The Shofar joins the Congregation in mourning the death of Lucille Bogen, mother of shul member Nancy Bogen Torchio, on Saturday, Feb. 8. Our most sincere condolences to Nancy, her husband Dan, and the family.

Jo Baer, an admired painter who exchanged the severe abstraction that made her name for a heady mix of dream imagery and deep historical references, died on Jan. 21 at her home in Amsterdam. She was 95.    Beginning in 1960, when she moved to New York, Ms. Baer became one of the handful of artists developing Minimalism. In the early 1970s, she moved her work to sculpture and paintings in brightly colored designs. “People [...]

Tony Roberts, the Hollywood and stage actor best known as the hero’s best friend in Woody Allen movies like “Annie Hall,” and who distinguished himself on the New York stage with two Tony Award nominations, died on Feb. 7 at his home in Manhattan. He was 85. Other acting credits are “Hannah and Her Sisters,” “Play It Again, Sam,” “Don’t Drink the Water,” “How Now, Dow Jones,” “Serpico,” “The Sisters Rosensweig,” “Barefoot in the Park,” [...]

Marion Wiesel, who translated many books written by her husband, Elie Wiesel, including the final edition of his magnum opus, Night, and who encouraged him to pursue a wide-ranging public career, helping him become one of the most renowned interpreters of the Holocaust, died on Feb. 2 at her home in Greenwich, CT. She was 94. Marion Wiesel shared her husband’s cosmopolitan knowledge of European culture and fluency in several languages. She quickly began translating [...]

Mort Künstler, whose meticulously researched and dramatically composed paintings of American historical events, especially of the Civil War, made him one of the country’s most prominent historical artists, died on Feb. 2 in Rockville Center, NY. He was 97. Mr. Künstler developed a sense of dramatic realism early in the 1950s as an illustrator for pulp novels and men’s adventure magazines. He refined his mainstream commercial appeal working for top ad agencies and magazines like [...]

Anson Rabinbach, one of the world’s leading experts of the Nazi era, died on Feb. 2 in Rome, where he was giving a lecture. He was 79. Professor Rabinbach was among several young scholars in the early 1970s who attempted to bridge the gap between social history and intellectual history, especially in the realm of 20th-century Europe. Frustrated by a lack of places in which to express his views, in 1973, professor Rabinbach and three [...]

Mel Bochner, an artist who produced often witty work, exploring the boundaries of art and the power of language in drawings, painting, photography, sculpture, printmaking, books, installations and public art — new ideas in conceptional art —  died on Feb. 12 in Manhattan. He was 84. “In 1970, I wrote on a gallery wall, ‘Language Is Not Transparent,’” Mr. Bochner told curators at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2022, when the museum held a [...]

Marshall Rose, a real estate developer who was instrumental in reviving the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue and transforming the adjacent Bryant Park from a mecca for drug dealers into a verdant Midtown oasis, died on Feb. 15 at his home in Manhattan. He was 88. A chairman of the library’s board of trustees from 1990 to 1995, Mr. Rose, along with his predecessor, Andrew Heiskell, and Vartan Gregorian, the library’s longtime president, [...]