The Shofar joins the membership in mourning the death of Charles Bogen, father of synagogue board member Nancy Torchio, on June 9, in Manhattan. He was 91. May the family be comforted by their many years of togetherness. Contributions to the shul in honor of Charles Bogen will be acknowledged to the family.

Morton L. Janklow, the New York literary agent who struck megadeals with publishers for best-selling authors, ghostwritten celebrities, several presidents, and a pope, and who influenced international book lists and the reading habits of millions for decades, died on May 25 at his home in Water Mill, NY. He was 91. Mr. Janklow represented Barbara Taylor Bradford, Sidney Sheldon, Danielle Steel, Judith Krantz. His agency also represented Presidents Richard M. Nixon, Jimmy Carter, and Ronald [...]

Margot Heuman was 14 when she and her family were deported to Theresienstadt in 1943, a Jewish transit ghetto for those who would be sent to the death camps. Her father died there. Her mother and younger sister would perish later in the camp at Stutthof. But Margot survived, she said, because she had fallen in love with a Viennese girl named Dita Neumann, and their relationship and caring for each other had kept them [...]

Robert Wallach, whose career as a trial lawyer in California was overshadowed by his connection to one of the biggest corruption scandals to hit Washington during the Reagan Administration, died on May 15 at his home in Alameda, CA. He was 88. From the moment he graduated at the top of his law school class from the University of California, Berkeley, Mr. Wallach was widely considered one of the best personal injury lawyers in California. [...]

Walter Abish, a widely admired if not widely read American author whose early life consisted of hasty escapes from hostile forces in Nazi-era Austria and revolutionary China, died on May 28 in Manhattan. He was 90. “Though he has published relatively late and little,” John Updike wrote in a review of Mr. Abish’s memoir, Double Vision: A Self-Portrait, in The New Yorker in 2004, he “projects a distinctive presence in  contemporary letters.” Overall, Mr. Abish [...]

Boris Pahor, a novelist in the Slovene language, who was best known for his descriptions of life as a member of the Slovenian minority in pre-WWII Fascist Italy, and as a Nazi concentration camp survivor, died May 30 in Trieste, Italy. He was 108. In his novel Necropolis, he visits the Natzweiler-Struthof camp 20 years after his relocation to Dachau. Following Dachau, he was relcated three more times: to Mittelbau-Dora, Haerzungen, and finally to Bergen-Belsen, [...]

George Shapiro, a Hollywood talent manager who oversaw the careers of comic personalities like Jerry Seinfeld, Andy Kaufman and Carl Reiner, died on May 26 at his home in Beverly Hills, CA. He was 91. Mr. Shapiro was most closely associated with Jerry Seinfeld, The New York Times said. He signed Seinfeld as a client soon after watching him perform at the Comedy Store in Los Angeles in 1980, and  lobbied NBC to build a [...]

Andrée Geulen was not Jewish, but because of her, 300-400 Jewish children were saved during the Nazi occupation of Belgium. For that she was honored in 1989 by Yad Vashem as a Righteous Among the Nations, as recognition given to non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews from the Nazi genocide. She was a young Belgian teacher at an all-girls boarding school in Brussels in the 1940s when her Jewish students were no longer [...]