Madeline Kripke, who kept one of the world’s largest private collection of dictionaries, much of it crammed into her Greenwich Village apartment died April 25 in Manhattan. She was 76. The cause was the coronavirus and complications of pneumonia.

Ms. Kripke, her father a rabbi and her mother a writer of children’s religious books, told Daniel Krieger for a profile about her on the website Narratively, that the Webster’s Collegiate she received from her parents when she was in the 5th grade “unlocked the world for me because I could read at any vocabulary level I wanted.” Beginning with the Webster’s Collegiate, she accumulated an estimated 20,000 volumes as diverse as a Latin dictionary printed in 1502 and the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s 1980 guide to pickpocket slang.

As a young collector, she once coveted a 1694 edition of The Ladies Dictionary, which she had found in a London shop at a time when she had only enough money for a planned train trip to France to meet a friend in Nice. She bought the book and hitchhiked to Nice instead.

Wynn Handman, a director and acting teacher who shaped the careers of Dustin Hoffman, Joel Grey, Faye Dunaway, Richard Gere and other stars at his acting classes at the influential American Place Theater in Manhattan, died April 11 at his home in Manhattan. The cause was pneumonia related to the coronavirus. He was 97. Mr. Handman was still teaching when he contracted the virus.

Ruth B. Mandel, a voice for women in politics, died April 11 at her home in Princeton, NJ.  She was an infant when she and her parents fled Germany on the eve of WWII. They were among the 937 passengers aboard the ocean liner St. Louis on what was called the Voyage of the Damned.

Cuba spurned the ship. So did the U.S. and Canada. The ship was forced back to Europe, where roughly a quarter of the passengers would die in Hitler’s death camps. A lucky few, including Ruth and her parents, made it safely to England, and later to the U.S.

After the war, she went on to become director of the influential Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University in New Jersey. She also became an official with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, preserving memory and educating new generations about how the past can inform the present. She made her name running what is now called the Center for American Women and Politics at the Eagleton Institute, where she was director for two decades. It became the premier research and education institution in the country for the study of women in politics.

Dario Gabbai, a Jewish slave laborer forced to perform as a Sonderkommando at Auschwitz Birkenau under threat of execution by the Nazis, died March 25 at a residence in Los Angeles. He was 97.

He described his grim work at the concentration camp in a series of Holocaust documentaries, including The Last Days, which won an Academy Award for best documentary in 1999, and also Auschwitz: The Final Witness in 2000.

“I have inside some stuff I can never tell,” Mr. Gabbai said in 2015. “I saw so many things. Even now, I like to cry to get it out of my system. But it doesn’t go out.”

Lee Konitz, a prolific saxophonist who was one of the earliest and most admired exponents of the style known as cool jazz, died April 15 in Manhattan, of complications of coronavirus and pneumonia. He was 92.

Although some musicians and critics dismissed Mr. Konitz’s style as overly cerebral and lacking in emotion, it proved influential in the development of the so-called cool school.  “My playing was about making a personal statement — getting audiences to pay attention to what I was saying musically rather than giving them what they wanted to hear, which is entertainment,” he said in a 2013 interview with The Wall Street Journal.  “I wanted to play original music.”

Ultra-Orthodox Jews wear facemasks and maintain social distancing during the funeral of Israel’s ex-chief Rabbi, Eliahu Bakshi-Doron, who died from coronavirus, in Jerusalem, on April 13.

AP/Oded Balilty