Naomi Levine, who as executive director of the American Jewish Congress in the 1970s was the first woman to lead a major Jewish advocacy organization, and who later became instrumental in New York University’s expansion into a top-tier institution, died Jan. 14 at her home in West Palm Beach, FL. She was 97.

Ms. Levine joined the American Jewish Congress in the 1950s as a lawyer on its Commission on Law and Social Action. Often in partnership with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, she wrote briefs in decisive Supreme Court cases, including Brown v. Board of Education, which dismantled segregation in public schools, and Sweatt v. Painter, which successfully challenged the “separate but equal” doctrine established by Plessy v. Ferguson.

She served as executive director of the American Jewish Congress from 1972 to 1978, when she accepted a position at NYU. A decade-long $1 billion fundraising campaign begun in 1985 was hailed as one of the most ambitious ever in higher education. Over two decades, she raised more than $2 billion for the university and as much as $300 million a year toward the end of her tenure in 2001.

Ruth Dayan, the founder of Maskit, a fashion house that expressed her social justice ideals by employing the artistic traditions of Jewish immigrants and Arabs, died Feb. 5 at her home in Tel Aviv. The ex-wife of the Israeli soldier-statesman Moshe Dayan, she was 103.

Maskit had stores in Haifa, Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, and sold Jewelry, housewares and textiles as well as modish clothing. You could find Maskit at Neiman Marcus and Saks Fifth Avenue. There were collaborations with Givenchy, Yves Saint Laurent and Christian Dior.

“Maskit was an aesthetic melting pot,” said Tal Amit, director and curator of the Rose Archive at the Shenkar College of Engineering, Design and Art in Ramat Gan, Israel. “It incorporated what Israel stood for, this mix of traditions and societies, and it all came together in one modern aesthetic.” The company closed in 1994.

Shlomo Hillel, a Baghdad-born Israeli operative who in the late 1940s and early ‘50s used bribes, fake visas, and a network of smugglers to move more than 120,000 Jews from Iraq to Israel, died Feb. 8 at his home in Ra’anana, Israel. He was 97.

Mr. Hillel was just 23 when the Haganah, a paramilitary organization sent him undercover to Iraq. There, disguised as an Arab, he helped smuggle small number of Jews to Israel in trucks. Later he devised a ways to smuggle thousands in an operation called Michaelberg. Using various other disguises and with the help of an Iraqi travel agency, he arranged 950 flights, called Operation Ezra and Nehemiah, with 124,000 Jews migrating to Israel.

In 1988, Mr. Hillel received the Israel Prize, the country’s highest civilian award. He served in the Knesset from 1952 to 1959, and then in diplomatic posts. He returned to the Knesset in 1969, was elected speaker in 1984, and stayed until he was defeated in 1992.

TV host Larry King died Jan. 23 at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. He was 87. In a career spanning six decades, King interviewed a staggering number of celebrities, political leaders, and public figures. He rose to national fame with the launch in 1978 of “The Larry King Show” before moving over to CNN for “Larry King Live,” which ran from 1985 to 2010, when he was famously replaced by Piers Morgan. The chat show was cancelled in 2014.

In a statement, Ora Media said that King “viewed his interview subjects as the true stars of his programs, and himself as merely an unbiased conduit between guest and audience.”

Ezra F. Vogel, an eminent scholar of East Asia at Harvard University whose writings about modern politics and society in China and Japan helped shape how the world understood the rise of those two Asian powers, died Dec. 20 in Cambridge, MA. He was 90.

In 1979, as Japan was ascending as an economic power, Professor Vogel published the book Japan as Number One: Lessons for America. It was as provocative title for a book in which he outlined in no-nonsense prose how and why Japan had caught up with, and in some cases had surpassed, the United States. Among the reasons he cited were Japan’s ability to govern and educate its citizens efficiently, and to control crime.

Two decades and several books later, Professor Vogel embarked on a comprehensive transformation of yet another ascendant Asian superpower: China. His lengthy book about Deng Xiaoping is one of the most in-depth biographies to date of the leader who had shepherded China out of the chaos of the Mao years, said The New York Times. The book won the 2012 Lionel Gelber Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for biography, among other honors.

Dr. H. Jack Geiger, who ran away to Harlem as a teenager and emerged a lifelong civil rights activist, helping to bring medical care and services to impoverished regions and to start two antiwar doctors’ groups that shared Nobel Peace Prizes, died Dec. 28 at his home in Brooklyn. He was 95.

Dr. Geiger was a co-founder, with Dr. Count Gibson, of community health centers in South Boston and in Mound Bayou, in the Mississippi Delta. They provided desperately needed health care, food, sanitation, education, jobs and social services — what Dr. Geiger called “a road out of poverty.” The centers inspired a national network of clinics that now number more than 1,300 and serve almost 28 million low-income patients at more than 9,000 sites.

Fanny Waterman, the British pianist and teacher who cofounded the prestigious Leeds International Piano Competition with Marion Harewood died Dec. 20 at a care home in Ilkley, Yorkshire. She was 100.

The idea of presenting an international music competition in 1960s Leeds, a gritty industrial city in northern England, seemed risky. But Ms. Waterman, a Leeds native, believed in the vitality of her hometown, and was certain she could draw support for the venture. The first Leeds competition took place in 1963, with the composer and conductor Arthur Bliss as chairman of an eminent jury. It was an immediate success, with 94 entrants from 23 countries.

She was appointed dame commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2005. In 2015, at 95, she retired from the Leeds Competition. “I do hope and pray,” she said at the time, “that in another 100 years, our competition will have the reputation it has now.”