]

Joseph I. Lieberman, the independent four-term U.S. senator from Connecticut, who was the Democratic nominee for vice president in 2000s, becoming thew first Jewish candidate on the national ticket of a major party, died on March 27 in New York City. He was 82. Mr. Lieberman served 10 years in the state Senate, the last six as majority leader before running the open U.S. House seat for the New Haven area. Following that loss, he [...]

 The Shofar joins the membership in mourning the deaths of two long-time shul members: Bill Adams on Feb. 15, at his home in Silver Spring, MD; and Alice Nadel on Feb. 23, at her home in Cutchogue. May their memories be blessed. We extend deepest condolences to the families.

Marc Jaffe was at a New Year’s Eve party in Hollywood in 1967 when a screenwriter named William Peter Blatty began chatting him up. Mr. Blatty said he had tried and failed to sell an idea for a novel — about a young girl possessed by a demon and the tortured priest who tries to save her. But Mr. Jaffe, editorial director of Bantam Books, the paperback publishing house in New York City, thought the [...]

Naomi Feil was only 8 years old when she moved into what was then known as a home for the aged, where her parents worked. Living there until she left for college, she learned firsthand how to comfort and communicate with older adults. When she died on Dec. 24 at her home in Jasper, OR, at the age of 91, she had devoted her entire career to finding ways to comfort disoriented older people and [...]

Charles Fried, a conservative legal scholar who as President Ronald Reagan’s solicitor general argued against abortion rights and affirmative action before the Supreme Court — but who later rejected the conservative legal movement’s rightward march, calling the current high court “reactionary” — died on Jan. 23 at his home in Cambridge, MA. He was 88. In 2021, as the high court’s Republican-appointed supermajority looked likely to reverse Roe, Mr. Fried wrote in an opinion column [...]

Vera Klement, a Holocaust survivor who was known for paintings that combined elements of Abstract Expressionism and figurative art, died on Oct. 20 in Evanston, IL. She was 93. “Abstract Expressionism suited me, I suppose, as far as a worldview: the notion of being at risk, on the edge, existential,” she told The Chicago Tribune. “And I think that has remained with me. It was the basis of my way of looking at art [...]

Alvin Moscow, who wrote a best-selling account of the sinking of the ocean liner Andrea Doria in 1956, then collaborated on the memoirs of several public figures, including Richard M. Nixon soon after he lost the 1960 presidential election to John F. Kennedy, died on Feb. 6 in North Las Vegas. He was 98. In all, 56 people died in the collision of the two ships. In Collision Course: The Andrea Doria and the Stockholm, [...]