Judge Thomas Buergenthal, who said his survival in a Nazi death camp when he was 10 years old had equipped him to become a human rights lawyer and venerable judge on the Worlds Court, died on May 29 at his home in Miami. He was 89. After the war, he settled in the United States, and was nominated by Costa Rica for a judgeship on the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, from 1979 to 1991 [...]

Franz S. Leichter, a New York State legislator for three decades, whose progressive views on abortion, gay unions and the decriminalization of marijuana became law here, died on June 11in Manhattan, at 92. First as an assemblyman and then as a state senator representing the Upper West Side, Mr. Leichter was regarded as one of the Legislature’s staunchest liberals. For him, that was a badge of honor, rooted in a deep sense of injustice imbued [...]

“Rick Wolff’s résumé is about as long as a Major League roster, his disparate professions inked by an adoration of sports and a fascination with sports psychology,” The New York Times said. He was a professional baseball player, a college baseball coach, an author of books about sports psychology, and an editor and publisher of books by athletes. In the early 1990s, he became the psychological coach for the Cleveland baseball team now known as [...]

Neville Sassienie spent his life moving between worlds, as an environmental activist, a seeker of spiritual truth, and a leader in the Jewish community. He died on June 15 in a village near London. He was 91. An accountant by profession, his interest in personal development led him to become involved in the Landmark Forum, an organization offering training in personal and professional growth. Eventually, he became aware that “personal spirituality and collective social and [...]

Sir Ben Helfgott, one of only two Holocaust survivors to compete in the Olympics, survived Buchenwald and went on to become a sporting legend. He died on June 16 in Britain. He was 93. He was captain of the British weightlifting team at the Olympic Games in Melbourne in 1956 and in Rome in 1960. During the British Empire and Commonwealth Games in Cardiff (1958), the survivor of the Buchenwald camp won a bronze medal [...]

Lisl Steiner, an Austrian-born American photographer, photojournalist, and documentary filmmaker, died June 7 in Pound Ridge, NY. She was 95. Steiner was born to a Jewish family in Vienna in 1927. Shortly after Adolf Hitler annexed Austria, she and her family emigrated to Buenos Aires. In her 20s, she began working in documentary film, and helped produce some 50 documentaries for the foreign ministry of Argentina. Later, she went to work for a Brazilian magazine, [...]

Haim Roet, who survived the Holocaust by hiding in a Dutch village, came up with the powerful idea to memorialize Jewish victims of the Nazis by intoning their names, died on May 22 at his home in Jerusalem. He was 90. Mr. Roet worked to spread the idea, and during the early 2000’s Yad Vashem and the Knesset made reading the names of victims an integral part of ceremonies on Yom HaShoah. “It is so [...]