Norman Lamm, the longtime leader of Yeshiva University who encouraged the Orthodox Jewish institution to engage with the secular world and, in doing so, The New York Times said, rescued the school from the brink of bankruptcy, died May 31 at his daughter’s home in Englewood, NJ. He was 92.

After he was elected president in 1976, Rabbi Lamm championed the concept of Torah U’madda — leading a life that blends rigorous adherence to Jewish law with pursuit of worldly knowledge and immersion in the wider society. The idea was controversial because Hasidic and other ultra-Orthodox rabbis argued that exposure to decadent influences would erode traditional Jewish life. But Rabbi Lamm, as a clergyman, philosopher, teacher and administrator, made a forceful case for his synthesis of the spiritual and temporal during his 37 years as the university’s president or chancellor.

Cyril Wick, a race car driver who “dressed British, thought Yiddish” died April 10 in London. The cause was Covid-19. He was 90.

Born in London to Jewish immigrants from Poland and Lithuania, he was educated at the prestigious Harrow School, where he faced anti-Semitic taunts during sporting matches. Later, an avid sailor, he would light Shabbat candles aboard his boat at the posh Lymington Harbour.         “He was like James Bond,” his stepdaughter Barbara Balaban said. “He raced cars and wore cool suits and did cool things and was passionately Jewish,” supporting numerous Jewish institutions, including nonprofits for the blind and disabled and a number of Orthodox groups. “His approach was very much ‘dress British, think Yiddish,’ she said. “He spoke like an old Harrovian, also sang songs in Yiddish and dirty Russian.”

Cyril Wick founded the engineering firm Diffusion Alloys, where he developed a number of techniques for coating metals in chrome and titanium.

Bruce Jay Friedman, whose early novels, short stories and plays were pioneering examples of modern American black humor, died June 3 at his home in Brooklyn. He was 90.

Mr. Friedman, who also wrote the screenplays for the hit film comedies Stir Crazy and Splash, was an unusual case in American letters: an essentially comic writer whose work skipped back and forth between literature and pop culture.

His first two novels, Stern (1962) and the best-selling A Mother’s Kisses (1964) — tales of New York Jews exploring an America outside the five boroughs — and his first play, the 1967 Off-Broadways hit Scuba Duba, made him widely celebrated. The New York Times Magazine in 1968 declared Mr. Friedman “The Hottest Writer of the Year.” He continued writing through the ‘70s and ‘80s, many of his stories made into films, including The Heartbreak Kid, a provocative story about a young man who ditches his new wife on their honeymoon and takes up with another woman. His 2011 memoir is titled Lucky Bruce.

Talking to a Key West, Florida, audience in 2005, Mr. Friedman said, “People ask me where do stories come from. Well, they come from a lot of places. Very often, it’s your life, and then you extrapolate from a personal experience. You have a fragment of an experience, and you ask yourself, ‘What if?’”

Betty Goudsmit-Oudkerk, a Dutch-Jewish woman who saved hundreds of Jewish children during the Holocaust, died June 14 in Amsterdam. She was 96.

Goudsmit-Oudkerk was the last living member of the small team of rescuers who smuggled Jewish children to safety over several months from a Protestant seminary in Amsterdam. The seminary bordered an internment facility that the Nazis had set up for Jewish children opposite the Hollandsche Schouwburg concentration facility where their parents were kept. At 17, Goudsmit-Oudkerk was allowed to care for the jailed children. With help from the director of the Hollandsche Schouwburg, Walter Süskind, she helped transfer hundreds of children to Johan van Hulst, who ran the seminary. Hulst’s team spirited the children away.

In 2022, a $27 million Holocaust museum is scheduled to open in the building that housed the seminary.

Frances Goldin, a lifelong firebrand who never stopped fighting to safeguard her beloved Lower East Side from upscale developers, died May 16 in Manhattan, in the same rent-controlled apartment on East 11th Street where she lived for 40 years. She was 95.

She was an advocate for affordable housing and a staunch defender of the poor. She was a civic leader in a vintage neighborhood, and in a second career, a literary agent who represented progressive authors, including Susan Brownmiller, Martin Duberman, and Robert Meeropol, among others.

When she was nearing 90, Ms. Goldin said she’d had three goals: to preserve and improve Lower East Side housing, which she did; to free Mumia AbuJamal, who is still serving a life sentence for murder; and to publish Imagine Living in a Socialist USA, which she edited with Debby Smith and Michael Smith and which was published in 2014.

Denis Goldberg, one of two surviving political activists convicted on the so-called Rivonia Trial, which put Nelson Mandela and seven others in prison and proved a turning point in South Africa’s long struggle against apartheid, died April 29 in Cape Town. He was 87.

Mr. Goldberg’s career, first in the armed resistance movement and later in the post-apartheid era, encapsulated much of his country’s modern history, from the racial nuances of the struggle against white minority rule to the reluctant acknowledgment of the corruption that became a byword in early 21st-century South Africa.

The hearings came at a crucial juncture in South African history. The authorities there had increasingly resorted to force in suppressing opposition to apartheid, the white rulers’ draconian system of racial separation, and their adversaries had turned to armed struggle in response. The trial was intended to crush and silence Mr. Mandela and his followers. But the prisoners turned the occasion into a global indictment of apartheid.

Mr. Goldberg served 22 years in prison, until 1985. Mr. Mandela was freed in 1990.

Joel Kupperman, a star on the radio program, “The Quiz Kids,” from age 6 to 16, died April 8 at an assisted living facility in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, of Covido-19 symptoms. He was 83.

He was one of the youngest contestants of precocious boys and girls, who answered questions about math, literature, sports and history, all sent in by listeners.

But his early fame became a taboo subject for his family in his adulthood, most of which was spent teaching philosophy at the University of Connecticut. “It was something we knew we were not ever to mention” said Karen Kupperman, his wife of 56 years and a history professor at New York University. In a rare interview with The New York Times, Professor Kupperman said his memories of being a national sensation were painful “Being a bright child among your peers was not the best way to grow up in America,” he said.