The Shofar joins the membership in extending condolences to Adrianne Greenberg on the death of her nephew, Ted Feinman, 69, of Largo, FL, on Oct. 23. May his memory be a blessing.

Yuri Orlov, a Soviet physicist and disillusioned former Communist who publicly held Moscow accountable for failing to protect the rights of dissidents and was imprisoned and exiled for his own apostasy, died Sept. 27 at his home in Ithaca, NY. He was 96.

Professor Orlov was released from Siberia in 1986 in a prisoner exchange before his 12-year term in a labor camp and exile expired. He was banished from the Soviet Union and went to the U.S., where he pursued scientific research and human rights advocacy. Beginning in 1987, he taught physics and government at Cornell University in Ithaca. He became a citizen in 1993.

He helped organize the Soviet branch of Amnesty International and, in 1976, founded what was considered his most enduring legacy: the Moscow Helsinki Group, which monitored Soviet compliance with the human rights commitments that had been outlined in the 1975 Helsinki Accords, signed by some 35 nations.

Natan Sharansky, another Soviet physicist and a Jewish “refusenik” who was arrested in the late 1970s and imprisoned for protesting the government’s refusal to grant him a visa to travel to Israel, recalled that what Professor Orlov proposed was “unprecedented in its boldness…it was Orlov’s bold vision that made our efforts so effective,” he said.

Joan Marks, a pioneer in the field of  genetic counseling, the practice of helping patients understand their risk of an inherited medical condition, died Sept. 14 at her home in Manhattan. She was 91.

Ms. Marks was the director of the graduate program at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, NY, for 26 years. During her tenure, she developed it into the largest such program in the country, which it remains, and helped to establish a new health care field. Today, there are thousands of certified genetic counselors in the U.S., trained to help patients and their families confront a variety of inherited conditions.

Genetic testing was once primarily used for diagnosing genetic defects in fetuses and newborns. But by the mid-1990s, testing was able to predict the risk of developing a variety of adult conditions, including breast cancer and ovarian cancer. Today, more advanced tests can detect more than 6,000 genetic disorders, according to the Genetic Disease Foundation. The need for trained counselors to help patients understand the test results has increased exponentially.

Murray Schisgal, a playwright and screenwriter who took his offbeat brand of humor to Broadway in the Tony Award-winning comedy “Luv” and to Hollywood in the hit farce “Tootsie,” died Oct. 1 I Port Chester, NY. He was 93.

Over a six decade career in theater, Mr. Schisgal employed elements from the theater of the absurd to write about such domestic themes as marriage, sex, family, loneliness and failure. His one-act plays were favorites of regional and community theater groups, which found them easy to stage and popular with audiences.

He once told The New York Times, “The theater is not a place for propaganda or where one seeks consolation. What we should seek is an aesthetic experience.”

The Alsatian Jewish poet Claude Vigée died in Paris on Oct. 2. He was 99. Vigée was descended from a family of Alsatian cloth merchants. Displaced from Alsace by the invasion of the Germans in 1940, he published his first poems in the underground magazine Poésie 42. He fled to the U.S. in 1943, where he obtained his doctorate in romance languages and literature. He taught French language and literature at Ohio State University, Wellesley College, Brandeis University, and finally at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem until his retirement. Since 1950, he has regularly published his poetry in France.

Among other subjects, Vigée’s poetry discusses the suffering of the Jews and the Alsatians, also with the fleeting beauty of the simple, rural heritage and the pursuit of peace.

He is the winner of numerous awards, including the Johann-Peter-Hebel-Preis (1984), the Grand prix de Poésie de la Société des Gens de Lettres de France (1987), the Prix de la Fondation du Judaïsme francais (1994), the Grand prix de Poésie de l’Académie francaise (1986), the Würth Prize for European Literature (2002), and the Elisasbeth Langgässer Literature Prize (2003).

Maynard Solomon, a musicologist and record producer best known for his influential biographies of Beethoven and Mozart, died Sept. 28 at his apartment in Manhattan. He was 90.

Maynard and his brother, Seymour, founded Vanguard Records. Over time, Vanguard and its Bach Guild label released an impressively diverse catalog of valuable recordings, especially folk music, blues and jazz. The classical repertory included English madrigals, Bach cantatas, masses by Haydn, and a landmark survey of the complete Mahler symphonies with Maurice Abravanel conducting the Utah Symphony Orchestra.

Mr. Solomon taught regularly at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, Columbia, Harvard, Yale and the Juilliard School.

Bernard Cohen, the lawyer in the landmark Mildred and Richard Loving case, died Oct. 12, at an assisted-living center in Fredericksburg, VA. He was 86.

Mildred Loving was black, and Richard Loving was white. They had married in 1958. Five weeks later, they were in their home in Caroline County when the county sheriff and two deputies burst in and arrested them. They pleaded guilty to violating Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act, and were sentenced to a year in jail.

After preliminary legal work, Cohen brought the case to the U.S. Supreme Court, where Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote, “Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual, and cannot be infringed by the State.”