Harry M. Rosenfeld, who oversaw the two reporters who transformed a local crime story into the national Watergate corruption scandal that toppled the Nixon administration, died July 16 at his home in upstate Slingerlands, NY. He was 91.

As the Washington Post’s assistant managing editor for metropolitan news, Mr. Rosenfeld directly supervised Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein as they mined secretive sources in their follow-the-money unraveling of the Watergate break-in, which President Richard M. Nixon’s press secretary had described as a “third-rate burglary attempt” and which led to Mr. Nixon’s resignation in 1974. The Post won a Pulitzer Prize for its Watergate coverage.

An immigrant who had fled Nazi persecution in Germany as a youth, Mr. Rosenfeld joined the New York Herald Tribune as a shipping clerk, a summer job before college. In his memoir, From Kristallnacht to Watergate: Memoirs of a Newspaperman (2013), he recalled there was not a “scrivener” among his ancestors. But in his high school yearbook, he chose journalism as his dream profession. In a career that he said had been influenced by his childhood under the Nazis, he “discerned a theme underpinning much of my journalistic labors: holding to account the accountable, the more powerful the better.”

Comedian Jackie Mason, known for his rapid-fire observations in a decades-long standup career, died at a New York hospital on July 24. He had been hospitalized for two weeks with difficulty breathing, his friend Raoul Felder said. Jackie Mason was 93.

Mason was an amateur boxer and an ordained rabbi before getting into comedy. He was a master of the “Borscht Belt” style of standup, leaning heavily on Jewish culture and expressions. In his later years, Mason curated a vlog called “The Ultimate Jew” on his website.

Many younger fans knew Mason best for his long-running association with “The Simpsons.” Mason’s voice appeared in 11 episodes as Rabbi Hyman Krustofsky, the father of Krusty the Clown.

Richard L. Rubenstein, the leading Jewish voice in the theological groundswell of the 1960s known as the “Death of God” movement, who argued that the idea of an omnipotent, benevolent deity who safeguards Jews as the chosen people, died on May 16 in Bridgeport, CT. He was 97.

Dr. Rubenstein was a Conservative campus rabbi and academic, who had studied at Harvard Divinity School as well as at Reform and Conservative Jewish seminaries. In 1966, in the seminal book, After Auschwitz: Radical Theology and Contemporary Judaism, he challenged the notion of a cosmos-controlling God, principally by raising the specter of the six million Jews, one million of them children, killed by the Germans and their collaborators.

“How can Jews believe in an omnipotent, beneficent God after Auschwitz?” he wrote. “Traditional Jewish theology maintains that God is the ultimate, omnipotent actor in the historical drama. I fail to see how this position can be maintained without regarding Hitler and the SS as instruments of God’s will.”

While he contended that the God of traditional beliefs did not exist, Dr. Rubenstein never renounced a belief in a God and attended synagogue every Sabbath, his daughter said.

Dr. Aaron Stern, a psychiatrist who as head of Hollywood’s movie rating board in the early 1970s established himself as a kind of filmgoers’ sentry against carnal imagery and violence, died April 13 in Manhattan. He was 96.

From 1971 to 1974, Dr. Stern directed the Classification and Rating Administration of the Motion Picture Association of America. The rating board graded films by letter to let moviegoers know in advance how much violence, sexuality and foul language to expect on the screen. The board’s decision that a film merited a rating of R, or restricted, might lure more adults, but would immediately eliminate the pool of unchaperoned moviegoers under 17; an X rating would bar anyone under 17.

“You can only rate the explicit elements on the screen — never the morality or the thought issues behind it,” Dr. Stern said in 1972. “That is the province of religion, leaders, critics and each individual.”

Jack B. Weinstein, a legal scholar and famously independent federal judge in Brooklyn who led the legal system into an era of mass tort litigation, changing the way huge classes of people claim injuries from toxins, pollutants and faulty products could get redress in the courts, died on June 15 at his home in Great Neck, NY. He was 99.

Judge Weinstein was on the bench for 53 years and spend nearly a decade as the chief judge of the Eastern District of New York. Throughout his tenure, until he announced his retirement last year at the age of 98, he kept protesting the strictures of the criminal justice system.

Judge Weinstein’s view of his profession was complicated. “One of the great resources of our nation is the legal profession,” he said at a symposium in his honor in 2001, 53 years after he joined the bar. “It is entrepreneurial. It is selfish. It is sometimes stupid. It has all kinds of conflicts of interest. And yet it is independent, fighting for individuals against institutions.”

Roman Kent, who as an orphaned teenager endured the horrors of Auschwitz and other hellish camps, and later channeled his sorrow and rage into helping to lead an American movement to memorialize the Holocaust and provide reparations for aging Jewish survivors, died May 21 at his home in Manhattan. He was 92.

While many Holocaust survivors have chosen to stay quiet about their experiences or share them only with close friends and other survivors, Mr. Kent believed that the world needed to be reminded of the six million Jews who perished at the hands of the Germans and their collaborators, and that Germany needed to repay the remnants of European Jewry for what they suffered and whom they lost. He and a handful of others did the painstaking work of galvanizing and organizing survivors into a movement.

Mr. Kent was chairman of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants. In 1988, he joined the board of the Conference of Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, which has negotiated most of the $80 billion that Germany has paid in assistance to survivors and for educational and memorial programs. At various times, Mr. Kent was president of the International Auschwitz Committee, also the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous, which provides aid to non-Jews who hid Jews or helped them escape.

Mr. Kent was a vigorous supporter of Holocaust education. In a speech he gave in 2015, on the 71st anniversary of the Lodz ghetto’s liquidation, he explained why. It was the obligation of adults, he said, to get children to understand “what happens when hatred and prejudice are allowed to flourish.”

Stuart Silver, an inventive design director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the 1960s and ‘70s, who introduced style and spirit into museum exhibitions, died May 6 in Manhattan. He was 84.

Mr. Silver’s self-described “theatrical techniques” and the philosophy they suggested — “that a museum was a place of pleasure, that a spectacle could also be enrichment,” as he put it — were characteristic of a whole era at the Met.

The driving force and chief evangelist behind the new approach was Thomas Hoving, who in 1967 became the seventh director of the museum in its history. “I brought the ‘blockbuster’ exhibition to the Met,” Mr. Hoving wrote in Making the Mummies Dance, his 1993 book about running the museum, “but designer Stuart Silver brought them to life.”

Memorable exhibitions included “In the Presence of Kings,” “Tutankamun,” “The Great Age of Fresco,” which drew more than 180,000 visitors in its first month, “The Year 1200,” which featured about 300 objects lent by 16 countries.

Later, he joined the Knoll furniture designer firm, and also formed his own design firm, serving, among other museums and fairs, the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum in California

[On a personal note, some years ago, The Shofar editor interviewed Stuart Silver for a profile in The Scarsdale Inquirer, at which time he talked about his idea to make museum design “less stuffy,” he said, and to involve museum goers in a discovery experience. Exhibition is more than factual accuracy, he said.]