The Shofar joins the membership is extending condolences to shul member Larry Kotik on the death of his father, Paul, on Nov. 20, 2020. May he be remembered for his loving kindness to his family and for his service to our country. Our sympathies to Larry, Tim, Larry’s sister Harriet and her husband Martin, and their children.

Lord Jonathan Sacks, formerly Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom, died Nov. 7 in London. He was 72.

Lord Sacks, a prolific author of books and articles on Jewish thought and religious tolerance, served as chief rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth from 1991 to 2013.

Israeli president Reuven Rivlin called Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks “a man of thought and a man of words, a man of creativity and a man of truth, whose generosity and compassion built bridges between people.”

Sheldon Solow, a Manhattan real estate developer who built a commercial and residential empire over a half-century, died Nov. 17 in Manhattan. He was 92.

The son of a Brooklyn bricklayer, Mr. Solow built scores of high-end rental structures, including his signature Solow Building at 9 West 57th Street, a 50-story office tower whose front-and-back glass facades are steep concave slopes. Since the early 1970s, it has been one of the city’s most distinctive edifices.

Mr. Solow, who was self-taught in fine art appreciation, according to the New York Times, amassed one of the city’s notable private collections of Renaissance and modern art, with works by van Gogh, Joan Miró, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Balthus, Picasso, Matisse, Botticelli. Giacometti, Morris Louis and Mark Rothko, as well as Egyptian antiquities and African art.

Seymour Topping, who chronicled the rise of China and the Cold War in Europe and Asia as a correspondent, shaped the crowning years of print journalism as an editor of The New York Times, and led the charge into the internet age in the classrooms of Columbia University, died Nov. 8 at White Plains (NY) Hospital. He was 98.

Mr. Topping enjoyed a career as a correspondent for wire services and The Times, as a foreign news editor and managing editor of the newspaper, subordinate only to the powerful executive editor A.M. Rosenthal, as a teacher and author of four books, and as one of America’s most respected journalists. “For Mr. Topping, known to colleagues as Top, the story was always about more than the day’s news developments, intriguing as they might be. It was about their historical significance, too,” The Times said.

Mr. Topping prized high standards of reporting and editing, which demanded fairness, objectivity and good taste in news columns free of editorial comment, political agendas, innuendo and unattributed pejorative quotations.

Israel Horovitz, an influential and often-produced playwright, died Nov. 9 at his home in Manhattan. He was 81.

Mr. Horovitz enjoyed his biggest successes Off Broadway and in regional and European theaters, including at the Gloucester Stage Company in Massachusetts, which he helped found in 1979. His plays gave opportunities to a number of young actors who went on to become successful, including Al Pacino, Marsha Mason, Richard Dreyfuss and Robert Klein, among others. Two of his plays made Broadway, and he occasionally tried Hollywood, most notably with the screenplay for the 1982 film “Author! Author!”

Throughout his career, he wrote scores of plays. In 2009, the Barefoot Theater Company in New York organized a celebration of his 70th birthday that involved performances and staged readings of 70 Horovitz plays by theater companies around the world. Nevertheless, his accomplishments were tainted by multiple allegations of sexual misconduct.

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.