Dr. Marc Lieberman, an ophthalmologist and self-proclaimed “Jewish Buddhist” brought sight back to thousands of Tibetans stricken by cataracts, died on Aug. 2 at his home in San Francisco. He was 72.

Dr. Lieberman, who called himself a “JuBu,” retained his Jewish faith but incorporated aspects of Buddhist teachings and practices. He kept kosher and observed the sabbath, but he also meditated several times a day. He studied the Torah, and also led efforts to build a Buddhist monastery in Northern California.

In 1995, he founded the Tibet Vision Project. Twice a year, sometimes with a colleague, he traveled to Tibet, where he oversaw cataract surgeries and trained Tibetan doctors to perform them. Over the next 20 years, some 5,000 people regained their full sight thanks to Dr. Lieberman.

Mimi Stern-Wolfe, a pianist and conductor who specialized in music programs with a social justice or political theme, died June 21 at a care center in Manhattan. She was 84.

In the late 1970s, Ms. Stern-Wolfe, a fixture on the Lower East Side of Manhattan for most of her adult life, founded Downtown Music Productions, which in the years since has presented a wide range of programs, including performances by and for children, eclectic shows by the Downtown Chamber and Opera Players, and concerts featuring works by women and music of the Holocaust. Ms. Stern-Wolfe played and conducted at many of the performances, often leading from the piano bench.

Most of her productions were staged on the Lower East Side or in surrounding neighborhoods.

Dr. Paul Auerbach, an emergency care physician who pioneered the field of wilderness medicine in the 1980s and then taught ways to heal people injured by the unpredictable, died June 23 at his home in Los Altos, CA. He was 70. Out in the wild, knowing how to treat a venomous snake bite or a gangrenous infection can mean the difference between life and death. In the 1970s, however, the specialized field of health care known as wilderness medicine was still in its infancy.

“Paul literally conceived of this subspecialty of medicine,” said Dr. Andra Blomkalns, chair of emergency medicine at Stanford. “At the time, there wasn’t a recognition that things happen when you’re out doing things. He developed this notion that things happen to people all the time, which is now a big part of our identity in emergency medicine.”

His book, Management of Wilderness and Environmental Emergencies (1983), is widely considered the definitive textbook in the field, with content about snakebite, frostbite and lightning strikes, etc.

Last year, shortly before he received his cancer diagnosis, the coronavirus pandemic began to take hold. “The minute it all first happened, he started working on disaster response,” his wife, Sherry, said. “Hospitals were running out of PPE. He was calling this person and that person to learn as much as he could. He wanted to find out how to design better masks and better ventilators. He never stopped.”

Still unknown is the number of residents who died in the June 24 collapse of the Champlain Towers South apartment building in Surfside, FL. Many religious and ethnic groups have lost members of their communities, but it is rumored that the building’s residents were largely Jewish. The Shofar will continue to monitor the facts of the tragedy as they are released, and will report to readers in subsequent issues. The Shofar joins all in mourning the loss of loved ones.

Josef Silverstein, a scholar and outspoken critic of Myanmar’s repressive military leaders over a turbulent half-century, died June 29 at his home in Guilford, CT. He was 99.

Professor Silverstein, who taught international relations and Southeast Asian studies at Rutgers University, focused on democracy and human rights in Myanmar both as an academic expert and as an on-the-ground adviser to opposition groups.

Professor Silverstein’s publications include the books The Political Legacy of Aung San (1972), Burmese Politics: The Dilemma of National Unity (1980), and Burma: Military Rule and the Politics of Stagnation (1977).

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.