The Shofar joins the membership in mourning the death of Roslyn Zimmerman, sister of shul member Arthur Riegel, and of Scott Demel, son of new shul members Marc and Caren Demel. May the families be comforted by memories of joyous times spent together with their loved ones.

Barbara Walters, the pioneering TV journalist, whose interviewing skills made her one of the most prominent figures in broadcasting, died Friday, Dec. 30, at her home in New York. She was 93. Barbara Walters began her national broadcast career in 1961 as a reporter, writer and panel member for NBC’s “Today” show before being promoted to co-host in 1974. In 1976, she joined ABC News as the first female anchor on an evening news program. [...]

Menahem Schmelzer, a Hungarian refugee who for more than two decades was the custodian of one of the world’s greatest collections of ancient Hebrew and other Jewish manuscripts and books as the librarian of the Jewish Theological Seminary, died on Dec. 10 at his home in Manhattan. He was 88. During Professor Schmelzer’s tenure as chief librarian, from 1964 to 1987, the seminary’s collection of almost 245,000 volumes was a primary destination for scholarly inquiry [...]

Edith Pearlman, whose acclaimed 2011 collection of short stories, Binocular Vision, lifted her out of relative publishing obscurity to make her an instant if belated literary star at the age of 74, died on Jan. 1 at her home in Brookline, MA. She was 86. “Why in the world had I never heard of Edith Pearlman?” the novelist Roxana Robinson asked in a rave review of the collection on the front page of The New [...]

Cara De Silva, a journalist and historian of food and culinary culture who in 1996 edited a groundbreaking collection of recipes amassed by prisoners in a Nazi concentration camp, which became a surprise hit, died on Dec. 7 in Manhattan. She was 83. Ms. De Silva was less interested in hot trends and buzzy restaurants than in the culinary byways and subcultures that defined a community that could be understood through its food. She was [...]

Ruth Adler Schnee, whose ebullient fabric designs and avant-garde home furnishings store in the heart of Detroit introduced midcentury modernism to baffled yet delighted Midwesterners, died on Jan. 5 at her home in Colorado Springs. She was 99. Born in Frankfurt, Germany in 1923, the family’s comfortable, cultured life ended in the fall of 1935 when the Nuremberg Laws deprived Jewish citizens of their rights. Ultimately, the family escaped Germany, sponsored by a family in [...]

Albert Reichmann, the billionaire patriarch of a real estate dynasty that built the World Financial Center, became the largest private owner of commercial property in New York City. He also began the transformation of London’s derelict Docklands into the Canary Wharf cluster of skyscrapers. He died on Dec. 17 in Toronto, the family’s hometown, at age 93. Mr. Reichmann and his brothers, the ultra-Orthodox Jewish sons of a rabbi, fled Vienna in 1938 as the [...]