Yitzhak Arad, who as an orphaned teenage partisan fought the Germans and their collaborators during WWII, then went on to become an esteemed scholar of the Holocaust and the longtime chairman of the Yad Vashem remembrance and research center in Israel, died May 6 in a hospital in Tel Aviv. He was 94.

Mr. Arad was not even bar mitzvahed when the Germans invaded Poland and what is now part of Lithuania in 1939 and began rounding up Jews, forcing them into ghettos and murdering them. His parents and 30 close family members wo8ld perish before the war ended in 1945.

Mr. Arad remained active with Yad Vashem until his last weeks. Last year, he took part in a photography exhibition about Holocaust survivors and their lives after the war. When it was his turn to speak, he confronted the audience with a hard truth born of his own ordeals. “What happened in the past,” he said, “could potentially happen again, to any people, at any time.”

Robert Hershon, a poet who as a founder of Hanging Loose Press, furthered the careers of countless other poets, died on March 20 at a hospital in Brooklyn. He was 84.

Mr. Hershon published more than a dozen collections of his own poems, works that could be amusing, touching or both. He was also godfather of sorts to many younger poets through Hanging Loose Press, a publication so informal that its editorial meetings were held in McSorley’s, an East Village bar, The New York Times said.

Hershon felt it should be the mission of small literary presses to discover and champion new voices…otherwise “What’s the point of their existence,” he said. “His preference was for poetry that didn’t take itself too seriously, but was energetic and inventive in both form and language; nothing pompous or stuffy or smelling of the library,” said the poet Mark Pawlak.

For more than a half century, nearly every prominent singer to perform at the Metropolitan Opera could expect to be approached backstage afterward by a wispy woman wearing thick eyeglasses, who held piles of memorabilia to be autographed while she praised the performance in a raspy Brooklyn accent.

This was Lois Kirschenbaum, one of New York’s biggest and longest-standing opera buffs and a nightly staple at the opera since the late 1950s.

Few operatic performances took place at the Met without being observed by Ms. Kirschenbaum, usually from a seat in the uppermost balcony. And few prominent singers went home without signing numerous items for Ms. Kirschenbaum, who had befriended some of the world’s most famous opera singers, from Beverly Sills to Plácido Domingo.

Ms. Kirschenbaum died March 27 at a hospital in Manhattan. She was 88.

Phyllis L. Marchand, the former mayor of Princeton, NJ, died March 25, at 81, at her home in Princeton.

Mrs. Marchand was a public official in Princeton Township for 22 years and was appointed mayor for 13 nonconsecutive one-year terms. That made her the township’s longest-serving chief executive, according to records dating to 1900, and earned her the unofficial title “mayor for life” until she retired in 2008.

She was widely known throughout central New Jersey for her energetic involvement in issues like affordable housing, the arts, social services, women’s rights, Jewish education and land preservation. She was severely criticized, however, for instituting a program to reduce the deer population that was running rampant and causing accidents. Critics said shooting was cruel, and that other methods to cull the birth rate were more humane. In the end, the program reduced collisions between deer and vehicles by 40 percent and, two decades later, the town is still using the services of the original contractor.

Yehuda Ben-Yishay, a psychologist whose experience working with wounded Israeli soldiers led him to make pioneering advances in treating traumatic brain injuries, died March 14 at the NYU Langone Health hospital in Manhattan. He was 88. His discoveries helped countless patients return to some semblance of the life they led before they were injured.

Before Dr. Ben-Yishay developed what he called holistic cognitive therapy in the 1970s, most scientists thought the adult brain was immutable, and that serious injuries — and the behavioral changes that resulted — were permanent.

Working at Rusk Rehabilitation at NYU Langone Health, Dr. Ben Yishay proved that functions like attention, memory and behavior could be strengthened or compensated for in recovering patients. His program has become the gold standard for treating brain injuries, inspiring similar programs worldwide.

Bernard Madoff, whose name became synonymous with financial fraud, died while serving a 150-year sentence in Federal prison. He was 82. His death on April 14 at the Federal Medical Center in the prison in Butner, NC, was confirmed by the U.S. Bureau of Prisons.

In February 2020, Madoff petitioned the courts for an early release from prison, stating that he had terminal kidney failure and a life expectancy of less than 18 months. But the U.S. Attorney’s office for the southern district of New York said Madoff’s crime was “unprecedented in scope and magnitude” and is “sufficient reason” to deny Madoff’s request. Madoff was the mastermind behind a $20 billion Ponzi scheme — the largest financial fraud in history.

Irving Picard, the court-appointed trustee charged with recovering assets stolen by Madoff from his investors, had recovered $14.4 billion as of March of this year, distributing most of it to Madoff’s victims.

Howard Weitzman, an entertainment lawyer whose client list bristled with the names of some of the nation’s most famous and infamous celebrities, died April 7 at his home in the Pacific Palisades section of Los Angeles. He was 81.

In a career spanning five decades, Mr. Weitzman was the lead attorney in more than 300 civil and criminal jury trials, representing more than 1,000 people, including Marlon Brando, Magic Johnson, Sugar Ray Leonard, Sean “Diddy” Combs, Justin Bieber, Ozzy Osbourne, Morgan Freeman and Britney Spears. He also represented major motion picture studios as well as the powerhouse talent agencies William Morris, ICM and CAA. He had a reputation as a fixer, and was often ranked as one of the most influential lawyers in the country.

For all his showmanship in the courtroom, Mr. Weitzman opted out of what the media called the trial of the century: the case against O.J. Simson. Mr. Weitzman had accompanied Mr. Simpson to a police interview after the murders, but in less than 48 hours, he dropped out, saying he was too busy. After the trial and the not guilty verdict, Mr. Weitzman took the unusual step of saying that the jury had reached the wrong conclusion. He said he had no regrets about not participating in the spectacle.