The Shofar joins the membership is extending deepest condolences to the family of Diana (Dede) Whitsit, a long-time shul member who died on May 12 at her home in Orient. May family, friends and colleagues be comforted by many happy occasions spent together with her. Following her death, family and friends visited Dede’s favorite viewing spot over the water in Orient. To them, this remarkable photo, captured by Sally Heitel barely a moment before the [...]

Richard C. Wald, who was the last managing editor of The New York Herald Tribune, ran NBC News in the 1970s, and helped turn ABC News into a powerhouse, died May 13 in New Rochelle, NY. He was 92. In 1980, Mr. Wald also gave ABC’s celebrated late-night news program, Nightline, its name. At the time, it was called America Held Hostage, a nightly report about the hostage crisis in Iran. Ted Koppel, the program’s [...]

Geraldine Weiss, who, after being told by a succession of stockbrokers that she was best qualified for the secretarial pool, devised an unconventional moneymaking strategy that she used in becoming the first woman to launch a successful investment newsletter, died on April 25 at her home in the La Jolla area of San Diego. She was 96. For more than a decade, Ms. Weiss wrote, edited and published her stock market newsletter, Investment Quality Trends, [...]

Sid Mark, a longtime disc jockey in Philadelphia who made Frank Sinatra’s songs the center of his wide-reaching musical universe for more than six decades, died on April 18 in Bryn Mawr, Pa. He was 88. He hosted three shows on various Philadelphia radio stations: “Friday With Frank,” “Sunday With Sinatra,” and the syndicated “The Sounds of Sinatra,” which has run for 43 years and at its height was heard on 100 stations. He also [...]

She was born Rachelle Zylberberg in Belgium, a Jewish child abandoned in infancy by her unwed mother and left alone at 12 when her father, a drunken Polish refugee, was arrested by the Nazis in France. She hid in as convent. After the war, she sold bras in the streets of Paris and vowed to become rich and famous someday. She died on May 1, at 92. In 1957, calling herself Régine, she borrowed money [...]

Irving Rosenthal wasn’t famous like the Beat figures he associated with — Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsburg and others — but he was an integral part of their scene. He died on April 22 at the commune he founded in San Francisco in 1967. He was 91. As a graduate student at the University of Chicago and the editor of a journal there, he and his poetry editor were fond of the Beat writers on the [...]

Midge Decter, a writer and editor who abandoned liberalism to help lay the intellectual foundation for the neoconservative movement and the so-called culture wars over feminism, gay rights, and other social issues, died on May 9 at her home in Manhattan. She was 94. Midge Decter was in the forefront of an ideologically evolving generation of public intellectuals focused on leftist politics from the 1930s through the early 1960s. Jolted by the turbulence of the [...]

Morton Mower, a cardiologist who helped invent an implantable defibrillator that has saved many lives by returning potentially fatal irregular heart rhythms to normal with an electrical jolt, died on April 25 in Denver. He was 89. Dr. Mower and Dr. Michel Mirowski, a colleague at Sinai Hospital in Baltimore, began work in 1969 on a device that would be small enough that it could be implanted under the skin of the abdomen and quickly [...]

Yuri Averbakh, a Russian chess grandmaster who was among the world’s best players for a decade, trained world champions and was the last surviving participant in one of the greatest competitions in history, died on May 7 in Moscow. He was 100. The historic contest in which Mr. Averbakh took part was the Candidates Tournament in Zurich in 19563, the final step in the cycle to select a challenger for the world championship. The tournament [...]