Chayele Porus Palevsky, a longtime stalwart of New York’s Yiddish cultural scene, who worked tirelessly to preserve the memory of Jewish Vilna, died Sept. 20, the second day of Rosh Hashanah. Palevsky, one of the last surviving Jews to have fought among the partisans of Vilna, died at the River Garden Hebrew Home in Jacksonville, FL, surrounded by her family.

Chayele and her family were imprisoned in the Svintsyan ghetto, where she joined a partisan group and helped steal guns from the Germans. After the ghetto’s liquidation, she continued fighting in the surrounding forests in a partisan group that called itself “nekome” (revenge). She served as a nurse and an ad hoc psychotherapist for her fellow fighters.

After the war, she married fellow partisan Simon Palevsky. They were active in a variety of Yiddish cultural organizations.

Arthur Ashkin, a physicist who was awarded a 2018 Nobel Prize for figuring out how to harness the power of light to trip microscopic objects for closer study, calling his invention optical tweezers, died Sept. 21, at his home in Rumson, NJ. He was 98.

The Nobel Committee wrote, Dr. Ashkin “has invented optical tweezers that grab particles, atoms, molecules, and living cells with their laser beam fingers.” Trapping biological material proved to have groundbreaking practical applications in research and in understanding the behavior of the basic building blocks of life, like DNA and other biological systems. Today, optical tweezers are widely manufactured and sold to researchers.

The Shofar joins the membership in mourning the deaths of Paul Mueller, brother of Tim Mueller, a close friend of our shul; and also Elaine Schwartz, a friend of many in our shul. Elaine was killed in an auto accident this month. A celebration of her life was held on August 23.

In the early 1970s, Nadine Taub was one of a cadre of young female lawyers breaking new ground by fighting gender discrimination. Along with Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Nancy Stearns and others, she made legal history in cases that successfully argued that equal rights for women were protected under the Constitution. She litigated cases for rape victims, for women seeking access to abortion, and for employees battling workplace discrimination and sexual harassment. Ms. Taub, 77, a professor emerita at Rutgers Law School, died June 16 at her home in Manhattan.

Ms. Taub was the founder and director of the Women’s Rights Litigation Clinic at Rutgers. In the early 1970s, legal clinics like hers were both a new source of legal representation and an innovative educational tool, allowing students to work on real cases.

After graduating from Yale Law School in 1968, she provided legal services for the poor in the Bronx and then for the A.C.L.U., working out of a storefront in Newark. She joined the faculty of Rutgers Law School in 1973 and retired in 2000.

Ms. Taub was the co-author of several books and publications on women’s rights and gender discrimination, including Sex Discrimination and the Law: History, Practice and Theory.

Reese Schonfeld, who founded the Cable News Network (CNN) with Ted Turner in the early 1980s before developing another major cable channel, the Food Network, a decade later, died July 28 at his home in Manhattan. He was 88.

Mr. Turner and Mr. Schonfeld gambled that CNN could effectively challenge the three main broadcast networks in their news coverage, which at the time consisted largely of 30-minute evening newscasts.

In 1975, he started the Independent Television News Association, which provided news footage to local news stations. Later he founded the Food Network, which is now part of global entertainment.

Martha Nierenberg had barely turned 20 when she was bundled off a train in central Hungary and hidden by nuns in a Roman Catholic hospital. It was March 1944, and a Nazi occupying force that included Adolf Eichmann would immediately embark on the annihilation of 500,000 Hungarian Jews.

Mrs. Nierenberg, who was born into one of Hungary’s wealthiest families, evaded capture for two months before friends assured her she could venture home. There she learned that she would be among 42 family members and close associates who were to be driven by the Germans to the Austrian border and, several weeks later, allowed to escape to Switzerland or Portugal. The cost was high. The Nazis strong-armed the family into signing away their estates, including some 2,500 pieces of precious art.

A trained biochemist who spoke six languages, Mrs. Nierenberg made it to the U.S. with her mother in 1945. She set off on a career as a scientist and researcher at M.I.T. and the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in New York, and then as an entrepreneur when, in 1954, she and her husband founded the Dansk Designs housewares company.

Mrs. Nierenberg died in her sleep on June 27 at a senior living facility in Rye, NY. She was 96. At her death, she was a lead plaintiff in a 30-year Holocaust art restitution battle with Hungary that counts as one of the highest-value cases ever pursued by a single family. Among the 40 paintings Hungary has refused to return are four by El Greco and others by Corot, Velazquez and Courbet. Her granddaughter, Robin Bunevich, estimates that the collection is worth $100 million. She said the family would continue to press the case.

Leon Fleisher, a leading American pianist in the 1950s and early ‘60s, who was forced by an injury to his right hand to channel his career into conducting, teaching and mastering the left-hand repertoire, died August 2 in Baltimore. He was 92.

Mr. Fleisher searched for years for a cure to his malady, focal dystonia. He tried shots of lidocaine, rehabilitation therapy, psychotherapy, shock treatments, and others. Ultimately, he joined the faculty of the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore and devoted himself more fully to teaching there and at the Tanglewood Music Center, where he was artistic director from 1986 to 1997. He also studied the repertoire of works for the left hand composed by Ravel, Prokofiev and others.

Eventually, a deep massage techniques and Botox injections provided sufficient relief that he was able to resume his career as a two-handed pianist in 1995. He continued to play recitals and make recordings until last year.