Isaac Shoshan, a Syrian-born Israeli undercover operative who had posed as an Arab early in his career, participating in bombings and an assassination attempt before making major contributions to the country’s espionage methods, died Dec. 28 in Tel Aviv. He was 96.

In a tribute on Twitter, former Prime Minister Ehud Barak, who once served in an Israeli intelligence unit that Mr. Shoshan helped conceive, said Mr. Shoshan had “risked his life again and again” on behalf of Israel.

Mr. Shoshan began taking part in intelligence-gathering operations after the United Nations voted in 1947 to partition Palestine into Separate Jewish and Arab states, setting off clashes that would turn into war.

Mr. Shoshan retired in 1982 but was mobilized from time to time by the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad to train agents and sometimes participate in operations himself.

Barbara Weisberger, who founded the Pennsylvania Ballet in Philadelphia and transformed the troupe into a nationally acclaimed company, died Dec. 23 at home in Kingston, PA. She was 94.

Originally trained in ballet in New York and Philadelphia, she never had a career as a dancer in a professional company. Instead, she became an influential ballet teacher who played an important role in the development of regional ballet in America.

Asked over the years about her lasting allegiance to Balanchine in the Pennsylvania Ballet, she would reply, “He is the best.”

Harold N. Bornstein

Dr. Harold Bornstein, who for time was President Donald J. Trump’s personal physician and who had attested that Mr. Trump would be “the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency,” died Dec. 15. He was 73.

Dr. Bornstein a gastroenterologist, was Mr. Trump’s personal physician from 1980 to 2017. When Mr. Trump was elected president in 2016, Dr. Bornstein had hoped to be named White House physician. But he was expelled from the Trump orbit after he disclosed to the New York Times that the president was taking medication to make his hair grow.

In 2018, Dr. Bornstein finally said publicly what many had suspected all along: that Mr. Trump himself had written the letter saying he would be the healthiest president ever. “He dictated that whole letter,” he told CNN. “I didn’t write that letter.”

Phil Spector, an American record producer, musician and songwriter known for his innovative recording practices and entrepreneurship in the 1960s, followed decades later by his trial and conviction for murder in the 2000s.

Spector developed the “wall of sound,” a music production formula he described as a Wagnerian approach to rock and roll. He is regarded as one of the most influential figures in pop music history.

In 2009, after spending three decades in semi-retirement, he was convicted for the 2003 murder of Hollywood actress Lana Clarkson and sentenced to 19 years to life in prison. He died in prison on Jan. 16 at the age of 81, according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

Joseph Safra, a Lebanese-born financier, who became the world’s richest banker after building an international business empire in Brazil, his adopted country, has died. He was 82.

The scion of a Sephardi Jewish family, Safra was born in Beirut and was guided by his financier father, Jacob. Famous for his discretion and conservatism, Safra chaired until his death the Safra Group, a conglomerate spanning banking, property, cellulose and bananas. Forbes magazine estimated his wealth this month at $23 billion, making him the world’s 63rd richest person and its wealthiest banker, according to the Financial Times.

The Safra Group’s extensive global property portfolio includes London’s Gherkin building, one of the city’s most distinctive landmarks, 660 Madison Ave. in New York City, J. Safra Sarasin private bank in Switzerland, Safra National Bank of New York.

Known for his philanthropy, Safra donated Rodin sculptures to a São Paulo public museum, gave money to two hospitals in the city, and funded the construction of a lavish synagogue. The family’s best-known gift came via the Jacob Safra Foundation, which gave Albert Einstein’s original manuscript on the theory of relativity to the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.

Guido Goldman, who used his vast inherited wealth and extensive network of friendships in politics and the arts to help rebuild America’s relationship with Germany after WWII, died Nov. 30 at his home in Concord, MA. He was 83.

Mr. Goldman’s fingerprints can be found on many of the leading postwar academic and cultural institutions linking the United States and Germany, including the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard University, which he founded with his mentors Henry Kissinger and Stanley Hoffmann.

Mr. Goldman’s father, who was president of the World Zionist Organization, instilled in his sons a commitment to social justice, which led Mr. Goldman to underwrite civil rights activism in the 1960s and ‘70s.

Already rich from his mother’s inheritance, Mr. Goldman amassed even more wealth during the 1970s and ‘80s as a real estate investor and private money manager — money he gladly and often anonymously dispensed among his friends and people he admired, including civil rights activists like Harry Belafonte and Marian Wright Edelman, the founder of the Children’s Defense Fund, the New York Times said.

Jack Steinberger, who shared the 1988 Nobel Prize in physics for expanding understanding of the ghostly neutrino, a subatomic particle, died Dec.12 at his home in Geneva. He was 99.

The neutrino’s existence was first proposed in 1931, but finding one proved difficult. It has no electrical charge, travels at nearly the speed of light, and has almost no mass. Not until 1956, when ways to smash atoms and examine the debris were developed, was one detected.

Six years later, Dr. Steinberger joined with two fellow Columbia University physicists, Melvin Schwartz and Leon M. Lederman, to show that two types of neutrinos existed. Just as significant, they devised a method to produce a beam composed of vast numbers of neutrinos at very high energies to study one of the basic forces of nature.

In bestowing the physics prize on the three men, the Nobel awards committee said they had “opened new opportunities for research into the structure and dynamics of matter.”

He was born in Bad Kissingen in Bavaria, Germany. His father was a cantor and religious teacher to the town’s small Jewish community. With the rise of the Nazis, his parents arranged for him to go to the U.S. with the help of the American Jewish charities. He was placed in the home of a wealthy grain broker named Barnett Faroll, who several years later arranged for his parents and brothers to join them in Chicago, rescuing them from the Holocaust.