Dr. Abraham B. Bergman, a pediatrician who was instrumental in passing a federal law to combat sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), died on Nov. 10 in Seattle. He was 91. In the 1960s and early ‘70s, Dr. Bergman was president of the National Foundation for Sudden Infant Death, a grass-roots group that supported parents who had lost children to what was once commonly called crib death. Although SIDS, as the syndrome became known, was the [...]

During those long car and airplane trips to visit family, spare a thought for Irving Liberman, a scientist who helped make GPS a reliable, precise resource. He died on Nov. 6 at his home in the Squirrel Hill section of Pittsburgh. He was 86. A lifelong tinkerer, Mr. Liberman was always fascinated by how things worked. At a young age, he would take things apart and put them back together, sometimes with parts left over, [...]

Andrea Fay Friedman, an actress with Down syndrome, who starred in the television series “Life Goes On” died on Dec. 3 at her home in Santa Monica, CA. She was 53. Ms. Friedman was known for her portrayals of people with developmental disabilities. She called her Down syndrome her “up syndrome,” her father, Hal Friedman, said in a phone interview. Her breakthrough in acting came in 1992 on the TV drama “Life Goes On” about [...]

Rabbi David Ellenson, a scholar who wrestled with the interplay of tradition and modernity in Judaism,, and who shaped a generation of Reform rabbis as a teacher and later as the president of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, died on Dec. 7 at his home in Manhattan. He was 76. He taught for more than 40 years at the Reform seminary, which trains rabbis, cantors and Jewish educators on four campuses: in New York, [...]

Shlomo Avineri, an Israeli political scientist, historian and former government official whose pessimism about resolving the conflict with Palestinians did not stop him from advocating measures to ease it, died on Nov. 30 in Jerusalem. He was 90. In his writings, Mr. Avineri was consistently skeptical about Israel’s prospects for achieving peace with its enemies. He was convinced of Palestinian and Arab hatred for Israel and Zionism, whose 19th-century roots he chronicled in 1981 in [...]

George A. Cohon, a Chicago-born entrepreneur who, by introducing the Big Mac — or the Bolshoi Mac — to Moscow in 1990, died on Nov. 24 at his home in Toronto. He was 86. A Fuller Brush salesman in college with a flair for merchandising, Mr. Cohon abandoned his law practice when Ray Kroc, the McDonald’s founder, offered him the chain’s franchise for eastern Canada. Mr. Cohon borrowed $70,000 to buy the rights and opened [...]

Mort Engelberg, a movie producer behind such hits as “Smokey and the Bandit” and “The Big Easy” who drew on his Hollywood expertise to stage manage appearances for politicians, notably a bus tour for Bill Clinton and Al Gore following the 1992 Democratic convention, died Dec. 9 in Los Angeles. He was 86. He drew on the tropes of road movies to invent the modern presidential bus tour for Clinton and Gore through Pennsylvania, Indiana, [...]

Merle Goldman, an historian at Boston University, widely considered one of the world’s leading analysts of Chinese politics, died Nov. 16 at her home in Cambridge, MA. She was 92. Dr. Goldman’s specialty was the politics of dissent in modern China, a topic that gave her a unique perspective on the country’s seismic changes under Communism. She wrote books, book reviews and opinion articles that were required reading for government and opinion leaders. She [...]

Neil Drossman, who brought wit to print advertisements and television commercials, died on Nov. 25 in the Bronx. He was 83. From the late 1960s until this year, Mr. Drossman was a copywriter at several agencies. One of the most enduring lines Mr. Drossman wrote was for Meow Mix: “Tastes so good, cats ask for it by name. For Stick Ups, small deodorizing disks made by Air Wick that could be glued anywhere in the [...]

Guy Stern, who fled rising antisemitism in Nazi Germany at 15 for a new life in the United States but returned to Europe during WWII as a member of a military intelligence program that trained him to interrogate prisoners of war, died on Dec. 7 in West Bloomfield, MI. He was 101. Mr. Stern was one of the so-called Ritchie Boys, a group named for a secret Army camp in Maryland that served as a [...]