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

Mort Drucker, a longtime contributor to Mad magazine known for his caricatures of actors, politicians and other celebrities, died April 9 at his home in Woodbury, NY. He was 91.

Mr. Drucker began his professional career at 18, when he got a job assisting on the comic book Debbie Dean, Career Girl. He also worked on a syndicated single-panel strip, “The Mountain Boys,” before finding steady work with National Periodical Publications now known as DC Comics. He continued to freelance for DC even after joining Mad in 1956. “ I’ve drawn almost everyone in Hollywood,” he said.

Rabbi Yaakov Perlow, who inherited the leadership of the Novominsker Hasidic dynasty that was founded in Poland by his grandfather and transplanted to Brooklyn a century ago, died April 7 at his home in the Borough Park Section. He was 89 The cause was the coronavirus, according to Agudath Israel of America, the umbrella ultra-Orthodox organization.

The rabbi, known as a persuasive orator and respected scholar, had been president of the organization since 1998, and was chairman of its rabbinical Council of Torah Sages.